How Do You Write An Article?

How do you write an article about something you know nothing about? It is what everyone wants to know. Article writers do it all the time. Most articles are written by ordinary people who research a topic and write about it. They then just put it to the back of their minds.

The question really breaks down into two questions;

  • How do you write an article?
  • How do you write about an article on a new subject?

How Do You Write An Article?

There are three stages to writing an article; research, planning, writing

Research-Finding Profitable Keywords

This is something you need to be able to do quickly for every article you write.

  • Brainstorm a list of potential keywords
  • Put the keywords into the free keyword tool from Google’s Adsense
  • Take the best keywords and put them into Market Samurai

When you find a keyword with a reasonable number of searches, a reasonable CPC and that you can get onto page 1 of Google for, then you can start your article.

How Do You Write An Article On a New Subject

Open the three or four websites that you hope to displace from Google’s search results and read them, looking for sub-headings.

Write your sub-headings, including keywords if you can. Leave three lines between your subheadings to write your content.

Read your source websites again then close their tabs or windows.

Write your content from memory. Include all the most important content from your three target sites and include a bit of your own.

Be careful that you cannot be accused of plagiarism, run your content through Copyscape to check it shows as unique. There is nothing wrong with reading, learning and writing from your head. Rewriting a page, while you have a page open does not give you your own article and articles written like this tend to have no flow to them.

How to write an article; It is what every budding web writer needs to know. Web writing has its own forms and structures that any new article writer needs to get to grips with.

How To Write An Article-Step By Step

There are no shortcuts. You have to work through the research, or you are just wastingyour time. Writing an article for the Internet is different from writing a newspaper article or an essay.

How To Write An Article-Keyword Research

Research is essential. You either need to spend half your time on research or you need to buy a wonderful piece of software called Market Samurai.

It is pointless writing a word on any subject unless your article is going to be read. Bing, Yahoo and Google need to rank your written article on the first page of their search results if you are to earn more than a few cents from it.

You need to choose keywords to focus your article on. These keywords should have about a thousand searches a month and pay about 40 cents a click. Keywords like this should not be too competitive and should enable you to rank well in search results.

Keywords and key-phrases can be researched using the Google Adsense keyword tool, which is free. You need the competition bar about half way across.

Check your competition by clicking on your keyword and opening the Google search page. Check every page listed to see if you could rank above it.

Market Samurai will enable you to do all of this and find other essential information in a few seconds. It is available as a free trial and you should at least download this and research a thousand keywords during your trial, which should keep you in article titles for a year.

How To Write An Article-Keyword SEO

Before you start writing an article you need to write down at the top of your screen the keywords and key-phrases you will be aiming at.

Use those key words and phrases in sub-headings where you can and scatter them through your article as often as you can without destroying the readability of your work. It is absolutely essential that your article reads in a natural way.

Include your main keyword in your title and page description. Include all your keywords in your tags. If you use any images, then use keywords in their titles and Alt Text descriptions.

Your first paragraph should include your main keyword twice, once as an exact phrase. For the second occurrence, the key phrase can be broken up, but the words must be in the exact same order.

How To Write An Article-Choosing A Subject

You need to choose an article subject where visitors are likely to click on your ads. There is a lot of research showing that people click when they need an urgent solution to a problem. This might be a product or service they are thinking of buying or it might be a ‘how to do something’ piece of knowledge. You need to attract ads focused on products and solving urgent needs. You do this by writing product reviews and how-to articles.

Information articles usually generate very few clicks because people read your article, find the information they were looking for and move on, without needing to click on any ads.

How To Write An Article-Style

It is a sad indictment of our society, but web pages are generally aimed at the lowest common denominator in society (not this one though). They use simple language and sentence structures because they are trying to communicate with the maximum number of people.

As an example, you will find the word “get” used far more often on a web page than in any print magazine article.

If you are aiming at Americans then you should use American spellings and words, even if you are British. If you use a spell checker, set it to US-English to avoid all those red lines.

How To Write An Article-Structure

Introduction

The introductory paragraph is the one that search engines display in their results listings. It needs to be sharply focused on your subject and to lay out where your article is going to go.

Avoid intros that use phrases such as “This article is going to…” Make every word in your introduction count because this is where you will either grab or lose your reader’s attention.

Body

Use H2 and H3 subheadings, using keywords where possible in your subheadings.

Think about the five Ws and an H that newspaper journalists use; What, Where, When, Why, Who and How whenever you are struggling to break up the article into sub-sections.

No paragraph should be longer than 6 lines on a computer screen. This might mean that you start a new paragraph on an article for the Internet where in a print article you would just start a new sentence.

Leave lines between paragraphs.

Use short sentences.

Finishing

This is the lease important part of your article. Your reader’s attention will be wandering by the time they reach this paragraph. Bring your article to an end, but avoid spending a lot of time trying to think of a witty and logical conclusion.

How To Write An Article-Signature Box

Sometimes you will be given a signature box at the end of an article. This is where you try to persuade your reader to do something, usually to click on a link to your own website.

You need to give your readers a reason to click, eg “The author has written a free ebook on this subject called 99 Ways to Do Blah Blah Blah Successfully, click here to download it, free.”

Written by Phil Turner, an ex-teacher from Ireland. Phil believes that to succeed in anything you have to help others and share your own knowledge. He makes a living mostly by writing on his own sites, which include HowToMakeExtraMoneyWriting.com and 21CWoman.com.

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