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Should you use free article content from article directories for your blog?

Before I answer, let me say that I have. I’ve gone to an article directory and used an article for my blog, but I don’t do it every day. And I’d suggest that you not do it every day either.

However, using free article content for your blog is not necessarily a bad idea. You can do it if you think the article will benefit your audience and it adds value to your blog. Don’t do it just because you want content on your blog.

Free articles are there for a reason. The article directories are there for a reason. But don’t just snag an article as filler content. That’s a sure way to ruin your reputation. Instead, only use an article if your audience can’t live without it. The article will not help you with SEO so don’t look for those kinds of benefits. It will help establish you as a person with good judgment if you do it correctly and choose articles that your audience appreciates. If you fail to do that then your audience will abandon you.

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I love it when people verify what I’ve been saying for years. Michael Martinez back in February had a great post that discussed the three best link building tools. One of those is blogging.

Here’s what he says about the benefits of blogging:

Pros of Blogs
–They are usually easy to set up and low-maintenance
–They are more powerful and flexible than widgets, gadgets, gizmos, and plug-ins
–They allow you to populate multiple domains/subdomains quickly

And I’ll add this to the pro list on blogs as well - They achieve better search engine results more quickly than any other tool available. Yes, even better than articles. Better than static websites. Better than social media. More powerful than a speeding bullet. Etc.

Why are blogs so good for search engine optimization, including link building? Because they are crawled - like all updated content - every single time you update them. The more often you update your blog, the more it will get crawled. The more it gets crawled, the more opportunities you have of achieving great rankings. Each and every blog post you write is treated like a separate web page by the search engines. Therefore, every ranking factor that applies to any web page applies to every single blog post you write. If you have a blog with 500 blog posts then that’s 500 chances to rank for your keyword, 500 chances + for your links to build link juice and gain the age advantage, 500 chances to build anchor text links with high quality and relevance, etc. Blogging is guerrilla SEO on steroids!

I could write all day about the search engine benefits of blogging. But, do it wrong, and you can kill your rankings. That’s why it is important to choose an expert in blogging, ghostwriting, and SEO who can steer you in the right direction and keep you away from dangerous waters.

Want to know more? Get a free consult with a blog consultant.

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One strategy that some SEOs and Internet marketers have used to build inbound links into their main website is to set up an off-site blog and link profusely to their main website. The question is, does this work? There are two parts to this discussion:

1. First, yes, it can work to a limited degree.
2. But only if approached in the right way.

The Real Purpose For Your Blog

Before you start talking about the link building aspect of your blog, you need to first understand the primary purpose for your blog, namely, to communicate with your customers and potential customers. Your blog is a marketing tool. You want it to draw in potential customers and drive them to your imporant web pages. The most effective blogs are the ones that do this using high quality, relevant content on a consistent basis.

There are three primary approaches to marketing with a blog and each of them should work in tendem to support the others. These are branding, pre-sales, and information publishing.

Let’s discuss these in backward order. Information publishing is all about delivering quality and helpful information to your readers. That doesn’t mean every blog post has to be a dynamic 1,000-word tome. Size doesn’t matter. Quality does.

Pre-sales information is not about closing. You can effectively use a blog as a sales closing tool, but it doesn’t have to be use that way. The way Blog Content Provider approaches blogging is to use each blog post as a pre-sales tool. We set up the sale by delivering useful, relevant information to your readers that interests them in more information and entices them toward your sales pages.

Branding is a term that simply means you develop a recognizable name for yourself in the marketplace. By using a blog as a branding tool you communicate an important message to your potential customers that you are professional and serous about doing business.

How To Build Inbound Links With Your Blog

Your off-site blog can be an important way to attract new business into your sales funnel. Each blog post has the potential to achieve high search engine rankings on its own with the proper search engine marketing techniques. But that alone will not be enough to drive massive traffic to your website.

Inbound links to your main website can increase your search engine positioning relative to your competition. Your off-site blog can play a part in that by adding links to your website from the body of each post as well as in your sidebar. Honestly, though, the links in each blog post - the in-text links - will be more valuable in this regard and can drive traffic to your main website as well as build links.

