By
allen on July 23rd, 2008
Posted in Article Writing | No Comments »
Here’s a good article on how you can generate ideas for articles. I’ll add more after the article, but read this first:
7 Tips For Producing Ideas For Articles
By Janet Simpson
I am a firm believer in writing and submitting articles. Articles work. They bring in traffic and they entice readers to visit your website in search of more information. Sometimes, however, it can be a challenge to continuously generate new ideas.
Here are some tips that will help you in the process of creating ideas for your articles.
#1 - Join discussion groups and chat rooms that focus on your particular niche. You can find discussion groups at Yahoo! and Google. Once there, look for the common threads. What questions are being asked consistently? Answering these questions is an excellent idea for the topic of your next article. You know beforehand that there are readers searching the internet for the answers you provide in your articles.
#2 - Search engines are a very good place to find out what people are talking about. Look through Google, Google Trends, Yahoo! Buzz, Dogpile, SearchSpy and MSN. You will find the hot topics of the day listed in these search engines, and hot topics are good themes to focus your article.
#3 - Dig out your old articles. Articles that you have produced in the past are excellent fodder for new articles. It is easy to edit your old copy, add a fresh slant and give up-to-date information.
#4 - Article directories. If you visit the most popular article directories, you will find a gold mine of information. What are other authors writing about? What are the common threads? Read other authors’ articles and come up with your own new and fresh ideas.
#5 - Calendars. Journalists use calendars to remind them of special occasions, annual events and holidays. You could do the same. For instance, there’s a host of ideas you can come up with around Thanksgiving. Conjure up new titles that fit in with your niche.
#6 - Surveys. What conclusions have been deduced from other people’s surveys? Use these conclusions for titles of your articles or create your own survey. Ask your subscribers exactly what information they need and answer their needs with your articles.
#7 - Generate a list. Make a list of the most popular or the easiest ways to… or the top 10… or the seven steps to whatever. Generating a list is one of the easiest ways to creating an article.
To download my new free ebook click here: Up & Running In 14 Days
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Janet_Simpson
More ways to generate article topics:
- Blogs - Read blogs. Lots of them. In fact, you should subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you can related to your niche. You can get article ideas from these blogs. You don’t have to read every single blog post. I like to scan headlines. When I find one that I like I’ll read the blog. You can usually get ideas for articles from reading other people’s blogs within your niche.
- Join some forums - Forums are a lot like discussion groups. Talk to other people in those forums and you’ll quickly figure out what is important to them. Write articles on those topics.
- Talk to people off line - You’ll be surprised at the information you can get off line. Any time you are face to face with someone interested in your niche, ask them a few formal questions about their perceptions and struggles. Just like in a forum, you’ll quickly get an idea as to what is important to them. Then you can write about it.
- Read magazines - Off line magazines are still a good source of information. A good article in a magazine can spark some imagination.
- Industry trade conferences - Talk to people in your industry. What are they doing? Follow them and write articles. You can even interview a prominent person in your industry for an article.
There is no limit to the number of places from which you can get ideas. Make a list, brainstorm, and start writing.
By
allen on July 22nd, 2008
Posted in Article Writing | 1 Comment »
The most important paragraph of your article is the first paragraph. In newspaper lingo, it’s called the lead paragraph. Why is it so important?
The lead paragraph is important because this is where you capture your reader’s interest. Your article will rise or fall on that lead paragraph, and particularly on that lead sentence. Let’s examine what you need to do to establish credibility in that lead paragraph and get your readers to keep on reading:
- The first sentence - You need a killer first sentence that does two things: Snags the reader into reading the next sentence and that uses your keyword effectively. SEO is an important aspect of article marketing. You want the search engines to discover your most important keywords and phrases and to rank your article for them. That first sentence goes a long way to helping you do that. Put your keyword in there one time. You do not need your keyword in the rest of the paragraph, but it does need to be in that first sentence. And make sure that you engage the reader from the very first word.
- The rest of the paragraph - You need to get people to read every sentence. If you lose your reader’s interest at any point in the article then they will leave and you will lose the sale. Every sentence must lead the reader to the next sentence - all the way through your article. That means, to get them through that first paragraph there must be a logical flow to the sentences and they’ve got to be interesting enough to keep them reading.
- Prepare the reader - I learned early in public speaking that when you have an audience you need to follow the three-point plan: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. This works in article marketing too. Use that first paragraph to set the stage for your article. Give a good summary of what the article will detail then subsequent paragraphs will give the “rubber meets the road” gritty details. You should not use phrases like “I’m going to tell you” or “This article is about.” Those are filler phrases that will lose your audience. Instead, simply give an overview of your subject before getting into the details.
