It takes time to write content. Time, I believe, is the most valuable asset we have. Hence, I am always looking for ways to make one well written piece of content work harder and harder in it’s ability to generate good backlinks. Today I’m going to take you through my favourite ways to utilise a good article again and again.

First off, let’s look at where a well written 4 – 500 word article should definitely be published:

1. On your website: It’s your content, so you should certainly publish it. Always publish your articles on your own website first, bookmark them to ensure the search engines are aware that your website should have first published credits.
2. On the top article directories: At the very least, you should publish your article at the top five article directories. These directories are crawled often by search engines and offer well trusted links back to your website. Last month’s post on ‘how to index your new website quickly‘ listed the top five article directories.

Now, if you did nothing other than the above with your articles on a regular basis, you would certainly still see the benefits. The above, however, is really only the start of what you ‘could’ do. To utilise articles to maximum efficiency you have to get a little creative. Here’s my current favourite ways of squeezing links out of your articles:

1. Turn An Article Into A Press Release
   Did you know that there exists online a whole network of Press Release websites dying to distribute your stories across the web? Many of the bigger ones, like prweb.com, charge for using their service. However, there are also a large number of services which offer a good distribution service free of charge, the best known of these is probably prlog.org. You will have to do a little editing to turn that article into a press release, but once you have, you’ll find a number of new places to publish that content AND receive high quality backlinks in return. To get you started, here’s a useful guide to turning an article into a press release and here’s a good list of free press release websites – there are many more, so do search out your own additions to add to these.
2. Turn An Article Into a PodCast
   I discovered an interesting new service this month called Odiogo that will turn any rss feed into a podcast. I’ve actually added this very blog to their service and as a result, you can now ‘listen’ to all posts in audio (just click on the ‘listen now’ link above), mp3′s are also downloadable should you wish to place them onto your ipod or player. Now, not only is this a fine and cool way to turn written content into multi media, it also offers you the ability to upload your Odiogo files to a range of podcast websites out there. Google particularly adores multi media content, and hence links back to your website from such podcasting places are high authority and, more importantly, ones that your competitors probably don’t have.  Here’s a comprehensive list of podcasting directories.
3. Turn An Article Into Video
   Having turned your article into audio, it perhaps comes as no surprise that I’m going to recommend you turn it into video too. If you downloaded the top100links, you’ll know that YouTube is the number one rated link you can have . Turning that article into a video easily means you can create that, and many more, fine site link back to your website.  There are a number of online software services emerging that turn an article into video almost instantly, the best known of these is Article Video Robot, this one will actually also submit your video to the top video distribution websites – including the mighty YouTube.

So, hopefully by now your getting the idea. The internet is a vast world of multi-media content. The more ways and formats that people can come across your content the better, both in terms of attracting traffic and in terms of growing your link base across a wide variety of IP addresses. With a dose of imagination, you’ll uncover a host of further methods for making your written content stretch and morph further across the web. Of course, I’d be most interested in any ideas you have, so please do post them here!