Blogs, Websites, and Articles -- which Mix is Best?

Blogs, websites, and article writing are three tools that should be taken seriously if you are new to Internet marketing. Each subject is important and essential, and should not be neglected. However, which tool is the most important?  If you are going to use all three tools how do you mix them and in what manner do you prioritize their use?

Without some sort of web presence you don’t exist online, so it is a given that you must have a domain name and a hosting company so people can find your site or blog. Whether it is a website or a blog -- you must start something. Regarding which is best, will be addressed later in this piece.

That leaves articles and article marketing. Let me say from the onset that article marketing is definitely the strong horse in this race. It is true that writing articles is not always easy -- even for experienced writers. Sometimes a writer knows that he or she should write something but is struck with what is known as ‘writer’s block’. They just don’t know what to write about, or if they do decide on the topic they don’t know how to start it, and sometimes even how to finish it.

All writers will agree that article marketing is a must if you desire to develop a presence and a profile on the web. But writing articles is also an art, and one that can be developed over time. If you are serious about article marketing and haven’t yet made a start -- make one now. In time it will return traffic and ultimately dollars for your efforts -- if you apply yourself to it consistently.

If you are a novice don’t be intimidated by the high standards the article sites will require of you.  This is a good thing -- a very good thing, as it will cause you to step up to their standards, and will improve your writing abilities. One article writing site will even send you free training e-mails on how to improve your writing skills – and that is so cool.

Article writing is a sure-fire way to develop a voice to be heard on the Internet, and is also a great way to drive traffic and visitors to your website or blog. If you are a consistent article writer, over a few months of effort you will find that you have a slew of articles on various subjects, and all of them are being read, slowly but surely sending traffic to your site. So, whether you have a website or a blog, always write articles.

Now, which is better -- a website or a blog? Well, when I first started in the Internet marketing ‘experience’ I knew very little about website design. As I was marketing or ‘publishing’ affiliate products, I spent the first few months focusing on building the website. I would play around with designing it, and as I added affiliate products to the site, it would be in a constant state of change. It was in the midst of designing and building the website that I discovered article marketing, and as you can see from the previous paragraphs that I quickly became a big fan.

As I began to submit my articles for publication I found a few articles would be rejected for grammar or spelling and punctuation errors, errors which were easily fixed, and once the article was resubmitted the articles were accepted for publication.

However, I found that there were a couple of rejections on the grounds that the article linked to a website that did not have ‘enough informative content’ or contained ‘excessive advertising’. This stopped me dead in my tracks. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. You see, being new to online marketing I had designed the index or home page of the site to be as simple as possible, containing links to the category pages of the numerous affiliate products I was marketing for them. Then it dawned on me that the article marketing sites seem to favor blogs because of the informative content they contain.

Now this leads me back to the question of whether a website or a blog is best -- and ultimately to the answer I discovered after much soul-searching. I did not want to sacrifice all the months of work I had done on building the website to abandon it for a new blog site. Earlier I had added a blog to the website, but that was all it was -- an addition – an afterthought.

Then I rediscovered ‘WordPress’ and newly discovered the fantastic WordPress theme called ‘Thesis’. Sure, I had to purchase Thesis, but let me tell you, it was worth every dollar I spent on it. WordPress offers plenty of free themes, but you are limited to what you can do as a novice who might not know HTML, PHP, and CSS code, so Thesis opened up a whole new world for me. Thesis is basically Word Press for people who do not know code, and it makes them look like they know what they are doing. Most people who discover Thesis love it, as I now do.

I had tinkered with WordPress themes as I was building the website, but once I discovered Thesis I deleted everything to do with my earlier blog from the server and started over clean with the newly updated WordPress platform and the fantastic Thesis theme. It was the best move I ever made.

Now I have a Thesis theme running on the WordPress platform as a blog for my homepage sitting on top of my website. I wasted nothing and gained everything. The article sites are happier, I am happier, and in time I hope to develop happy subscribers to my new blog. You see all three tools work together beautifully when used in the right order and combination. Try it -- and enjoy.