Entries Tagged 'Article Marketing' ↓

I’ve had this report sitting on my hard drive for quite awhile, but I finally read it today. It was a good read because it made me do some analyzing which I’m sure will benefit me in the future. I’m talking about Building Traffic With Article Marketing by Yaro Starak and Brian Clark. I’ve been a subscriber of Yaro’s for quite awhile now, and I’m a religious reader of Brian’s Clark’s blog, CopyBlogger.com so it’s no surprise that this was a good report.

It’s only 10 pages long so it won’t take you long to read if, but I’ll break some of it down really quick for you anyway. One of the tips that stuck with me was about the title of the articles. So many people get this one wrong and don’t spend enough time coming up with the right title:

Testing Article Titles – If you get this part wrong, you’re screwed. Unless you have a killer title to each article, you’ll be wasting your time writing the rest of the article. You need to capture the reader’s attention right away by having an irresistable title. You can have a blah title like “Weight Loss Tips” and it could be the best article in the world, but it won’t get read as much as one titled “Burn Fat The Easy Way – 9 Proven Tips”.

Something else that this report reminded me to do was to go back and work on improving some of my own article titles since EzineArticles (my favorite article directory) allows you to edit them (but they have to be re-approved first so you wouldn’t want to do this regularly or you might annoy the hell outta them).

In the second part of this report, Brian gives some really good tips to help make sure you get it right the first time and also about writing the author bio box and the article itself.

You can grab the report here.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a great way to increase traffic and generate incoming links to your website, but it doesn’t matter how many articles you write – you’ll never get any traffic or links if you don’t write GOOD QUALITY articles.

Before you submit your next article, ask yourself: “Is this something I would publish on my own website?”

Spend some time to create a quality article with useful information. Be unique and creative. Write something that people will want to link to and refer friends to.

I’ve seen the difference in stats between articles I’ve spent days writing, and articles I whipped up in an hour. Its well worth it to take your time and come up with something link-worthy. Trust me.

My mother started her career at our local newspaper as a reporter, then eventually became a successful news editor for ten years. During that time, she’s written countless stories and edited many books. Needless to say, she knows how to write.

In the past little while, I’ve been trying to convince her to write for the internet and start her own blog. She started off with a long article which I thought was really good and would interest a lot of people, but I found I had to show her a few tips to get more people to read the whole thing.

First of all, readers on the internet are completely different than traditional readers. When you pick up a book, you read every word. When you read an article in a magazine, you usually read the whole thing.

Internet readers are actually more like ’scanners’. They scan headlines and skim paragraphs for phrases, but generally don’t read every word on the screen. In many cases, they don’t scroll down to read a full article.

To keep your readers (or scanners) on your website or blog, you need to make sure your content is internet friendly. To do this there are a some things to keep in mind:

• Use bulleted lists with short and descriptive sentences (like this).

• Use sub-headlines to break up long content.

• Use bold, underline and italics when appropriate.

• Keep paragraphs short, about 4-5 lines.

• Pay attention to your headlines – make them enticing for the reader.

• Add photos or graphics to spice up articles.

• Get to your main point right away before the reader loses interest.

• Connect with your readers using words like ‘we’ and ‘you’, instead of ‘they’.

• Keep sentences short and easy to understand.

• Don’t let your lines go for more than about 65-70 characters.

• Don’t ‘pretty’ up your site with distracting backgrounds.

• You don’t need to sound like a rocket scientist. When you write, imagine you’re writing for someone in grade 6-8.

• Don’t be afraid of being casual and friendly in your articles.

• Use fonts like Arial or Verdana for your text. It’s easier to read.

• Always, always, always proofread for spelling and grammar mistakes. The occasional slip-up is forgivable, but too many gives the impression that you don’t care.

I come across so many sites and blogs with really long articles and bland looking content. It’s almost painstaking to read every word, but headlines and bullets would have made it more interesting and easier to follow.

Make sure your own content is internet-friendly and if you already have articles published, go back and edit them. If you have sales copy for your own product or an affiliate product, now would be a great time to tweak it and raise your conversion rates.

You don’t have to be a best-selling author to be a successful internet writer. However, it’s important to be able to see your content through your reader’s eyes. Always proofread your copy, then ask yourself if you would find it interesting and informative if you had read it for the first time.