Article Writing
By admin | May 8, 2008
Article writing is a major consideration in any serious traffic generation profile - and to make sure you’re getting the most out of article writing, you need to understand the basics of why they work.
Article marketing is simple, and effective basically because it’s hands off. You can use articles as viral marketing - the back links that sites like E-zine articles (http://E-zinearticles.com/) and other article marketing sites alone make it a valuable and viable contribution to your article marketing projects.
Its important to remember though, you’ve got to actually work at it - article marketing is a high quality form of marketing - you’ve got to make sure that the final product reflects well on you - not only to get them accepted, but also because this article will be your ‘face’ on several sites. Article reprints spread far and wide, and the best ones can carry on for far longer than you’d normally expect.
Once you understand how they work, you can work with the methods that make them so successful, and go from standard success to stellar in a couple of simple steps.
What you’ll need
Article writing or production is simple - take some PLR or an article concept, stick it into your word processor and that’s about it. Depending on where you want to send your articles will depend on what exactly you’ll need next.
You’ll also need to get accounts with sites you want to submit your content to - and check out their guidelines. Make sure you understand the rules on keywords specifically, as it’s the single biggest ban reason - once you do, you can find some great traffic goldmines writing for other sites, with your own links in the bio.
Writing a bio
Bios are simply a brief description of who the author is, and further links to contact, or read more by them. Most bios relate directly to the information that are being shared in the articles – and will share one or two urls relating to the subject at hand – in your case, your site, or sites. Using articles to promote your sites will, of course, mean that you should promote the sites in question, without shunting traffic through intermediaries. Which, in turn, means that if you’re offering reprints on your site, you should archive them on the site, with a current bio in place.
Writing:
Content writing isn’t easy and for that reason, you might want to consider taking a day of time to brainstorm, write and submit. You can write articles in a couple of hours - submitting itself can be done when you have a spare couple of minutes - but the most important thing to remember, and keep firmly in site is the quality of your writing.
You may think that you’re not a good writer, but anyone and everyone has some writing ability - it just takes a certain mindset to actually commit the words to paper - a mindset that professional writers take years to hone.
Hiring a writer
You CAN hire a writer - there are lots of places you can find a good writer, or writers, including Getafreelancer.com and elance.com - but for every good writer, there are tonnes of poor ones. Its important to know what to look for in a good writer.
Can they articulate WHY they are a good writer? ” I is da bomb!” really isn’t a vote of confidence for anyone’s writing abilities. Its important to look at how well their personality shines through their CV, and how well they express themselves.
Style or substance? If their style fits yours then they might be a better fit than someone with an impeccably written CV with no feel of style to it. Substance too is important, if they can express ideas readably, you’ll find that they are entertaining, enthusiastic and engaging, and therefore, make better articles to read.
What are their clips like? - if they’ve got clips, review them, and get a feel for how they handle topics - if they are comfortable over the topics they are presenting, its another point in their favor.
Do they speak English, or at least pass as speaking it properly? - one of the biggest issues with freelancers that price themselves low is that they are possibly English Second Language writers. Which means that they’ll either have a perfect grasp of the language and genuinely be brilliant, or more commonly, they have turns of phrase that gives them alway as ESL writers. These turns of phrase WILL need to be edited thoroughly.
What are their reviews like? Do they have glowing reviews, high ratings? Information such as how they’ve handled previous contracts is very important.
Building a strong article
The first and most important few words of your article are in the title or the headline - they should indicate, or offer something that ties into the article itself, and makes sense to your reader, once they’ve read it, which means that if you name it something like ‘When life hands you lemons, build a dot com’ - it should make complete sense to the reader as to why you chose that specific title.
Once you’ve chosen and written your title (which can be before, or after you’ve written the article itself), you should move on to the first paragraphs - they should explain, clearly, the message you’re trying to share, over the course of the article, but to This is one of the primary methods that e-zine owners and newsletter producers, and of course, website owners use to choose content by.
Your title should be pithy and informational in itself.
If you’ve started your content with writing your title - you can then move on to running over the points you want to share in your article, a piece at a time. This way of sharing information makes for good, interesting articles that aren’t overly long and can focus on one or two important points that you want to share.
Article writing for the net isn’t complicated - a great formula and rule of thumb to remember is most people skim read content online, so you need lots of subheadings, and paragraphs of between three and eight lines long. You can write slightly longer, or shorter, for things like bulleted lists. This works well because people skim read - and have an incredibly short attention span.
Go easy on the exclamation points, as well. One exclamation point indicates importance or excitement… a half a dozen are just rude, and mark you as an amateur writer, which, in turn, will get you rejected from the article sites you’ve been working towards being accepted in - another sign of amateur writing is all capitals in the titles.
It’s also important to remember that people will read content by you if they’ve enjoyed you as a writer, or content provider, they will look for you again, and visit your site, which is why its of vital importance that you create a landing page from all of your articles, linked via your resource box.
Your resource box at the end of the article is the part that is most important to you. You’ll use it to direct people to your site. Its a short biography at the end of each article you produce, which anyone using the articles has to leave in place. This is why they are so good as traffic tools - these article marketing high points are just a couple of the perks.
Submitting Articles:
Once you’ve written your content to submit, you shouldn’t submit your article to everywhere that will take it. Article marketing has recently been crippled by the Google Slap, so avoiding, or at least accepting that your articles will be caught in the Google duplicate content filter (and on any search engine for that matter) is an important first step to relaxing where you send your content to.
You should choose five article submission sites to send your content to at most - recommended sites such as E-zinearticles.com, articledirectory.com and other, possibly niche based sites will give you excellent coverage of a vast market of potential readers.
While there’s lots of software that you can use to submit and produce articles, such as article architect, that you can use to automate your submissions, and working on articles, all you need do is bookmark the sites that you submit to the most, and ensure you’re building strong, interesting content on these sites, so that not only do you gain a reputation for solid content, but you’re also creating a marketability platform.
Topics: Traffic |