While an article used to promote your product or service might be just a bunch of words, it also has a life beyond what most people think. In this 10th and final article in the series of making article marketing pay off for you, let’s talk about Resurrecting Your Articles, or breathing new life into them.

There are many ways article marketing can work for you, but the most popular first step is to submit them to online article directories for two main reasons:

1. To create links that lead back to your web site.

2. To allow ezine and web site publishers to syndicate your content on their sites.

Which, in turn, brings reason #1 back into play — the more people who can see your article, the more traffic you’re going to get.

As you can see, submitting to article directories really make a lot of sense, but too many article marketers stop at that point and don’t reap the whole benefits of writing an article. So let’s look at 5 great ways you can reuse one of your articles in order to bring in even more sales.

1. Sales on Autopilot. Article #2 in this series covers this step in detail, so look that up if you want more, but in a nutshell, put your articles online as a single webpage and then have it lead into a pitch for your product or service. Now, add a follow-up message to your autoresponder series pointing to that web page. The people on your list will get good content, and you get another way to try and make the sale.

2. Blog Content. Most article directories don’t require exclusive content so you’re free to publish your article on your own blog even after submitting it. And while doing a 2- or 3-part article is frowned on by some of the major article directories, on your blog it’s perfectly fine. If you have a longer article consider breaking it up to make it last longer.

3. Special Reports and Ebooks. By combining like articles together and publishing as PDF you have a no-brainer way to create your own whitepapers and special reports. Those can be sold or given away as a bonus for people who join your list, etc.

And by putting several of those special reports together you can easily create an ebook that can then be sold. If you’re interested in this tactic, article #3 in this series goes into more detail.

4. Podcast Material. If you have a microphone on your computer you can easily create content for a podcast by simply reading your article as you record it. If you don’t have a podcast, you can still record your articles and then offer that audio content to others who have podcasts. It works the same way as people with websites republishing your content, except this content is an audio version of the article. Yes, complete with your offer and a link at the end.

5. Video Article. I know I’ll lose some people just at the heading (“You lost me at video!”) but creating a video article is super easy and doesn’t require that you look fabulous or have professional equipment. If you created an audio version of your article in step 4 above, you’re more than halfway done.

Now all that’s required is to create a slideshow using Keynote or PowerPoint with key phrases from the article on the slides. Now play the audio and flip through the slideshow while recording the screen using something like ScreenFlow or Camtasia.

Sure, the first one you do might take a weekend of tinkering, but by the time you hit the third or fourth one you should be cranking them out in about 30 minutes.

There you go, five more ways in which you can resurrect your articles and gain more traffic. Submitting to directories is a great idea, but don’t get stuck thinking that’s all you should do — the more you can reuse and repurpose your articles the more sales you’re going to make.