For one thing, article marketing is a great way to start attracting more visitors to your blog.  Not only are your articles posted in the article directories; newsletter and ezine publishers may pick them up and use them in their publications, which could definitely bring more readers to your blog.  Article marketing is also a great way to build long-lasting quality back links to your blog, which should help boost its ranking in the search engine results over time.

If you’re not sure how to use article marketing and blogging together, try these ideas for starters:

Re-purpose older blog posts into articles
Since many of your blog posts are probably shorter than traditional full-length articles, try collecting 2 or 3 shorter posts and combining them into a longer article.  For example, if your blog is about making money online and you have three short posts about ways to do that, each post could be made into a bullet point in a “Three Great Ways to Start Making Money Online” article. 

Or – rather than using the full blog posts, you can extract just a paragraph or two of text from several longer posts and combine them into full articles with bullet points.  “Top Five Tips for Making Money Online,” or “8 Great Ways to Monetize Your Website”.

Write unique articles, then re-use them on your blog
You can also write a few unique articles each week to use for article marketing, and then re-use the same articles in creative ways on your blog.  For example, you could put together 5 or 10 of these articles and create a PDF report to give away to your visitors.  Submit the PDF report to document sharing sites like Scribd.com, and be sure to include a link back to your blog.  You could even create a full ebook or other digital product to sell from your blog, and include a collection of your best articles as a bonus. 

Get more mileage from your articles
The top article directories can provide a lot of benefits for your blog, but don’t dismiss the smaller directories.  Use a distribution service or software to broadcast your articles to hundreds of sites and create an abundance of good back links to your blog. 

Do this only after using the articles in as many ways as you can – once you start broadcasting them to hundreds of sites they will quickly be scattered everywhere.  In fact, if you want to cut down on the saturation you could re-write the articles before mass distributing them, but it’s not absolutely necessary.

Contextual Advertisements
Your blog is probably already filled with links leading to other websites, blogs, and forums, right?  What if you could get paid every time someone clicked on a link on your blog?  That’s what contextual advertising programs can offer you.  

You would have to sign up to the program and install some code on the pages of your blog where you want the ad blocks to appear.  When visitors click on one of those links, you earn anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars per click. 

Some of the more popular contextual ad programs are Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Kontera, and Text Link Ads.

Digital Affiliate Promotions
No matter the subject of your blog, there are probably at least a few digital products that you can promote for profit.  Think about ebooks, online courses, downloadable music, memberships, and services that your visitors may find valuable. 

Make sure you choose targeted products and services – don’t plaster a bunch of unrelated ads all over your blog because chances are you won’t earn a dime from them.  Instead, offer products and services that you know your visitors would be interested in.  That will boost your conversion rate (how many people buy versus how many people see the ads).

Search for compatible digital goods on Clickbank, Amazon, and PayDotCom

Physical Product Promotions
You don’t have to stop at digital products; people buy plenty of physical products online too.  You could join affiliate programs and promote everything from household goods, herbal supplements, beauty products, electronics, DVD movies, music CDs – and much more.  Again, it’s important to target these offers to your visitors; promote things they already have an interest in.

Keep in mind that the amount of traffic your blog gets will likely determine the amount of income you can generate from it.  When your blog is brand new you may not have the traffic needed to generate a lot of income, but that should keep increasing the more established your blog gets over time.

News headlines
No matter the subject of your blog, chances are there are a handful of headlines that would pertain to it every week.  These don’t have to be breaking news alerts, but rather think about new product announcements, industry news, and even slightly related news subjects.  Take a few minutes to visit bigger news portals online each morning and skim through the headlines.  Not just the big national headlines, but also finance, technology, entertainment, sports, and more.  Do any of these stories relate to your blog’s topic?  Write about it!

Google alerts
Google offers a fantastic alert service that will send you an email every time it comes across news, blog entries, videos and more, when they relate to a keyword (or keyword phrase) that you specify.  Create Google alerts for your main keywords, long-tail keyword phrases, and even product or company names that relate to your blog topic.  You may want to set up a filter or a separate email address for these alerts, or just set them up to come through once a day or once per week.

Article directories
Busy article directories are great places to find ideas for your own blog posts.  Visit the categories that match your blog topic(s), and start making a list of ideas.  You can also check out other categories that may not be directly related but still contain plenty of ideas that you can apply to your own niche market.

Other blogs
Do you read other blogs on your topic?  If not, you should be!  Create a separate folder in your favorites and bookmark as many related blogs and websites as you can find.  Spend a few minutes each day browsing through them, and keep a running list of ideas that are sparked by what you see there.  Obviously, you don’t want to directly copy anyone else’s ideas but use them as a starting point for your own.

Discussion forums
Discussion forums are loaded with excellent questions, insights, ideas and more that you can use for your blog.  Every time you see someone asking a question, jot it down and later write a post about it.  In fact, keep a notepad handy while you participate in forums and jot down all of the great ideas that are sparked as you interact with others, and find a way to use them in your blog.

Keeping your blog alive (and having fun while you do it) doesn’t have to be hard.  Below are a few good ways to make sure you have fun while also creating a lively, popular blog:

Be enthusiastic about your topic

The more inspired and passionate you are about the subject of your blog, the more that enthusiasm is going to shine through to infect your readers.  It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging about amusement park rides or the dietary habits of snails – if you find it interesting, your readers probably will too. 

It’s also helpful if you have strong writing skills so you can properly express your enthusiasm rather than writing flat, uninteresting posts.

Always be on the lookout for good information

When you first start your blog you’ll probably have a ton of tips and information to share, but as time goes on you may feel like you’re running out of things to say.  A good way to overcome this problem is to stay active in finding more information relating to your blog topic.  Visit a bookstore and skim through some magazine articles and books.  Ditto with your local library.  Sign up for newsletters on your topic, and participate in online discussion forums.  All of these resources offer plenty of information that you can then blog about.

Challenge yourself

One of the common reasons bloggers get bored is because they stop challenging themselves to create interesting posts.  Try playing an association game each day to liven things up.  Let’s say your blog topic is digital cameras.  Take any book (a dictionary or thesaurus works well) and open to a random entry.  If you opened to the word “counterfeit,” you could research and write a post about how to avoid getting burned by buying a counterfeit camera.  If you opened to the word “lopsided,” you could write a post about how to properly frame a shot, and so on.  You can come up with thousands of great post ideas this way.

You could also start at the beginning of each week with a list of topics, and push yourself to write one post per day to cover one of the topics – even if you may be tempted to procrastinate.  Challenge yourself to be more disciplined, and eventually you’ll enjoy the feeling of satisfaction you get from accomplishing your blogging goals.