Blogs vs. Article Submissions - Should You Have A Blog Or Do Article Marketing (Or Both?)

There are several different online marketing methods you can do when you're marketing your website. Two of the most popular and user friendly are blogs and submitting articles.

What is the difference between these two and is it worth the effort to do both of them? Or should you just do one or the other depending on how much time you have? Do blogs and free reprint articles actually do different things to market a website?

Having a blog and doing article marketing are two very different forms of online marketing, and you don't have to pick one or the other, as they do different things. When you have a blog, for example, you attract readers by publishing fresh content on a regular basis. By having links on your blog that lead back to your website, you can funnel traffic from your blog to your main site.

Also, the content that you put on your blog should be unique and not available elsewhere on the internet. That means that when Google looks at your site, it will see unique content and reward you accordingly.

For all of the pages on your blog, Google will give a ranking for searches done for keywords associated with each page. If search engines regard your blog as being an authority website in your niche, then the pages on your blog will get a higher ranking. In that case, the value of the links coming from your blog will also be higher--and that means that links going from your blog to your main website will have a higher value as well.

If having a blog is so great, then why do article marketing? Well, you still have the same problem with a blog as you do with your website--how do you drive traffic to it?

Just like your website needs to be marketed, so does your blog. Article marketing is the answer to that. Here's how your blog and any other type of website can benefit from submitting free reprint articles (article marketing):

1 - With article marketing, you get widespread exposure for your website and your business.

2 - By submitting free reprint articles, you improve the search engine ranking for the pages on the website.

3 - By marketing with articles, you build inbound links to your website.

Not only does article marketing help with your search engine ranking, but those links to your site from the author resource box serve as an additional source of traffic to your site. People can click the link in your resource box and be directly taken to your website or blog.

Your free reprint articles will appear on article directories, so when publishers are looking for content, they can go to an article directory and reprint your article and resource box on their site or in their email newsletter. The article content does not remain unique, but it does "get the word out" about your website, which is what you need to do in order to bring in more readers.

As you can see, there are different perks to having a blog and to doing article marketing. While the blog has the benefit of having unique content on it, it's still an isolated site until you market it. The free reprint articles are published on multiple sites, but they are very effective at bringing traffic to your website or blog both through search engine searches and via the articles themselves.

Having a blog and doing article marketing are natural complements to each other--it's a good idea to do both if you have the time. If you don't have time to do both, then start by doing article marketing, as you need to get exposure for your website somehow (just having a blog won't do the trick).

But having both a blog and submitting free reprint articles may be easier than you think. You can actually combine your efforts--you can take your blog posts and rewrite them to submit as articles. Rewriting the blog content is a lot easier than trying to come up with brand new free reprint articles. As long as you keep the content on your blog unique, you can use your blog posts as the basis for your articles.