Whether you’re a small business owner with a growing website or you’re an affiliate marketer looking to get more results from your online marketing efforts, the strategies for content marketing are essentially the same.

I have talked about these strategies in more detail in other posts, but today I want to look at the whole package together to give you a better idea of how you can get these auto-pilot web marketing machines working for your business or affiliate system.

1. Blogging
We’ll start with the most obvious of the five – blogging. We all know how powerful blogs have become in the last few years or so. These easy mini-websites do a great job of communicating with your niche market directly in an informal and often personal manner. This is the most important place to begin your content marketing system.

ACTION STEP: Setup your own self-hosted blog with a provider like Bluehost or learn how to build traffic with free blogs at WordPress.com or other providers.

2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of my favorites, but it’s a bit useless unless you have a website or a blog where you can drive traffic from directories. This content marketing method works because online users trust article directories for providing quality content. Plus, if you do it right, you can really leverage article marketing for seo.

ACTION STEP: Write articles and submit them to the top article directories. Or, better yet, hire an article marketing service to do it for you.

3. PPC Campaigns
Pay Per Click works because many users don’t find what they’re searching for on the first page of Google or Yahoo search results. That’s when they go clicking on those ads in the sidebar. If you can write compelling ad copy and a great landing page, you’ll see tremendous results. But beware: Google is making it more difficult to get cheaper clicks.

ACTION STEP: Create a landing page with a high-quality sales letter and setup a PPC campaign with Google Adwords. Test, tweak, test, and repeat.

4. Social Media Promotions
Social media marketing is definitely on the rise. It’s easily the most cutting-edge form of online marketing but – despite what some ‘experts’ might tell you – it’s really just another form of what we’ve already seen again and again… more content marketing! The only difference is now users are getting pickier about what they choose to see and what they don’t. This just means you have to leverage the right tools to get to your target market. And of course, you’ll need great content to do it.

ACTION STEP: If you don’t have a twitter account yet, you best get crackin’. Setup at www.Twitter.com and start tweeting about topics related to your niche. Then watch the followers start signing-up to read your tweets.

5. Email Marketing
Last but certainly not least, email marketing is the cornerstone of any content marketing system. Once you’ve pulled in an audience with your blog, reached out to them via article marketing, increased your traffic with PPC, and leveraged online communities with social media, it’s time to build that list and start reaching out to your customers with direct-email marketing.

ACTION STEP: Sign up with a service like Aweber to build an online email list. At first, your list will be hard to convert with few signups. But you can be sure the results will improve as the momentum builds and signups increase. Remember: direct marketing is a numbers game.

With the end of 2009 upon us, now is a good time to start thinking about your 2010 marketing plan. I would encourage anyone, regardless of your level of expertise, to begin making plans to put each of these five systems in place or to improve the communication between them for the coming year!

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There are two primary free blogging websites available online – Blogger.com and WordPress.com Because it’s Google owned, Blogger is easily the more popular of the two. But what Blogger lacks, WordPress delivers in spades.

The greatest advantage of WordPress.com is the unique tagging system. In my experiments, WordPress tags can be a tremendous source of free traffic and backlinks if you do it right and target a fairly undeveloped niche.

Here’s how to set up your free blog:

1. Go to www.Wordpress.com
2. Start a free account.
3. Setup your first free blog.

It is extremely important – as always – to choose a WordPress.com domain that includes your target keyword phrase. If you are targeting the “online insurance quote” niche, for example, you might choose a domain name like http://freeonlineinsurancequote.wordpress.com (example) for the best keyword targeting.

Once inside the WordPress system, create your first post by selecting “Post” from the sidebar menu in your account dashboard. Then, write the post yourself or use the content provided by your freelance article writers. Be sure to include just one link to the website you are promoting with the proper anchor text. Then, add a keyword targeted category in the right sidebar.

Of course, for the best results, you should use high quality content with variations on your main keyword target. Try not to be too spammy. Spam is spam, folks. Good content is good content. You know it when you see it. This may be a great free traffic generating system, but it’s not intended to be an opportunity for you to get lazy.

WordPress Tags for SEO

Finally, it’s time to add the secret ingredient — tags. you should also see this option in the right sidebar. Be sure to add at least five, preferably 10, and be sure each tag is a highly relevant keyword for your niche. Now

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