Promoting Your Articles Using a Free Wordpress Blog

Wordpress.com is one of the main sites where you can register for a free blog, or even multiple blogs if you wish, and this can be a great way to give the articles that you write more exposure.

Why should you create a blog at all?

Not everything that you want to write about makes a good article that you can publish and expect to earn money from, for example here on Associated Content.

There are times that you want to write something else, or even to add a different perspective to an article that you have written, and writing an article to a blog with a link back to your article can send more visitors to that article.

Probably the best reason for creating a blog is to focus on something that you have a keen interest in, such as Gardening, Pets, Crafts, Dating etc.

Here you can write blog articles that are related to your niche, and these might well bring to your blog an audience that you might never find visiting your articles, had you written them without creating this niche for people to find.

The nice thing is that having established a blog, there are a number of ways in which you can use this to drive traffic to your articles, not just on Associated Content, but on other sites that you write on as well.

Like me you might also create lenses on Squidoo, or write at Helium or Hubpages. You might write at Qondio, Fortitude, Xomba, Bukisa or other sites where your articles accumulate value based on traffic and advertising clicks.

Articles that you publish on your blog can be used to generate a visitor's interest in one of your other articles, and of course you link to them.

But there is more...

Blogroll

This is a strange term, and one that came into being with the advent of the Weblog.

A Blogroll is basically a list of links to other web sites and pages, and usually appears in the sidebar of your blog site.

This is where you might add links to your other web sites or blogs, to your profile page on places that you write.

You can divide your Blogroll by Category too, and I usually divide mine into:

My Web Sites
My Blogs
Places You Can Find Me
My Friends Sites

and so on.

Once you have a blog you begins to make friends with people who have similar interests, and it makes sense to add links between each others blogs.

Now your blog has the potential to be seen on other people's blogs, and your blog will now get more exposure over time.

Comments

By visiting articles on other blogs and leaving meaningful comments on them, this again provides a link back to your blog.

If you make your comments interesting enough, there is a good chance that people who read them will come and visit your blog as a result, and they might just stick around and read a number of articles too.

Sharing

Sharing is another great way to get noticed, and the Sharing tools that blogs are provided with these days help articles to get noticed quickly.

If you configured your Wordpress blog correctly, at the bottom of each article is a set of buttons that allow visitors to share the article son popular social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc.

This can in some cases help your traffic to explode.

Auto Posting To Your Blog

This is very important for promoting your articles, and it uses the same Sharing technique that I mentioned above.

One option that most Sharing functions offer is the ability to create a Wordpress posting from the article that you are viewing.

So, say you have just published an article on Associated Content, go and view the article, and I am sure by now you have noticed the buttons on the bottom left of the screen, that enable you to share that article on Twitter and Facebook.

To the left is another Share button, that opens a window, showing other sites where you can share your article.

Click on the Wordpress button, then enter your Id and Password at Wordpress, and the default id of your Wordpress blog will pop up.

If you proceed with this, and then go to your blog, you will find a new post that has a link back to your Associated Content post, plus the details from the Article Summary box that you completed.

This is great, but it's not perfect, since the newly created article does not have a Title.

You can copy and paste this from the body of the document, and now you have an article on your Wordpress blog, that links back to your article on Associated Content.

RSS Feeds

Every site where you write these days produces an RSS feed, and indeed most sites these days that have constantly updating content, are built around RSS Feeds.

Your Wordpress blog is another place where you can add feeds from Associated Content, Squidoo, Helium etc into your blog, so that visitors can see the latest articles that you have written.

What More?

Other areas that will help to make your blog more popular are Search Engine Optimisation, and the use of Categories.

I will expand on these in a following article, but let me just say that the scope for making your blog popular is vast, and having made it popular, if you share your articles from Associated Content onto your blog and also write about them, you are guaranteed to drive traffic to them.

Don't forget also that by making your blog popular, it is now an entity in it's own right, so where relevant don't forget to link back to it from your Associated Content articles, and also don't forget to add your blog to your profile.

Good Luck, and if you would like to swap Blogroll links between your Wordpress.com blog and mine, let me know on poddys.wordpress.com

See also:

When is Creating a Blog on Wordpress.Com A Good Idea : Promoting Your Articles