By Barry J McDonald

1 - The most obvious reasons most people use articles is to help build links from high page rank article directories back to their site. So, by submitting articles you help to increase your blog’s page rank and become more search engine friendly for your chosen keywords.

2 - While you may think that because you blog on a regular basis you’re automatically going to be found by your chosen audience, but this isn’t so. Not everyone may read blog’s for various reasons like they haven’t the time or they may just not know how to sign up for your RSS feed.

3 - Like point number 2 there may be other bloggers in your niche who never heard of you. But because of your articles there is a better chance that they’ll come across some of your content and either talk about your article in their blog or link to it for their readers to read.

4 - Generally, blog posts are shorter than articles in length (blog posts can be about 200 words long) but by writing an article you now have more room to further expand on some of the points you’ve made in your blog.

5 - Articles are very easy to share with others. By having your content in article directories you could find your articles being used by other webmasters as content in their sites. Not everyone webmaster uses or like using blogs on their site and they may rather use your full article on a webpage instead.

6 - As we know article marketing is a great way of producing free traffic. So by writing and submitting articles, you now have a two prong approach to building traffic. For example if your blog fell out of favor with the search engines your source of traffic wouldn’t dry up as you now have another source.

You may think that you don’t have the time to do article marketing because you’re too busy writing content for your blog but you why not package some of your blog posts into articles and submit them to the big article directories.

You may be worried about falling foul of Google duplicate content rules but if you make your articles 20% different than your blog posts and you should have no problems. This could be as simple as just changing the first paragraph and adding a resource box to your article.

Generally, the more content you have out there on the internet, the more traffic you’re going to receive so why not try to get your content in front of as many peoples eyes as possible whether that’s in a blog post or an article.

Reader Friendly Content: At all costs keep your content – articles, poems, photographs, videos – reader friendly, that is to say, it should keep more and more readers interested. Your reader must be at the center of you post in a way that your reader must feel that he is gaining something out of reading your post. This is the basic rule in marketing.

Worthwhile: Never let the reader feel that he has been tricked into reading your post or clicking on your blog link. You are thwarting all your long term chances of that reader coming back to your blog, in which case your blog rankings over the long term are in a dicey position.

Check for errors: Making grammatical and spelling errors can be a major put off for many readers. They may not visit your blog again simply because the errors that you make are too high. Always proof read your blog. A small typo here and there can be understood, but make sure you don’t make any major errors.

KISS: Or, Keep It Short and Simple. This is the thumb rule you must follow at all point. Long winding posts tend to get boring. And it may contain nothing that is interesting to the reader. Also no one has the time enough for your blog, no matter how well you write. In fact, your blog will be much more appreciated if you put your thoughts simply and shortly.

Interesting: Make sure that you hold your reader’s attention by making your posts snazzy. They must not be written in a tone that is tiring to read. Write short sentences and keep then crisp and precise. Always hit the point immediately in the course of your article.

Link: Keep linking the blogs you read to yours in order to build a network those people will be in turn encouraged to link you. Remember, linking increases rankings.

Keywords: Using the keywords of your posts frequently increases the search ability of that particular article of yours which in turn leads more people to visit your blog.

Clear Thoughts: Make sure you put your thought clearly before the readers so that it does not become tedious for them to read.

Colloquialism: You can write in a friendly tone. Avoid using too many slang words, but otherwise, if your post demands it, you can be colloquial.

Post Title: A catchy post title or headline is half your business solved. It can glue a reader to your post almost immediately. However, do not put misleading post titles, or you will lose creditability.

So, be consistent with your blog content and watch traffic flowing in to your blog!