Another way to build links is through a signature at the bottom of each blog post.

The danger in using this method to build links is that it could be construed as a form of spam if not done properly. Mixing some outbound links into your blog posts to highly relevant, authoritative websites within your niche can assist you with your link building efforts as the search engines see this as a sign that you are using natural linking techniques. But you want to be sure of two things with regard to your outbound links:

1. You aren’t link to your competitors
2. And you are avoiding bad neighborhoods

The Limitations Of Blogging As A Linkbuilding Tool

Every search engine marketing technique has its limitations. Including blogging. While you can build relevant and authoritative links using an off-site blog, there are some concerns you should take into consideration before you start blogging.

No. 1, don’t put your blog on the same IP block as your website. Host it with a completely different hosting company. The search engines have been known to discount links from sites owned by the same owner just for being on the same IP block and in the same niche.

Secondly, don’t rely entirely on your blog for inbound links. This is one of the biggest mistakes that website owners make. Link diversity is very important. If all of your links are coming from the same source then you will likely cap out on your rankings, and there is a high degree of probability that it won’t be on page 1. You should also build links from other sources. This link diversity along with variation in your anchor text will bring you more search engine favor than your blog alone.

For more information about blogging, click here to speak to a blog consultant.

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I used to call a combination of blog writing and article writing for Internet marketers a powerful one-two punch. While it can still be a powerful marketing puglistic combination, I’ve discovered one that is even more powerful - the blog-Twitter punch.

Savvy Internet marketers have discovered that Twitter is one powerful traffic driving machine. But if you use Twitter for delivering the hard sell, it likely won’t do much for you. Twitterers who are successful at using Twitter to drive traffic to their blog then to their website are doing it by using Twitter as a reputation tool to draw followers to themselves then to drive those followers to their blog and website where they can close the sale. It’s powerful targeted marketing. Have you set up your Twitter account yet?

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SEO Gadget wrote a blog post about comment spam affecting his rankings. Of course, the grand conclusion is that spam comments hurt his rankings. I can understand where that conclusion came from. I also agree. It can, and does, happen.

Search Engine Optimization Journal’s conclusion is that those comments were harmful because they were porn-related content. That’s possible too, but doubtful. One of the issues regarding spam comments, as pointed out by Scotland SEO, is that they are supposed to be nofollow.

It doesn’t matter is blog comments are dofollow or nofollow, the search engines will treat them the way they want to and you can’t afford to let the bad links hurt your site’s reputation. That’s why comment moderation is so important. It’s also why you need to keep a close eye on which types of comments get through on your blog. We at BCP automatically delete the following types of comments when we spot them:

• Porn links
• Obvious keyword-spam with several links in the body of the comment
• Comments where the commenter used an obvious incorrect website URL
• Comments with dead or broken links, particularly in the website URL field of the comment form
• “Feel good” comments that add no value to the discussion

Some comments are helpful; some are not. We try to get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones. Otherwise, your blog can suffer in the search engines. If you aren’t sure which comments have value and which ones don’t then you might be better off letting someone else manage that aspect of your blog. That’s what blog managers do.

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I manage a handful of bloggers and have managed more than 100 blogs in the last couple of years. I also read a great deal about blogging and copywriting from other bloggers in the industry. I’ve noticed that there are two general views regarding how to write a blog. Those views can be summarized below:

• Valuable Content View - This is the view that your content should be written with your readers in mind, not the search engines. The idea is that keywords are necessary, but not so important that you forget about the needs of your readers. You aren’t writing keyword fluff. You’re writing content that will be deemed valuable by human readers and not just words on a page driven by keyword usage
• Keyword-Rich View - The keyword-rich view is just the opposite. This view presupposes that SEO is everything. Without the right mix of keywords and the correct density patterns and so on you might as well not even blog. If you don’t optimize every single blog post to the utmost then you aren’t really blogging, according to this view. The weakness of this view is that optimization may get you good rankings, though often you can end up hurting yourself by over optimizing, it won’t endure you to your readers and what good is a blog if it has no readers?

