How Your Blog Can Help Your Article Marketing Campaign and Vice Versa

It seems many of us have taken to article marketing for an unprecedented increase in traffic to our websites. To this end, we write maybe an article a day or three a week at minimum, post them to our blog (for even more exposure), and submit them to our ever-increasing list of article directories. We feel proud of ourselves for having accomplished this much in so short a time.

Then, one day, out of the clear blue, we read that there may be a problem with our system. Duplicate content - the problem of the search engines not being able to see that every article that bears my name was actually written by me no matter where it was found first, second, or last.

In order to avoid this, the suggestions abound. Maybe we shouldn't post the same article to more than one directory; maybe we can post a version of the same article to different directories, but it must be changed by at least 30% in order not to be banned by the indexers; maybe we can post to our blog first, ping it, wait 24 hours, then post to article directories; maybe none of it matters and we can post anything we want wherever we want.

In forums and blogs throughout the world, there is much discussion about duplicate content. But no one has the answer. Maybe not even Google, the top dog we are trying to impress in the first place. It seems that Yahoo has a handle on this, but Google can't quite get the math right.

No wonder. Have you ever looked at the algorithm used to figure PageRank? I used to work as a copy editor for a physics journal and these equations look a lot like the same ones used to work out problems of black holes and nuclear physics. There are so many summations, sigmas, fractions, matrices, and the like that one little sigma in place of an epsilon can cause the entire thing to blow up - and no I don't mean the world. I mean the PageRank algorithm. If this is how the PageRank algorithm is structured, I wonder how the duplicate content algorithm is structured?

With the ongoing marketing of such software as Article Submitter Pro that submits the same article to more than 300 directories, and individual directories making an article available to be used in ezines and blogs throughout the world, the biggest problem with duplicate content seems to be posting the same article on your own blog and in article directories. For some reason, this could be held against you.

In order to get around this problem, it was suggested by a few reliable sources that I post the article to my blog first, ping it, wait 24 hours, then submit to article directories. In the past few days, however, I've come up with perhaps a more conservative approach that has the potential to increase the exposure of both my content and my name, and thus the traffic to my site.

What is this new revelation?

I write freely and in a more "down to earth" manner in my blog then use the same content to write my article and submit it. Because articles are generally written in a more formal tone, though not stuffy, I take the words from my blog that are just written as they come to me and turn them into an article that is a bit more organized and maybe contains quotes and information from research.

In addition to providing the foundation for my article, the style of writing in my blog might appeal to a slightly different audience and be picked up from there rather than from an article directory.

Beyond providing the foundation for an article, my blog gives a reader who clicks on a link in my article resource box more information than they found in the article. Blog posts can generally be as long as you want them to be, without losing your reader's attention. I can include website links and examples that either are not allowed in an article or just take up too much space.

And, on the flip side, if someone bookmarks my blog and finds a link back to my article or searches for my name, I get more exposure and the chance for my article to be picked up by ezines and blogs if they like the article style better.

Even if you aren't concerned about duplicate content between your blog and your articles, it's a win-win situation to write a blog post directed to your particular audience then modify it to appeal to an even wider audience through article directories.

If you just do not have the time to post to a blog and rewrite the post to submit to an article, at the very least post to your blog first, ping your blog, then wait 24 hours before submitting the article to an article directory. This should't cause too much trouble for the sigmas, summations, and epsilons in the algorithm.

Copyright © Claudia Pate
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