- Paragraph structure - Another element I borrow from newspaper writing is the 5 W paragraph structure. In newspaper writing, it is customary to tell your readers what the article they are about to read is about by including the 5 basic pieces of information all readers look for: Who, What, When, Where, Why. And sometimes newspaper people include How. With informational writing in particular, which article marketing is, this information is essential to establishing what your article is about. Answer these questions in your lead paragraph and you’ve established in your readers’ minds just why they should read your article. You’ll also establish yourself as a credible authority on the subject.
Article writing is not newspaper writing, but there are some similarities. Establish yourself as a credible authority and attract your readers’ attentions by writing a dynamic lead paragraph. If you do that, they’ll keep reading.
By
Bill Platt on July 21st, 2008
Posted in Article Directories, Article Marketing, Article Submissions, Website Content | No Comments »
I spent most of this weekend updating one of my side-project websites. To be frank, it is a site I built with HyperVRE. While the HyperVRE product is pretty good, it is not ideal for big websites. So long as you are sticking to 10-page websites, this is a good product. But the site I have working on is a 500-page website.
The problem with the HyperVRE comes to light when you are working sites in excess of 20-pages. It takes a long time to compile large sites, and updates and template changes can be very painful and time-consuming.
This is where I have been with my 500-page website, that I built in just a couple of days using the HyperVRE package. It simply takes too long to update with minor changes. What I did was to decide to hand-repair the site and convert it to my own operating system platform, so that future repairs and tweaks could be implemented easily. (If you are wondering, I believe that this may someday become a stand-alone product, but I am a bit too busy to aim for that just yet.)
So, my adapting of the website has been made much easier with my php knowledge. But, I am still having to edit each article display page and put it into my new template system. I have cleared about 100-pages in the last 12 hours, so progress is good. I only have 400 pages to go….
So here is my point.
I have been looking at each of the individual articles, as I am morphing them to the new system. Far too many of these articles from a wide variety of article directories have lots of problems. I am going to document for you here the major problems I have seen, so that you can prevent yourself from getting caught like a lot of these writers have been caught - fluttering in the wind, with their article marketing campaign in ruins.
Resource Box - General Notes - The whole point of putting articles into circulation is to get your link out on the web, in newsletters and on websites and blogs. Don’t forget to put your links in the authors’ resource box!
Resource Box - Link Specific - Make sure your links work! Far too many of these articles have inoperable links, because the HTML for the HREF tags are seriously hosed. Noted Tips: 1) Put a space between the A and the HREF, between the HREF and TARGET tags, etc.; 2) Make sure there are quotes on each end of the URL or not. The HREF tags will work, with or without quotes around the URL, but putting only one quote around the URL breaks the link; 3) Make sure to include a http:// version of your link in addition to your embedded keyword links; 4) Don’t put punctuation at the end of your URL, unless you are including just the domain name, with no deep links (links to pages within your website). Even if you are linking just your domain name, I solidly recommend that you do not follow the URL with any punctuation.
Use The ENTER Key Sparingly - You should only use your ENTER key to break paragraphs, and then use it twice, to put a blank line between paragraphs. DO NOT hit ENTER after every type-written line. It will hose the proper display of your articles — and it is really hard to fix at the webmaster end. (I actually did just delete some articles, because they were so full of mistakes that I did not want to invest the time to fix them.) If you absolutely have to… hit ENTER at the end of each type-written line (strongly recommended against), make darn sure that you hit the SPACE key before hitting the ENTER key. Some directory sites will strip your extra ENTER keys out of the text, but those same sites will fail to put a space in there for you at the end of the line. The result is wordsthatrunintoeachother. This is damn annoying to the webmaster who has to choose whether to delete your article, OR fix your mistakes.
Sub Headings
When you are including a sub-heading in your text, you should make sure that you do two things: put a blank line between the subhead and the next paragraph, and always cap the first letter of every word in your subheading. Extra Note: If the directory will let you include BOLD html, then be sure to bold your sub headings.
If you are going to put a numbered list in your article, please put a space between your number and the first word that follows it. It looks like crap if you don’t.
If you are putting an unordered list in your article, please separate list items with a blank line between them, unless you are going to include the LIST ITEM html coding.
—
If you are using an article distribution service to get your articles out onto the Internet, then you generally have three kinds of choices:
- Do-It-Yourself Software;
- Low-cost and mostly Do-It-Yourself distribution service;
- The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service - full service.
