Blogging, Book Marketing & The Problem With Duplicate Articles

To protect the privacy of participants, all names have been changed in what follows.

Dear Mel,

I wonder if you might give me some advice. I'm on Ezine Articles and I also write a blog. I duplicate material from one to the other. Is it worth me doing this, or should I just do the blog? I can't work out from the stats whether those who view my Ezine Articles are the same as those who view my blog, or different people? I'd welcome your wisdom on this subject!

Carol

Hi Carol,

If you take a look through the articles on my website, you'll see that I've addressed some of these issues. Go to the Home Page, click on Article Writing & Blogging under the heading Authors' Resources, and you'll find all sorts of information.

Right let's see if I can answer your questions specifically.

DUPLICATE BLOG ARTICLES

First of all it's not a good idea to duplicate articles because it messes up the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) i.e. the way that Google bots "crawl" websites to provide meaningful search material for people looking for information.  Take a look at this article on the subject: Duplicate Content In A Post Panda World.    The answer to this is to change the title of your blog post, and the way in which the information is presented, before submitting it to ezine articles.

BLOGGING FOR BOOK MARKETING

I take it that "is it worth me doing this" means in book marketing terms? The answer is a resounding Yes!  I'm actually going to be doing a presentation, as one of two authors, at the CRT Conference in Swanwick in June on this very subject.  If you're trying to market your book then ANY and EVERY comment that you make on other websites / forums / article syndicates is going to bring your name to the fore.  This is what I do for my novel, A Painful Post Mortem.

AUTHORS' WEBSITE INFORMATION

I hope you're using Google Analytics to tell you who's visiting your website? If so, you should be able to tell who's visiting from Ezine Articles. Look at the Traffic Sources, and under Referred Visitors, you'll see how many have come from other sites. Search Traffic tells you how many people have typed keywords into Google (or Yahoo or whatever) and come up with your site. Direct Traffic tells you how many people have come direct to your website because they already know about you.

Hope that helps.
Mel