5 Tips to Improve Your Article Writing
If you’re doing your own link building work, chances are that you are doing some sort of article marketing. Whether you are submitting some articles to article directories or putting up content on your own blog, article writing is a craft in which the more you practice it, the better you’ll become.
GoArticles, an article directory in which you may want to submit your articles if you haven’t done so already, has put together 5 article tips every writer should know. These tips can be very helpful to gather ideas and put articles together a lot more efficiently.
1) Create a word count limit for your article. When you set a word count goal, it forces you to keep your focus. You’ll find that you are writing much more efficiently.
2) Say what you need to say as simply as possible. For those of us who like to elaborate and go off on tangents, this guideline can be a challenge, but definitely something to work towards!
3) State the point of your article from the first sentence. Your reader will look at your title and the first sentence to decide whether he wants to read your article. You greatly increase the likelihood that the reader will peruse your full article if you can rope him in right at the beginning. Resist the urge to write a lengthy and complicated introduction. Get to the point quickly.
4) Teach your readers. Your main purpose in writing articles is to provide helpful information to your target readers. If your article fails to do this, it will not be successful on any other level. Focus on teaching in your articles – forget about promoting your business, getting backlinks, and hyping products. Think of common questions that your readers have, and then write your articles as solutions to those questions.
5) Do not ignore the concluding paragraph of your article – experiment with different strategies that will subtly draw your reader from your article body into your resource box.
Remember, when doing article marketing, the goal is for the content to spread while links are distributed along with the content. If the article doesn’t have any solid content for a webmaster to use, it won’t be much help. On the other hand, that one article link is a link. If you’re too busy to write articles on your niche, it’s always a good idea to outsource this type of work.
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September 6th, 2010 at 11:14 AM
You want the Resource Box to flow right out of your article, since it is the next paragraph in the article. Starting off with “Jim Smith is blah blah blah” is like announcing to the reader that the article is over and they can stop reading now.
Not the result you want at all, right? Instead you can start off with a nice transitional phrase beginning with the word “and.” For example, “And now I would like to…” or “And now you can…” is a great way to begin.
Then, back to my notion of invitational language, you simply invite the reader to take the next action you want them to take. For example, you can say “And now you can claim your free instant access to…” whatever it is you are going to offer them.
The invitational language brings them in instead of chasing them off. Then and only then do I ever mention my name, and then only so that the good information they are about to get is linked in their mind to my name and brand.