TIP #1: Plan Your Articles
Map out 20 -30 article titles ahead of time. This keeps your topic mix fresh and helps avoid writers block. If you know the direction you’re going, you don’t have to re-think each time you sit down to write a blog post.

This is also a good time to plan keyword placement. Make sure your articles are informative, but also have a 2-3% keyword density to maximize your search engine optimization. Investing time in crafting your blog post titles. Spend some time and think about a title that will attract and captivate the imagination of your target audience.

TIP #2: Build Off Other Content
You don’t always have to reveal earth shattering news or tips on your blog. It can be just as effective and valuable to your audience to make recommendations, product reviews, or point them to other informative websites. One example of this is embedding a YouTube video in your blog post, commenting on the video, and then add some suggestions or recommendations of your own. The key is sharing information or videos that your audience will care about, not any video will do.

TIP #3: Have a Point and Get To It Fast
Blog posts should be at a max 500 words. The key is drawing your audience in with the first 1-2 sentences. Replace the lengthy introduction paragraph with one sentence. The second sentence should be your thesis, argument, or point that you are trying to make.

TIP #4: Simple Language
Most of your audience will be people who want to learn something from your article. Short sentences are attractive, easily readable and understood. Like getting lost in translation the point you so anxiously wish to make can be lost by the time the reader finds his way to the end of a long sentence. (an example of what not to do)

TIP #5: No Excuses, Just Do It Already
Writing and procrastination have a tendency to go together. The worst thing you can do is not update your blog on a regular basis. Blogging 4-5x per week will yield amazing SEO benefits. Stop putting it off until tomorrow and start typing something now. You’ll get better with each blog you write.

Take the $300 per month you’re spending on a print ad or mailer and invest it in content creation. By content creation I mean articles. Short 500 word articles that use your keyword phrases and pertain to your business or industry. If you were writing a newsletter to send out to your existing customers what would you tell them? Use this mindset to outline and write 20-25 articles a month.

You can hire someone to write these for you. There are plenty of starving English majors looking for this type of work. Personally I recommend you write your own articles. In the process of writing your articles you revisit the needs of your customers and what’s important to them. Taking the time to thoughtfully respond to their needs helps you when you meet them face to face or on the phone. In order the keep pumping out new articles, you’re forced to keep-up and research your industry news, events, and competitors.

Now take each article and post it on your blog. Don’t do this all at once, you want a nice trickle rate of 4-5 articles per week. Each article you add to your blog should be tagged with keywords and make sure you set your blog to ping. Read More About Pinging Here

Think of each article your write as a new ‘doorway’ that people can use to find you and your business. Each article is a page that Google and other search engines can use to index you on their sites. The more pages indexed the more likely potential customers will find you. The more articles you have the more you look like an expert in your field.

Now that you have articles you can leverage that content to market on other websites too!
Read how to repurpose content here:  Repurposing Your Content

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• Write a blog post with the rule of three. The post contains an introduction paragraph, three supporting examples or arguments, and a conclusion.

• Turn the blog post into tweets. Take your main point from the introduction paragraph and post it as a question to your twitter followers. Then take the first sentence of each of your supporting examples or arguments and drip tweet them throughout the day. Make sure to link to your original blog post in all your tweets.
• Turn your blog post in to wall posts. The conclusion of your blog post summarizes the overall point you’re making. Take this nugget of an idea and find a related video, resource, or book on the topic. Post the video or resource on your Facebook wall along with a link to your original blog post.
• Turn your blog post into a video or podcast. Take the blog post introduction and personalize with your own voice and style. Take the three supporting arguments and find an expert in the opposing or supporting side and interview them. With a podcast format you can call them and record their voice. With video you can be like a journalist and interview a local expert in the topic. Suggest several resources for the audience to get more information and wrap up with your final conclusion. Don’t forget to plug your website and encourage folks to subscribe to your channel.

• Digg and Ping your blog & videos. After you post to your blog and video site of choice, make sure to recommend yourself on the social bookmarking sites. This introduces your content to folks and generates incoming links. If you’re using a tool like WordPress to write your blogsite make sure you have it set to auto-ping blog indexing sites like Feed Burnner and Technorati.

As you can see, one blog post can be easily repurposed into four different social media channels. This not only saves you time, but keeps your message consistent. If one blog post can generate four different pieces of content you can exponentially increase the reach of your online marketing.

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Tips for getting the most out of article writing:

• Write Original Articles: Create your own content. Don’t fall for the copy-and-paste trap. It’s okay to draw inspiration from other articles, but put your own spin and touch on the topic. This does three things for you: (1) positions you as an expert in your field,  (2) allows you to add a bio box to the bottom of the article, and  (3) lets you have full syndication and reprint abilities.

• Add a Bio Box & Reprint Gratis on Every Article: Let your article work for you. Allow other bloggers, news sites, and websites to re-post your article on their site for free, as long as they include your bio box at the bottom of the article. You can see how my bio box below positions myself as an expert, links to by blog, and has my top keyword phrases in it. Now every site that republishes my article will be an incoming link to my blog, thus helping my blog become an authority site in the eyes of the search engines.

• Submit Your Articles: The goal is to have your articles everywhere with the bio box on the bottom. There are article directories like Ezine Articles that bloggers, reporters, and website owners search to find content for their publications and blogs. By submitting your articles not only do you get an incoming link from Ezine Articles, but you get one from anyone else who decides to use your article. I have articles from almost five years ago that are still getting re-printed and driving traffic to my site. Think of every article as a tentacle to bring visitors to your site.

Writing articles may sound like a chore, but I encourage you to add them on a regular basis (daily works best) to get the best results. Most articles on the web are about three paragraphs and 300-400 words. That is not a lot of writing, and once you get the hang of it you can complete one in 20-30 minutes. The time you put into this marketing practice is worth it. Imagine adding 300+ new pages on your site every year. In less that six months you would out rank all your competitors because most website owners only have five page-static websites.

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The line between blogs and websites is blurring with tools like WordPress.  WordPress is a free, open-source content management system and blog tool all rolled into one. That means you can manage your entire website and blog in one easy to use tool.  WordPress takes all the ease of blogging and allows you to create posts and pages.  Pages are for content that is not date dependent like, about us, products, services, contact us, etc.  Posts are blog or journal entries where you can post articles, photos, and videos.  Pages and posts can be RSS feed for powerful content distribution, a must have for any serious Internet Marketer.

From personal experience, and working with my website clients, I have found that websites I build in WordPress get indexed almost instantly in Google.  The pinging feature of WordPress notifies the Google spiders to crawl and index the site.  My clients love how easy it is to publish new content to their sites and, as a result, keep their websites fresh and up-to-date.

So to answer the question, should I build a website or a blog?
The answer is:  use WordPress and do both!

RSS Feed Diagram

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