Article Writing Tips

January 16th, 2008 | by Chris |

I wrote 2 weeks ago about article marketing and how you can use it to promote your MLM business. I hope that you have already started writing and submitting your first ones. If not yet, start immediately after you read that post since I am going to give you a few tips.

OK I know that when you begin it may takes you an hour just to write a line, but with practice you’ll begin writing, not masterpieces, but well written quality articles within that time-frame. You don’t need to write to a few pages long ones. 400-600 words would be sufficient for doing your job. After all you don’t want to educate your reader. At least not at someone else’s website. You want them to click the link in your resource box so they can come to your website.

But lets get to the tips. I know you are anxious to read them

First of all, don’t forget to start with a small draft. It can help you volumes when you get down to writing and increases your speed greatly, since you know they key points you will mention, beforehand. And when I say don’t forget, I really mean it. I am guilty of doing it myself. Some times I caught myself start writing without making a draft and I have to stop and go back cause I know that somewhere down the road I’ll eventually run out of steam and stuck without knowing what to write.

So write it on the wall to remember it if you are like me and you rush doing things before you think.

Second, since we mention the draft, equally important is the research. If you don’t know a lot on the subject you’re writing, checking various sources to get ideas and knowledge can greatly help you. Of course you should not overdo with it. You’re not trying to write the best article ever on your subject. You know the ones that people refer to them for years later and admire it and say nice words about the author and how intelligent he is. You’re in business and your objective is to send the reader of the article to your website. So be as fast as you can. Once you have sufficient information, get down to business and don’t waste more time.

Third, write a compelling title. You should grab your readers attention and make him read further. The title is your first impression. If it’s not interesting you lost your potential reader.

Fourth, unless you are preparing a scientific essay, don’t just mention the facts and write your arguments. Try to be entertaining. Use a more journalistic approach. Try to have a style similar to the one you find on magazines. Your readers are people like you. They don’t want to read a boring article. They’re not out only for the info. How it is presented is equally important.

Fifth, in case of a writer’s block, don’t sit and look on the screen. Trust me it doesn’t help. What you should do is start typing. Don’t give much attention to what you are writing, just press the buttons. Write whatever comes to your mind. Do anything else than siting and watching the screen. Don’t worry as you can always come back and correct what you wrote. What you can’t do is correct what you haven’t written.

Sixth, very important, pay attention to your resource box. You know the section at the end of your article where you write your little bio and include the link to your site. Exactly, that one. What you shouldn’t do is writing your bio. Yes, you read that right. Your purpose here is to entice the reader to click on the link and come to your website. A boring bio, not yours but all bios are, won’t do the trick. You need a short phrase with a strong call to action, like “visit our site to find why people like you are failing with network marketing” or “find out why people like me are making all the money while the rest are wandering clueless”.

It’s not that bad to hype a little in that box. You need to push some buttons to make the other interested enough to visit you site. What’s wrong is to keep up the hype on your own pages.

Furthermore try your resource box to have some consistency with the rest of your article. You want to relate with it and bind naturally with what you were writing previously.

And finally, if you still, after these marvelous, the greatest ever tips written on article writing, you can’t put down a sentence better than a six year old kid would have, you can always outsource it. There are a lot of people in sites like elance that you can hire to do it for you. And yes, you can put your name on it.

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