Why do I mention this? For one, I own The Phantom Writers. But, I am not mentioning this to brag. The reason I mention this is because with my distribution service, we actually provide a full-service operation. We will put your articles together for distribution, and our team of experienced people will ensure that everything is working as it needs to work. We make sure all of your links are formatted properly and working. We also make sure that all of your T’s are crossed and your I’s are dotted.
My point, if the people whose articles were in my automotive website were distributed by us, instead of someone else, the multitude of problems I saw today would never have been, because my staff would have made certain that your article distribution went off without a hitch.
—
If you are struggling with high fuel prices and trying to figure out how you will be able to pay for your online advertising endeavors, please consider getting a copy of my ebook, “How To Increase the Fuel Mileage of Any Vehicle.” By utilizing the gas-saving tips and gas-saving strategies I recommend, you should easily be able to improve your fuel efficiency by at least 30%! In these days of $4 per gallon gasoline, 30% will add a whole wad of change back into your monthly budget… just enough to enable you to build your income streams, so that maybe you won’t have to worry about conservation next time around.
—
Bill Platt 405-780-7745 - 9am to 6pm CST
By
allen on July 18th, 2008
Posted in Article Content Provider, Newsletters | No Comments »
Get free weekly tips and an inroad to every blog in the Content Provider family. Subscribe to The Content Letter weekly newsletter. Every week we provide three articles from three of our blogs - Article Content Provider’s Article Marketing Blog, Blog Content Provider’s Blog Marketing Blog, and the SEO Service Provider Blog. We also occasionally invite guest author’s to contribute and as we grow we will include articles from other websites in our family. We currently have more than 20 niche sites planned that will be added to the family and most of them will have blogs as well.
To subscribe to The Content Letter, click here and enter your e-mail address in the opt-in box just below the header at the top of the page.
By
allen on July 17th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Audio Articles | No Comments »
Many successful article marketers have learned to repurpose their content and usually it simply entails taking your articles and rewriting them with another focus or offering them through another medium. For instance, many article marketers repurpose their articles by packaging them as as e-book. That’s perfectly acceptable.
One way to repurpose your articles is to repackage them as audio articles. This can also be called podcasting. You simply take your articles and read them into a microphone, recording them onto a digital recording then submitting them to podcast directories. The advent of the audio article has yet to come, but there is potential there.
One thing you can do is to repurpose those articles that you’ve written and put them on your own website as audio articles. Visitors to your site will be able to listen to you read your articles while they do other things, saving themselves time. They can also download your articles to their ipod or mp3 player and listen to them any time they want. With audio articles, you can give your visitors what they want in more ways than your competition. Why not take advantage of all the possibilities?
By
allen on July 16th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing | 2 Comments »
Articles are a great way to market your business. They have been for a long time. Here are three ways you can promote your business without promoting it:
- Write an article on the latest trend within your industry. Make it informational, but don’t tell everything you know. Keep it short, to about 500-700 words, but tell why the trend is important to your target audience.
- Highlight an essential benefit of your service. Don’t write like you are trying to sell your service. Write like you are informing your target audience of a benefit of a certain service. In your author resource box, give them an opportunity to contact you about your service.
- Define a topic. Discuss a particular topic within your niche that a lot of people don’t know about. Be informative, but not salesy.
Article marketing works. But you have to do it long term.
By
allen on July 15th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article Writing | No Comments »
Ideally, you would know everything there is to know about your niche and not have to do any research when writing your articles. But that isn’t realistic. No one can know everything.
At some point you will have to do some research. How much time should you spend on it? Well, you should obviously spend as much time as is necessary to gather the information you need for your articles, but you also have to keep in mind the gold axiom: Time is money.
Over the years I’ve discovered that it’s best to do all the research I need for a particular topic in one sitting so that I don’t have to jump back and forth between projects as that alone can be a time killer. By managing your projects in time blocks you can get more done. Do all of your research at once and take good notes then write all of your articles at the same time. This way you can do all of your research for all of your articles on a particular topic and save yourself some time. With the proper approach you can research 20 or 30 articles in an hour or two of time and then be able to write 10 articles per hour if you are fast at collecting and organizing your thoughts. Your article marketing time will be spent doing the important things and not wasting time.
Need an article marketing consultant?
By
allen on July 14th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article Writing | No Comments »
I’ve browsed the article directories and have seen articles titles, Part 1 and Part 2. Is this a good practice?
