Expert List Building Blog

Article marketing if not as old as the hills is one of the most well known and least controversial of all Internet marketing techniques. It simply means writing articles and publishing them in article directories.

Business is all about serving customers and allowing them to find you in the article directories is a simple move for any webmaster or blogger to make.

Whole fortunes are based on article marketing and even prominent marketers who use all kinds of power techniques to get their name in front of as many customers as possible use and speak highly of article marketing.

About this time you may be looking for a “but”

I don’t blame you…

The but is that writing articles is a chore for most people and a chore too awful to contemplate for others…

You may be one of them

So how can we make writing articles easier?

Take it in steps.

This is almost our motto – here at Expert Listbuilding. Our whole rationale is to deliver a step by step program to build your most important online asset – your very own opt-in email list.

So how do you take steps to writing an article?

A couple of years ago when I was writing and designing some lessons to introduce people to blogging I chose to get them into Twitter first.

A blog post can be of any length. Some people write quite short posts – a couple of lines sometimes, while others go on for ever!

But typically a blog post is a couple of paragraphs and is usually shorter than an article.

And a twitter “post” is shorter still – it is a maximum of 140 characters – including spaces.

Baby steps to Article marketing then would start with Twitter. Keeping a schedule of one tweet (twitter post) a day is great to begin with. What to tweet about. Twitter is designed around answering one question…

“What Are You doing?”

And you can answer that easily just by er, typing what you are doing. So your first tweet might be, “This is my first tweet – this is fun”

The essential thing for any business is consistency – so you must keep going. It does not matter who is reading this stuff the training you are going through is just to get you into action.

The segue or transition into blogging can be gradual. You can install a WordPress blog and use a little “plugin” which takes your tweets and publishes them on your blog.

That’s one way to begin blogging. You can then type your tweets on your blog and a different plugin can publish them in twitter.

Once you are used to the idea of writing in your blog the posts will get longer all by themselves. It can take some people a long while to get into their own rhythm. Memories of your strict English teacher might inhibit you!

She or he did not teach you blogging though – this is different

You can’t really include smiley faces in English but I just used one!

Where are we now?

We’ve taken baby steps of tweeting and then blogging and really getting into the blogging and finding that we need to use the “More” button on our posts or they are too long and take the whole “front page” of the blog.

And we find we are writing so called “article” in our blogs.

When we can just sit down and type an article we have the choice of publishing in our blog or in the article directories.

We need to do both.

Publishing in the directories – like EzineArticles will get attention from many readers and webmasters.

Great!

And publishing in our blog builds traffic to the blog which can be monetised in various ways. One example is that a reader may be interested in learning about blogging and they see a banner on blogging – such as SeoPress by Brian Johnson – in the sidebar here.

But don’t publish the same article on your blog and the directories. Blogging is rather more informal than article writing so a few tweaks and a little rephrasing may be in order before you pop the article into an article directory

If you’d like a bit more guidance on article marketing check out Right Article Marketing. I wrote it a year or so ago. It’s still good and when I redo it later in the year and raise the price you’ll get the new version automatically at no charge.

That’s all for now.

Get tweetin’ blogging’ and writin’

And enjoyin’ too

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