Effective Article Writing - Do the Research First!
Part 1
Copyright Herman Drost

If you are going to spend your precious time writing
articles to gain traffic to your web site they must appeal
to both the search engines and your potential readers.
Therefore this article will discuss the research you must
do even before writing the article, then provide an outline
on how to actually write it.

What to do before writing your article:

1. Choose a topic

Your goal is to write on a topic where you solve someone's
(or your own) problem i.e.

-7 reasons to use articles to market your web site
-How to write an effective article
-How to market your articles to boost your web traffic

Sometimes it's difficult to come up with a topic that you
feel inspired to write about. I usually write about some
problem I've come across while working with my web design
business. It could be a design problem or something related
to it such as marketing or hosting. Then after having
solved this problem I feel comfortable writing about it. I
also feel good that this article will then help others that
may have struggled with the same problem.

If I still don't have a subject I feel passionate about, I
will visit forums, read online newsletters or magazines
related to my field of interest. I may also talk to friends
in the same business. They often share some of the problems
that they have encountered.

2. Keyword research

Another goal of article writing is to make your article
search engine friendly. This means including searchable
keywords that search engines will spider. Therefore
researching appropriate keywords before weaving them into
your article is crucial.

Use the keyword suggestion tool at
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ to find which
words or phrases are searched on most often. It will
display the top results for both overture and wordtracker.
The numbers differ because overtures data is based on more
searches whereas wordtracker differentiates between single
and plural forms of the word or phrase.

Include your researched keywords into your article being
careful not to repeat them so often that it won't read
smoothly. You want to your article to appeal to your
readers also.

3. Article length - begin with just writing out your
article without worrying too much about the length. It's
more important to let all your ideas flow out of your mind
first. If you think it's getting too long split it up into
two or more articles. It's often easier to write a short
article of 500 words than one of 1000 words.

Most article publishers prefer articles between 500 to 800
words and will not accept articles any longer than that.
Others prefer longer articles over 800 words so check with
the publisher before you submit your article for
publication.

You can easily check how long your article is by placing it
in MS Word. Then go to "tools" - "word count" to get a read
out of the length.

Part 2 of this article will provide the outline on:

"How to Write an Effective Article"

Related articles
Top 7 Benefits of Marketing Your Articles
How to Write an Effective Article

=====================================================
Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
and owner of iSiteBuild.com
Web Site Design, Web Hosting, Web Site Promotion

Author of “Marketing Tips” newsletter. To subscribe, enter your information at:
http://www.isitebuild.com/articles.htm