31GYL Day 13: How To Write An Article

We're now at Day 13 in the Growing Your List Challenge. We’re also entering a new topic in the challenge that spans 8 days, and is one of my favorites: Content Marketing! 😀

For Day 13, refer to pages 33-36 in the
31 Day Guide to Growing Your List

To start, we'll look at how to write an article (correctly). Specifically an article that is engaging enough to get both quality backlinks and clicks, which equals immediate traffic to your squeeze page...

Content Marketing for Backlinks and Human Visitors

If you're only writing and submitting articles to get relevant backlinks, you're missing half the benefits of this simple marketing strategy! You should also be writing with human visitors in mind so that you can get immediate targeted traffic to your squeeze page offer, in addition to higher search engine rankings.

Article Marketing, and content marketing in general, is a great way to target long tail keyword phrases and reach your market immediately - while your own site or page is still getting indexed and ranked.

Or, once your page is ranking well for it's keyword phrase, content marketing is a great way to dramatically expand your reach by targeting all of the related or similar keyword phrases.

See: Driving Traffic To Your Product Reviews
(which works just as well for driving traffic to your squeeze page!)

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How To Write An Article That Gets Readers AND Clicks

There are 3 main things to keep in mind when writing great content:

1) The Headline or Title
2) Well-Written Content
3) Formatting!

The headline will pull them in, the content will pre-sell the reader and lead them straight into your call-to-action, but the formatting - well, that can potentially turn them off to the point that they never even read your great content!

I'm a real stickler about formatting. From image alignment to line breaks, if content doesn't flow well on the page it makes it very difficult to read. Most of us skim and scan unless something really catches our eye and pulls us into the content.

Even without reading every single word carefully on a page, most of us "skim & scan" all the way to the order button and even make a buying decision without carefully reading the page.

Use that to your advantage (!) and make sure you format your content so that the main points stand out, visitors can easily scan your content, and make simple impulse decisions on your call-to-action.

Creating A Great Title For Your Articles

A great Title is going to contain a combination of copywriting and a keyword phrase. You'll start by choosing a keyword phrase to target for your article.

This is a means of serving your market because they have specifically told you what they want to read by typing that phrase into the major search engines.

A keyword phrase alone is not enough though! You need to make the Title compelling. It's the very first thing, and often the only thing, the visitor sees when they have to make a decision whether to click through and read it (or not)...

Article Title Tips:

• Use trigger words like "how to", "easy" and "discover"
• Offer quick & easy Steps or Tips
• Make it around 7-10 Words

A handy resource is this Free Headline Analyzer.

Using this tool I analyzed the headline example on Page 34 of our free guide: "The quick and easy way to lose weight". That headline got a score of 37.5%.

A little tweak to the headline: "Three Quick and Easy Steps to Losing Weight" saw a dramatic increase! This headline got a 50% score which is very high.

I also tried another variation: "3 Easy Steps to Lose Weight Fast!" which showed a score of 42.86% (also very nice!).

Bookmark the free headline analyzer and use it for every title you have to create: article titles, forum thread titles, email subject lines, blog post titles, headlines for your pay-per-click ads, etc.

How To Write An Article People Will Enjoy Reading!

If you write a great title, people will click through to read your article. This is NOT the place to lose them! You have only a few seconds before they decide whether to read your article... or click the back button.

As I mentioned earlier, the formatting of your article will be the first factor in that decision. If you article is one big long paragraph with no breaks, you've lost them. If your article is written in ALL CAPS, you've lost them. So make sure your article is properly formatted for easy reading.

With a great headline and proper formatting, your target market will begin reading your article - or at least scanning your sub-headlines and bullet points.

A well-written article will engage them, get them reading (instead of skimming) and pull them right into your call-to-action.

3 Quick Article Writing Tips:

• Use a Conversational Tone
• Don't Bloat Your Article
• Include a Relevant, Strong Call-to-Action

It's important not to bloat your article for the sake of word count OR in an effort to "sound smart". It won't read well, and will be counter-productive to your objective.

A conversational tone can be difficult for some people to achieve.

It's hard to sit down to a blank screen and "talk to it" in a way that sounds smooth and natural. One thing I do when sit down to write articles is imagine that my best friend asked me a question.

Using our example above I might imagine that she phoned or emailed and said, "Okay, I'm fed up with my weight problem. What's the quickest, easiest way to lose this weight??" From there I would start writing my response.

Note: it's best to just write. You can edit and format after.

Another strategy I use is to do the formatting first. As you can see in my how to write a blog post, I often format the entire article/post first - with each of the elements I want to include. This includes a quick outline of the topics I want to cover. I then go back and turn those topics into sub-headlines, and flesh out each of the content areas one at a time.

Your Task For Today:

Choose a keyword phrase to target. Ideally this will be an informational keyword phrase relevant to your squeeze page offer. Create a great Title and write your article.

Tomorrow we'll look at how to write a resource box or byline that includes a strong call-to-action and encourages your readers to click through...

Best,

p.s. If you struggle with writing articles, or creating content in general, you must check out: Write Better Content, Faster & with More Conversions! This is a hands-on, step-by step, interactive course by Alice Seba on creating content that will help you get more traffic and make more sales online. Highly Recommended!

You can get started today for only $1 😉

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