We all know that writing articles can be a time consuming process. You need to pick a topic, get everything you know down on paper, research supporting statistics, structure the article and then send it.

Article Marketing Using Blog Posts

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with new topics to write about.

A great source of ideas for topics are your old blog posts. However you can not just copy and paste these old blog posts directly into article directories. To do so you risk content duplication penalties and thus web traffic to your article will be negatively impacted.

I have used the following 6 step approach to re-working my blog posts into articles and it works very well.

1. Refrain from re-working the article line by line. Google bots have become very sophisticated at recognizing patterns and changing words here and there is not sufficient to fool them anymore.

2. Read over old blog post and note key points. Do not copy full blocks of text. Note the key points and use those as structure for your new article

3. Use the key points to create a new article. Simply create an article around the key points recorded in the previous step, using these key points as a skeleton structure.

4. Use an article template to structure your article. Where your blog was most likely in essay form it’s advisable to structure your article in bite size chunks. For example Top 5 Mistakes…, Top 10 ways to etc. These can take the form of bullet point or numbered lists.

5. Never re-work a previous submitted article. It’s critical that you do not plagiarize your previous articles. It’s perfectly fine to re-work a blog or forum post but not a previous article. This will serve only to undermine your article writing efforts.

6. Synonym Replacement. It is important that your article retains effective keyword density i.e. there were certain keywords used in your blog post which are critical and should be retained for your article. You may be able to use synonyms (words that have a similar meaning) for less important keyword phrases to further remove the probability of duplicate content penalty.

This is a very effective 6 step process that will enable you to derive maximum benefit from re-working your old blog posts into articles.