The Lazy Bloggers Guide to Leveraging Content

One of the best things about the blogging platform is the ability to leverage your own content as well as share others, and it is this ability that not only helps perpetuate the blogosphere and the internet as a whole, it is also what sustains it. So it is a given that when you begin your journey as a blogger you will participate in the righteous act of tweeting, digging, and generally sharing your own and everyone else's del.icio.us content.

It took me a while to learn this but I will let you in on a little secret now; There are so many platforms available to help leverage your own content, and the whole point of this post is to talk about exactly that - but ironically, it is through sharing other people's content that you will get more traffic and ultimately achieve more for your blog and your brand. (You still need awesome content of course)

Sharing is Caring, and Caring takes a while

Now the problem with sharing other people's content is the time it takes to really do it properly. I have talked before about the awesome power of Effective Blog Commenting and the general importance of building and maintaining relationships in the blogosphere but it is time consuming to say the least, so when it comes to the task of leveraging our own content - finding the quickest and most effective method possible is definitely in our best interest. With that I give you the methods I use to leverage my own content that don't take me any time at all.

Oh and can I just quickly add (in case you were wondering) the Duplicate Content Penalty does not exist, there is no such thing, in fact I am going to use the F word here. The Duplicate Content penalty is a Farce, a Faux Pas and a Fallacy so forget worrying about whether you should duplicate your content elsewhere and just do it already:)

Social Media

The Social Media playground is one that I am yet to master and debate still rages over its effectiveness in Marketing speak, but if you have the ability to share your content there without lifting a finger then I say why not. You can do this by installing a few plug-ins that automatically share your post to your Facebook wall and also to Twitter. WP to Twitter and WordBook are both available to download through your admin panel and if you don't already have them installed I highly recommend you do so.

Bloggers love to share

By far the best place to leverage your content is through platforms that promote blogging in general because the visitors you get will be your peers so they will comment and engage. The best place to do this without doubt is BlogEngage (very fitting name I might add) and this site is an invite only forum for bloggers to share their content and promote each other's best stuff. The best thing about BlogEngage is that you can install a 'vote' button much like you would a 'Tweet this' button so that your readers can vote and even submit your posts! That is the beauty of BlogEngage, because the content is simply a link to the original post you not only make it easy for others to submit your articles for you, you also guarantee click throughs to your site when the post is live.

strong>Article Marketing

There is no way I am going to go in to the ins and outs or Article Marketing, but I am going to tell you how I leverage my best content without really doing much at all and it's all through the power of the plug-in (again, man I love WordPress)

I have heard many a pro blogger talk about EzineArticles as being the only Article Directory worth using and since they are the only Article directory to offer a plug-in it kind of works out well really.

The plug-in I speak of is available through EzineArticles in your Author Area under Author Tools and basically what it does is allow you to send your posts directly to Ezine from WordPress. This is fantastic because you can now share your best work with the most authoritative Article Directory on the web simply by clicking a button, but first you will have to make a few changes.

Ezine does not accept links in the post (generally) and does not accept comments that recognise the article as a blog post so before you submit your own post you need to rectify this. The best way to do this is simply to kill all your links, remove any reference to your own blog or readers and then submit it to Ezine. Now go to your Dashboard and when your blog freaks out and tells you that you have not saved you say 'Yes no worries' and thus none of the changes you just made are saved. See, there really is a lazy way of doing everything.

These are the methods that I use to share my own content that don't take more than 2 minutes of my time to do, and they have all proven to be effective methods of generating traffic to my blog - truly the lazy bloggers way.

Alex Whalley is the Keyword Blogger and blogs about Keyword Research, on and off page optimisation and niche site marketing.

Visit The Keyword Research Blogger, Alex Whalley for more advice, insights, tips and techniques on how to find and then utilise the most profitable keyword for your next marketing campaign. Subscribe to his newsletter and get SEO and Traffic Generation tips, as well as a FREE copy of the Ultimate Keyword Research Resource and learn how easy it is to get an Organic Traffic Jam at your site today!