Here at Blog Content Provider, we believe in SEO content. We are an SEO company. But we also believe in reaching readers at a gut level. That’s why I like to stress valuable content first and SEO as an additional benefit. Because if you do it right, your blog will attract readers and when it does it will increase in SEO power by sheer authoritativeness.

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Blogs are at a disadvantage in one regard: Traditionally, they have high bounce rates. That’s because readers generally read one post and they’re gone. This is especially true of subscribers.

But that may not matter in the long run even though bounce rates are important for ranking purposes. This isn’t proven, but I believe it’s true. Google has stated publicly that they measure traffic and rank websites based on traffic. But a high traffic site may not necessarily be of any value any more than a low traffic site with a low bounce rate. All things considered, a high traffic site with a high bounce rate may actually be holding a negative, not a positive.

Consider this: A site receives 100,000 daily visitors on a regular basis. 80% of those visitors are unique and 80% of those read one page and they’re gone, never to return. Would you want that? Or would you prefer to have 1,000 daily visitors of which 80% are loyal and return on a regular basis? I think we’d all rather have the latter, right?

Particularly if your site is a blog. You want readers coming back.

A loyal readership is much more valuable than high numbers of people that show up and leave. But I do believe that your site’s bounce rate may be an indicator of user value in the eyes of at least one search engine. Work on creating valuable content and your bounce rate will go down. You might even see a resulting increase in search ranking for some of your keywords.

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Is business blogging different from personal blogging? In a certain sense it is, but then in another sense it isn’t. It really depends on your goals as a blogger and as a business.

Most corporate blogs couldn’t get away with personalization. You have to maintain a business image and make sure all of your communications stays on track with your message. Everyone’s got to stick with the talking points.

A small business, however, can make their blog almost as personal as a personal blog. You still have to watch your p’s and q’s, but you can get a little personal. It won’t hurt you. To some extent, a corporate blogger may get away with it if done correctly.

But where a business blog and a personal blog go there separate ways is in the mission of the blog itself. A business blog is making marketing, making money, and increasing the size of your market share. You want your readers to become customers. And to do that you have to write it in such a way that you attract buyer-oriented readers. But you don’t want to push them away with strong sales pitches on every blog post. You want to draw your readers in with valuable content and get them to start a conversation about doing business with you. Is your blog doing that? Why not?

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Every day now I see the next automated software for Twitterers being harked as the next great thing. Get 16,000 new followers automatically in 90 days. Gain thousands of followers automatically with no effort while you sleep. You know the deal.

The problem with these automated packages is that they work too well. It’s not that they don’t work at all. They work too well.

Yes, you’ll get thousands of followers, but they won’t be targeted followers, and chances are those people following you won’t have the slightest bit of interest in what you have to offer. I’d rather have a list of 1,000 highly targeted followers than 20,000 non-targeted followers.

A few years ago you’d see the say hype about blogs. Get instant trackbacks! Increase your RSS subscribers by the hundreds! Same deal, different program. You still those too, but not as often as you used to. I think the charlatans and snake oil salesmen finally realized they were going to sell as many as they sold and they moved on to the next great thing. Now it’s Twitter followers. Same game, same story, different day.

Don’t fall for it.

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When Seth Godin became an evangelist for blogging, he advocated short posts. He still writes that way. But his posts are full of wisdom and good graces.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of bloggers who write long posts and they provide great insight into their topics every day. That’s great. A blog post has to be as long as it needs to be to get the point across. But it need not be any longer.

So how long should it be?

Not long. But it’s entirely up to you. You’re writing it so write it your way.

But if you have a ghostwriter write your blog for you then find out what the minimum and maximum number of words are going to be in their blog posts. Here at Blog Content Provider, our posts are typically between 250-500 words each. We sometimes write longer posts, but we rarely write shorter. We believe in delivering value.

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