I saw a question in the Warrior Forum yesterday that asked whether it would be better to promote a product via a blog or via affiliate marketing.

The answer, of course, is why not do both?

As far as promoting a product through a blog goes there are some things to keep in mind:

• Blogs, by their nature, are not as tightly focused as a sales page. There are generally other links that people can click on, enabling them to leave your blog without making a purchase
• If you do manage to keep your blog tightly focused this may make it difficult to keep producing good articles over time. And that’s essential if you’re going to attract readers.
• The focus on a blog is generally more on the articles, where as the focus on a sales page is generally on the product and its benefits.

However – a blog tends to attract more search engine traffic than a sales page. This means that your cost of sale is likely to be lower.

So if you’re promoting a product do both: run an out and out marketing campaign and promote it through your blog.

Here are some ways to improve the ability of your blog to attract search engine traffic, encourage people to subscribe and help to spread your content among the social sites:

• Set up a Wordpress self hosted blog on your own domain
• Install and activate SEO related plugins. There are others, but here are some starters:
  • All-in-one-SEO pack
  • Google Site map generator
  • What Would Seth Godin do
  • Share This
• Join some social bookmarking and social networking sites. Be sure to actively participate in the communities and don’t only post your own articles! This is very important – if you only post your own articles people will start to give you a wide berth and on some sites you risk getting banned.

Use the social sites to disseminate your content. You can do this efficiently on those sites that allow you to set up your RSS feed – but do so with care! Remember to post articles that provide value to people.

The links from the social sites have no value because they all use re-directs. But links from people who see your articles, like them and link to them DO have value.

And probably the best resource for helping you to get traffic to your blog is…

Jack Humphrey’s Authority Black Book.

It’s free to download and contains 67 pages of tools, techniques and ways to increase traffic to your blog.

Check it out here. (It really is free!)

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