I think, on the whole, no. Article marketing is not a good match for articles broken into parts because they typically need each other to be successful, but e-zine publishers and webmasters will rarely use both articles. They may only find one of them and not realize that it needs the other to work. If they do notice a two- or three-part article series they will likely pass it by and not publish it.
To be most effective in article marketing, write each article as a standalone article. You can write articles that are related to each other without requiring that they be used as a series. The longer your series the less likely your articles will be used by other publishers. I would stay away from the practice altogether.
Need an article writer?
By
Bill Platt on July 14th, 2008
Posted in Article Directories, Article Marketing, Article Submissions, Article Writing | No Comments »
In this age of article spam, including links within the body of an article is difficult to accomplish, depending on how you are distributing your articles.
If you are relying on a bunch of article directories to get your articles to publishers, links in the body of an article is nearly always a guaranteed article killer. 80% of article directories prohibit links in the body of the article and for good reason.
Most article directories prohibit this practice, because so many people abuse article marketing, in an effort to spam the article directories and search engines. They simply miss the point of article marketing, by missing the idea that article marketing is an excellent tool for getting human readers to their website to buy what is being sold.
The new breed of article marketers who entered the marketplace in circa 2005 had been told by the so-called guru’s that the only point of article marketing was to generate links to one’s website, for SEO and link popularity purposes. So new article marketers started coming out of the woodwork, trying to shove as many links as they could into the articles they were distributing. The biggest mistake these folks made was to shove numerous links into the body of the article, with little or no regard for whether readers would enjoy reading that article.
What was missed by the so-called gurus and their students, was that those people who were finding great success with article marketing in 2005 and before, were focused on telling good stories to attract human visitors to their websites. They knew that getting the link was important, but they also knew that in order to get more links, the writer needed to tell a good story.
Article directory managers were annoyed at the junk that was pouring into their directories every week, so they started seeking out methods to quickly identify the trash. The one identifying mark that really stood out was that 90% of the article marketers who were putting links into the body of the article, were those people guilty of submitting those most trash articles to their directories.
Article directory managers did realize that 10% of the articles with links in the body of the article were great articles, but they also knew that the other 90% were pure trash. Granted, they knew that they would be losing a few good articles each week by prohibiting articles with links in the body of the article, but they also knew that they would be ridding themselves of a huge portion of the garbage that was being sent to them.
Strictly as an effort to manage their own time, article directory managers put an end to articles with links in the body of the article.
The only reason one should ever consider putting links in the body of their articles is when they recognize that those links might prevent an article from being published in some sites, but at the same time, it might make the article more attractive to others.
The first trick to getting an article out there with links in the body of the article is to distribute your article only through article distribution sources that allow such a thing. The second trick is to only provide links that support the story you are telling, and to avoid using self-promotional links in your article.
There are some article distribution channels that permit links in the body of the article, although the strongest recommendation is to only include links that support the story being told.
If you only provide links that add to the value of the article, then the chances of certain publishers printing your articles is greatly enhanced.
For those of you who pay attention to the articles that I write and distribute, you will note that half of my articles have NO LINKS in the body of the article and half DO HAVE LINKS in the body of the article.
I do this because I want to be able to reach publishers who appreciate links in the body of the article, and I want to reach publishers who prohibit links in the body of the article.
I only include links when those links add real value to my story. And I switch formats, so that I can reach a much larger audience through diversity in writing strategies.
When all is said and done, whatever formats you utilize in your articles, the most important consideration is to always give your readers real value. When you have learned to do that, you will also find success in your own article marketing endeavors, like those before you have done.
Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers.com Article Ghost Writing and Article Distribution Service
By
allen on July 12th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article Writing, author resource box | No Comments »
You’ve got some great articles, but you find yourself writing your resource box every time you want to submit one to an article directory. It’s really getting old. So why do it?
You really only need to write your resource box once. In fact, why not write three author resource boxes, with slightly different information in each one and with different links? Then each time you write an article that you want to submit to an article directory, you simply choose with author resource box to use. Save your resources boxes in a text file on your hard drive and whenever you’re ready to submit your articles to an article directory you just copy/paste the one you want to use onto the bottom of your article. Simple.
Here’s what you should include in your resource boxes:
- Your name
- Name of your company
- One sentence that sums up the service you want to promote
- A link to your landing page
- (Optional) A second link
- A closing sentence that serves as a call to action (this should have a link in it; preferably your one link or the alternate, and this sentence can be the same sentence as the summary mentioned above)
You really want to use that author resource box to drive traffic to your landing pages. But don’t promote more than one landing page per article. Focus on one landing page per article and use your articles to drive traffic to that landing page.
