Mass Traffic Attack Chapter 3 – Authoring Great Articles
Mass Traffic Attack Chapter 3 – Authoring Great Articles in my experience, the most important thing about authoring any great article is NOT to think of it as “writing,” but to imagine instead that you are directly “speaking” one on one with somebody. This will come as great news to all the “non-writers” out there! Many of us are uncomfortable with the concept of writing; “article writing” conjures up images of well known, highly paid journalists penning their weekly piece in newspapers and magazines.
What makes a great article depends on two things:
- How well you have researched the subject.
- Understanding the correct structure for the best articles.
If you have never authored an article before, or if your stomach turns at the very thought, then reading the above 2 points is not going to help that much!
Relax.
Before I got started authoring articles I must have read about every book on the subject. All of them went way over my head; they were aimed at existing writers not complete novices like me.
So that is why when I decided to put this guide together, I assumed 2 things.
- You have never successfully drafted an article before
- The very thought of it causes you, if not terror, then certainly downright anxiety
If that is not you, that is OK, you have a bit of a head start on everyone else! Anyway, let us take a closer look at the 2 factors I mentioned – structure and research. Once you understand these two components, you will have everything you need to confidently write your first article. After that, all the others will follow.
Structure
It is not difficult at all to write an article. However, like most things there are “rules to follow” if you want people to read your words and, more importantly, click through to your web site to get more information. I have lost count of the number of articles I have seen that blatantly disregard these rules.
The content is just a collection of words that do not follow on from each other and there is extraordinarily little attempt made to try to get the reader to find out more. No doubt these are the same people complaining that “article marketing doesn’t work.”
Here are the various components of a well-written article:
- 1. Headline – should be attention grabbing and contain your keyword phrase
- Opening Paragraph – introduction to your article, explain what you are going to write about. Aim to cover “x” number of points in your article
- Main Body – 3,4,5 paragraphs. Cover one point per paragraph.
- Conclusion – this starts in the final paragraph and continues into the Author’s Resource Box (or Bio Box). Basically, summarize what you have just written
- 5. Resource Box – the most important part after the headline (if your headline sucks then noone will read your article anyway). Here you are allowed to insert a link back to your site, which is the whole point of drafting the article in the first place.
- Word Count – aim to write around 400 words
- Keywords – your main keyword phrase should appear 2-3 times, your secondary keywords should appear no more than twice
- Teaser – the primary aim of your article should be to function as a teaser for more information from your web site.
Do not worry if there are some parts of the above you have not fully understood or if some of those terms are new to you. Everything above will be covered in greater detail in the next few chapters. Also bear in mind those are not fixed rules; I often break them myself. However never forget point 8 – you are authoring articles to get the reader to click the link to visit your site.
Research
There are really two aspects to research for articles; one is keyword research to make sure your article can be found. We will be covering that in the next chapter. The other part is gathering research material for your article. This is what we shall cover here.
In a later chapter I am going to walk you through a “live example” of how to put together an article on a subject that you know nothing about. For now, I just want to open your eyes to the massive amount of research material available to you for free. There are hundreds of resources out there that you can use to get information.
Here are just a few to get you started:
Of course, if you are promoting a particular branded product, the best source of information is from the product’s main web site itself. We will take a look at an example later in the eBook. For now, let me just show you the power of the above sites as research material. I am going to enter the keywords “rabbit training” into the search boxes for each site.
Zoom into the images if you need to.
Google – 5,550,000 Results
Ezine Articles – 1,134 Results
Go Articles – 208 Results
Wikipedia – 1,077 Results
Yahoo Answers – 2,992 Results
Google Scholar – 269,000 Results
No doubt some of that information will be duplicated or irrelevant to your search term but with millions of results just from those few sites, you have more than enough material to last a lifetime – just on that one keyword phrase!
Imagine having to author an article 20 years ago without access to the internet as a tool. I can only guess but I envisage it would have involved several trips to the local library and an investment in “Encyclopedia Britannica”! Even that would have only given you access to a fraction of the information available.
So, use what is out there. Truly you can never run out of content to use as research material. In fact, it would be impossible to use even a tiny percentage of it. You might be asking yourself why you bother doing any research? Two reasons come to mind:
- To give you specific ideas of what to write about
- To gather material to include in your articles
In fact, for most of my article research I do not even bother with Google; I just browse the article directories and see what topics other people have written about. This usually gives me a lot of ideas.
Another great resource you can use to get ideas of specific subjects to write about is to browse forums related to that niche. Simply go to Google, type in
“keyword” forum
and go through the results. Having just tried that now “rabbit training forum” brings up almost 1.2 million results, and “rabbit forum” gives me 3.4 million results. Go through a few forums (obviously not all 3.4 million of them!) and see what questions people are asking.
You will find some questions get asked repeatedly. Then check the answers. Keep a Notepad file open while you are doing this, and you will soon have tens of subjects for potential articles.
One final thing, and this is ESPECIALLY important. Never ever simply copy and paste someone else’s content. Eventually, you will get caught out, at best you will get banned from article directories and look a fool; at worst you will find yourself facing a lawsuit over breach of copyright. It is simply not worth it, especially when it is so easy to author your own original articles.
Quite apart from that, imagine how you would feel if you found that someone else had copied all the articles you had painstakingly written? Right.
Best Wishes, Coyalita
See Tomorrow: “Chapter 4 – Keyword Research”
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