All Entries Tagged With: "readers"

Your Lead Paragraph: What Should You Say?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Why Article Titles Are Important

When you write your article titles do you put a lot of care and attention to crafting the perfect title? If not, you should.

There are plenty of reasons why you should take extra pains to ensure your article titles are the best they can be. Here are two reasons right here:

(Source) The heading or title of your article must consist of the keywords; most of them or all of them. The benefit from this is that when publishers are searching for keyword related articles, the search engines look for these keywords, and if the title is compelling enough and body content informative, your article has an excellent chance of being republished.

Did you get those two reasons? I’ll restate them:

1. People read the article based on the title
2. Search engines rank the article based on the title

That’s right, your articles will rank in the search engines based on how well you write your title. Keywords are very important. You need your keyword in the title one time – not twice. Once. And it should be included in the first five words of the title. After that, if you have a secondary keyword then slip that in near the end of your article title.

Beyond being highly optimized, your article titles should also do these things well:

1. Pique the curiosity of the reader.
2. Tell precisely what the article is about – your readers will not want to read your article only to find that the title was misleading. That’s very annoying and you will lose their trust.
3. Be short.
4. Use an action verb.

You are always writing for two audiences, whether writing articles, blogs, headlines, website content, or anything else. Your two audiences are always your human reader and the search engines. You should endeavor to make them both happy. Start with that goal in the first word of your article title.

How Long Should Your Article Be?

Some people say your articles for aritcle marketing should be 250-300 words long. Is that long enough?

In some cases, I’d say that’s long enough. It really depends on your topic. For most articles, I’d say 500-700 words is better. There are two principles you need to weigh against each other for the optimal article length.

On one hand, e-zine publishers want shorter articles because if an article is too long then people won’t read it. You have to hold reader interest and shorter articles do that better.

On the other hand, you want articles that are highly optimized. Shorter articles tend to be under-optimized. As more and more people use the Internet for marketing, there is an increased level of competition for every niche. More content gives search engine spiders an easier time of ranking the content for the right keywords. To be sure, a 1,000-word article is better for SEO than a 200-word article.

So how do you take these two principles and get them to work together for your marketing good? You compromise. You take the principle of shorter is better for reader interest and the principles of longer is better for SEO and you write an article that is somewhere in the middle. Most people will read a 500-700 word article. Anything more than that and they’ll lose interest. And you can increase your chances of people staying with you for the full article if you include a couple of subheads in your article. But an article of 500-700 words will be short enough for most readers and long enough to get you adequate exposure for your SEO efforts.