Almost everyone online trying to promote a blog knows to write articles as part of their promotional efforts.  The question is, do you know what you are doing when you write an article?  Is your purpose to gain branding and expertise or is it simply to build backlinks?  It makes a difference, and you really should understand what your primary motivation is when you begin article marketing.

If you sell a service, or want to build a community type website around a particular theme where you are the expert, then you want to do more than just build backlinks.  You also want to brand both yourself and your website as an expert in your field.  This means that you need to write articles with your voice and distribute them to more than just the article directories.  In this case, you want to build relationships with editors of online newsletters with the goal of getting some your articles published in them.  This is a very powerful approach and can build business very quickly.

Back when I was a media publicist online, (before I retired to blog), I wrote one little article called “The Big Bang Publicity Campaign” and it was accepted in one major ezine.  After that hundreds of ezines big and small picked it up and then some glossy, hardcover business magazines published it.  That one little article brought my business $13,000 in about 6 weeks and continued to bring business for the rest of the 12 years that I owned that business.  It’s still published today.

What does that tell you?  It tells you to take your time with your articles and write quality content.  Teach, teach, teach.  And then contact ezine editors to submit your articles.  When I published that article nearly 13 years ago it was much easier to find ezine editors.  Today articles have gone the way of the ezine directories with writers expecting publishers to seek them out.  How silly is that when you can contact these editors yourself?  Although this does cost a pretty penny, I recommend The Directory of Ezines.  It keeps a current list of editors and can be invaluable for getting published in ezines.  Ezines that go to emails, not just to large directories where your article is likely to get lost.

If however, your main goal is to get backlinks, also an important online activity for promoting your blog in the search engines, then you want to distribute your articles in the most efficient way possible.  I suggest using Unique Article Wizard and this is why.  They use a unique system that reproduces your article in a completely professional (and readable) way and sends it out to blogs and directories.  This way each article is unique for that blog or directory making your backlinks much more powerful.  Better backlinks means better rankings in the search engines.

It’s that simple.

If your goal is to do both, brand and build backlinks then divide your article writing using some of your articles for the ezine editors and some for backlinking.  Don’t do double duty or the ezine editors will not love you for it.

Last, make friends with article writing.  If you hate, decide to love it.  This one activity is crucial to your online success.  Then do it smarter than everyone else.  It will make a difference to your blog and it’s success.  Promise!