Do you own a Blog? Do you convert your posts into articles? This is a common sense suggestion that I’ve seen over and over but it wasn’t until very recently I actually began acting on it. It’s easy to see it somewhere, like here, and think it’s a great idea and then forget all about it. Myself, I just kept putting it off, until one day a couple of years went by. Once I tried it a couple of times I couldn’t believe I waited so long to take advantage of the content I had already written.

The post is already written, it’s original by you and hopefully it’s related to your niche market. Like I said, common sense. Why not take that hard earned work and let it generate some quality one-way links back to your site, free site traffic and a reputation as an expert in your field? Let’s get started building your expert reputation;

1. The first step is to sign up for a few article directories and learn their terms, rules and guidelines. I can’t stress this enough, follow the directory’s rules to the letter. You want published, not flagged and held for violating key word abuse or something similar. See if and how many links your articles can have, what HTML tags you can use etc..

2. Once you have setup accounts with a few sites, every time you write a new Blog post ask yourself if it’s worthy of an article. Is it something others would want to read? If not, you may want to reconsider posting it to your Blog but there are many posts that I don’t convert because they wouldn’t be appropriate. One example would be a post that’s loaded with resource links and wouldn’t be worth much if the links were removed.

3. Now all you have to do is a little editing to adhere to each directory’s terms. Personally, I keep a separate folder on my computer and use notepad to archive my articles. I keep the basic article there along with each title, key words, a short teaser, number of words and author’s bio. This makes it a very simple task to add the same content to multiple directories.

4. Write your Author’s Resource Bio for each directory you are going to contribute to. Just like the article itself, be sure your bio isn’t in violation with the site’s rules. This is where you get your traffic and back link from. Don’t try inserting links to your site in the body of the article, self promotion is inappropriate there and will get your submission rejected. Remember, you’re providing valuable content for other sites to use and, just as with any product, your article must be of value to them or it will never be used. Keep that in mind and write for the best content and you’ll be fine.

Now that you have the ball rolling, I’ll offer a few tips so you get the most from your work…

In a very short time your articles should start adding up. It’s not unusual to see thousands of back links generated from other sites using your content if you keep adding to the pool. An easy way to speed things up is to go back and look at old blog posts. If they have potential edit and submit them. You may have dozens or hundreds of articles just waiting to be free content for someone’s website.

Mix it up a little too. Write different variations of each article and your bios for each site you submit your work to. This will help ease the issue of duplicated content but that’s for another discussion. EzineArticles.com, my favorite, allows up to three separate author bios so I use one for three separate niches using links back to the related site.

Tracking your progress is easy. A few weeks after your article is approved and online, check for back links with one of the many free online tools available. Link Popularity Checker is one that’s easy and free but there are hundreds of others. You could even use tracking links to split test the results but I believe the SEO benefit of the back links are more important. Tracking links would steal any page rank, if any, that might come from the link. I do want to mention that recently I’ve noticed of few very popular article authors with very little or no page rank. I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s from other unrelated issues such as text ads or some other search engine penalties. My whole reason for giving my hard earned work away is to build traffic and my reputation. Anything else I’ll just consider a bonus.

Expert Author Brian HawkinsWould you like to use this article on your website? See our EzineArticles.com bio page for details and a list of available articles. You must include the author resource box below each article published and please make sure each link is ‘clickable’. Don’t forget to come back here and leave us the page the article is on using the comments feature of this post. That will give you a search engine friendly link back