Get New Streams of Traffic From Old Blog Posts

If you’re interested in stomping the search engines then you’ll want to be sure and add this extremely simple and viral marketing (that means it’s hands off) weapon to your online arsenal.

I’m actually kicking myself because even though I’ve used this for myself and my clients in the past… I’ve gone and completely neglected to do this for HomeStomper. So, once again I’m living proof that it doesn’t take a jenius to be a Stomper.

Now, if you’re currently using a blog in your online marketing then this really can’t get any easier since you will simply re-purpose your blog content. Here’s how…

Get free exposure

Grab yourself a free acount over at Ezine Articles.

Ezine Articles allows writers to publish articles that include a special footer called a resource box. In the resource box you can provide a few sentences about yourself, your services, and a link to a landing page on your website.

Here’s where it gets interesting: other folks are allowed to reprint the article on their own websites, blogs or newsletters as long as they keep your resource box intact.

How to win

For you, you can easily get hundreds (even thousands) of websites linking directly back to your landing page… no reciprocal link necessary.

A hidden benefit is becoming an “Expert Author” on Ezine Articles. You’ll benefit from the Page Rank and backlinks and can even place an Ezine Articles graphical badge on your site recognizing you as an “Expert Author” for some added credibility.

For the publisher, they reduce their workload by getting free content for their newsletter or website so long as they follow the reproduction rules.

Prepping for mass syndication

Select your favorite posts from your blog. You can submit them directly to Ezine Articles or do a bit of editing.

A couple of things to check before submitting:

• Is the title attractive enough?
  Since publishers initially just scan article titles at Ezine Article, you want to make sure yours stands out.
• Is the content short enough?
  The sweet spot tends to be about 400-600 words. Many folks have short attention spans so you’ll probably want to edit down your longer posts or split them into two or more.
• Does the resource box have a compelling call-to-action?
  Make sure you give readers somewhere to go when they’re done reading your article.

Resource box done right

This is basically your short bio or elevator pitch, along with a call-to-action.

Some essentials to include:

• Your name. Umm, well, duh
• Your pitch. A short 1 or 3 sentences that communicate what you’re about along with your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Your call-to-action. They’re warmed up, now tell them what to do next. This can be a special report, a newsletter, autoresponder course, etc.
• Your website. Your website written in it’s entirety, http://www.HappyHomes.com. Of course, a more advanced strategy is to make this a keyword link like Phoenix Real Estate pointing back to your site.

Here’s what it looks like when you enter your resource box:

And here’s the result:

The fine print

Now, from my experience, many of the backlinks and sites that pick up the articles aren’t necessarily from the highest-quality of sites. I’ve had several appear inside message forums with entire discussions around the article but most will probably be sites without high Page Rank and built for AdSense revenue. That’s okay…

These still count as backlinks and contribute to your name or search terms owning the search engine results pages. Granted, this isn’t a foundational strategy but given the fact that all you have to do is take an already existing blog post and plug it in, you really con’t lose.

In regards to duplicate content: it’s my understanding that Google registers the first site it found the content to be the parent so you won’t be penalized (this is subject to change at Google’s whim, of course). But, the real answer is to tweak your article a bit… shortening it, changing the title, etc.

The final stomp

Now, article marketing won’t be the howitzer of your marketing arsenal and you won’t want to rely on it to be your main source of website traffic but it is one of those tools that add to your tipping point.

Considering you’re simply re-purposing your blog’s content and not writing anything new, this isn’t something you want to pass by without looking at it. It’s just too monkey-stoopid simple to leverage for someone to ignore

Like I said earlier, this is one of those tactics that adds to your tipping point. If you’re looking to rule the search results for your name or keyword and benefit from new sources of incoming traffic then start re-purposing your blog posts and stomp them all over the net.