In the previous article in this series, we talked about one way of using article writing to promote your website, by submitting them to article directories and getting visitors from your link in the resource box for the article. In this installment, we’re going to go over another form of article marketing that doesn’t involve submitting your articles to article directories. It can work very well but is going to take other forms of advertising along with it to make it work.

You probably know by now that blogs are a big thing on the Internet. I actually had my own blog long before the term ever got created. About 10 years ago, I had a web page that was my own personal online diary. I would simply go there each day and post my feelings about the day or things that I did. Nobody ever saw it, but I didn’t care. It was just so much fun to know that stuff of mine was on the Internet.

Today, people have turned this into an art form. There are real blogs all over the place. Many of them are really well done and interesting reading. And therein lies the key. If you can set up a blog and really put some good article content on it, you’ll eventually see that people will come to your blog to read those articles. Once you have them there and have captured them with your words of wisdom. That’s when you can pretty much do anything from that point. I kind of look at it as your blog being the capture point and then from there you can send people anywhere you like. Maybe you have another website you want them to check out that is in the same niche as your blog. Maybe you sell an affiliate product that you want them to check out. You can do any of these things from your blog. Just include a link at the end of the article, or middle.

Middle?

Why not? Blogs are not bound by the same rules as article directories where you can only have a link in your signature or resource box. It’s YOUR blog. So you can do anything you want with it. So for example, you can be talking about this great new game that just came out and start to review it. In the middle you can say, “Here, check it out at…” and then just give them your Amazon.com affiliate link for that product or wherever the product is being sold. Think they won’t go check it out?

The flexibility of blogs is mind-blowing. You are limited only by your imagination. If you’re a creative writer, and that’s why I so stress that writing is one of the most critical parts of online promotion, then there is no reason why you can’t make a few sales off your blog each day.

So now, the $64,000 question is simply, “How do we get people TO our blogs?”

And therein lies the rub, because blogs are no different from any other web page. If people don’t know they exist, then they won’t know to go there.

That’s why we have this whole series on Internet advertising.

One method that we should talk about here, however, since this article is basically about putting articles on blogs, is the method of blog directory pinging.

Basically what you do, after you actually update your blog, is to go to one of these services and let them know that your blog has been updated. You simply type in your blog name and URL and then hit the ping button. What will happen is that this service will then ping all the blog directories in its listing letting them know that your blog has been updated.