Archive for the ‘Quality Content Writing’ Category

Avoid Fluff and Keep it Real with Your Marketing Message for Improved Conversions

Monday, June 28th, 2010

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There’s a reason why it’s said that “content is king” and not “content is the court jester”—you must provide value and useful information in your content. Stuff your marketing messages with too much fluff and your prospects will be able to tell the difference. Combine this no-fluff approach with your overall sales methods and you’ll significantly improve your sales conversions.

Constant Value in Your Content

After each and every paragraph you write for your blogs, ebooks, social marketing posts, articles, newsletters, direct response pieces, and email campaigns, you must ask yourself, how will this paragraph help my prospects and current clients? This will help you stay on target in consistently providing value to your audience.

With the virtually endless number of resources that can be found online, few things frustrate or even enrage an Internet user more than being misled online. So much information and so little of it is actually useful—a true testament that many of today’s SEO-based articles are purely written to boost search engine rankings and drive traffic to websites instead of actually helping their readers. Online consumers are going bald from pulling their hair out in frustration over reading through entire articles only to find that they completely failed to address the title or the keywords that brought them to the article.

One of the primary culprits here? Fluffy content that features no useful material. Businesses need to be very wary of using too much meta speak, essentially talking about talking. Correct this by maintaining highly purposeful content and language in all of your online and offline pieces.

Distrust Demolishes Sales Potential

No one wants to buy from someone who they don’t trust. Fluff-filled content that mirrors what a court jester would produce instead of what a king would bestow on his loyal subjects creates sales-killing skepticism. While some of us might be wishing for a line of lemmings mindlessly marching off a cliff and into our bank accounts, you must respect your audience as educated readers, savvy consumers and highly trained value seekers.

Besides, when you look at it in terms of apples to apples, who in their right mind would buy from a business that provides fluff as their main marketing message when there are countless other businesses to choose from? The marketplace is more saturated than a five-pound bacon sandwich, so you’ve got to make every marketing piece count. If you fail to make your online and offline marketing messages useful to the public, then you will be wasting everyone’s time, including your own.

Keep Your Business Healthy

You must remember that word-of-mouth marketing and referrals go both ways—negative viral marketing will infect your business. If you flake your way through your content and copywriting then you will quickly raise countless red flags against your business. And what do consumers do when they sense that there’s something sketchy about your business? Warn all of their friends, family and business associates about the potential pitfall that your business promises.

Fortunately, all you have to do is maintain a proper degree of integrity with your content, keep it honest, and you’ll soon be able to enjoy positive word-of-mouth marketing that will assist your business in going viral—the money making way.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

How to Generate Steady Leads for Record-breaking Sales

Friday, June 25th, 2010

One of the most forbidding challenges for any business is generating steady leads. Without a stead stream of incoming prospects businesses are enslaved to constant marketing, with every unit of effort producing one unit of success; if that. Instead, businesses can propel themselves into record-breaking sales by executing marketing that produces multiple units of success from just one unit of effort. The long-term ROI benefit of generating your own leads instead of continuously buying leads from others will bolster your business for perpetual success.

The best approach for creating your own self-sufficient stream of leads instead of doggedly pursuing new business is to execute a blend of marketing efforts. Put more marketing lines in the water and you automatically increase your chances of creating continuous leads.

Guide Your Prospects to a Lucrative Landing

Put another line in the water with a landing page. A landing page is different from a fully functional website—it doesn’t feature a full suite of content and images. Instead, these are usually just a single page intended to capture leads online. Your landing page must include a simple form to capture contact information. You will then direct Web traffic to the landing page which offers approximately 250 to 400 words about a specific offer. (SEO Tip: You can also plant a backlink on this page to your main website to drive reverse traffic and to boost your search engine ranking by building your overall number of inbound links.)

While you can certainly use these pages to pursue a direct sale, the main goal of your landing pages should be to build your herd (list of leads and prospects to continuously follow up with and market to). You need to offer something that encourages prospects to submit their personal information, such as a free e-book. You can even state that they need to input their info in order to claim their free gift (free 1-hour consultation, sample product, etc.).

A fine example of an information-based landing-page lead generator is the Calgary Painters Group landing page. First, they get it right by combining copywriting and video! Second, they ask for just a few simple pieces of non-invasive contact information. Third, they give you a solid reason for providing your personal information—a free, informative e-book.

Wake the Dead

Landing pages also provide an excellent opportunity to market a specific product or service. You can easily tie these pages into fresh marketing campaigns without losing people within the sales funnel of your main website. Directing them to a single page generates incredible focus on a particular product or service you’re trying to promote. This is ideal for both new offers as well as trying to rejuvenate older offers that haven’t been selling well (e.g. clearance sales, overstock items), bringing new life to dead campaigns.

Chocolate, Strawberry or Vanilla

Just because someone doesn’t share your over-the-top joy for chocolate ice cream doesn’t make them wrong. There are always going to be those who prefer the sumptuous strawberry or the reserved, yet refined vanilla over the coco bean. You will need to keep this in mind with your landing pages. There may not necessarily be a right or wrong tone that you convey with your landing pages, but there certainly are specific tones and modes of speech that will prove to be much more effective than others. Generate and test several different landing pages to see which tone best zeroes in on your target audience.

Start off by developing chocolate, strawberry and vanilla landing pages:

Chocolate: These are the people who like to indulge themselves. Include appeals to greater leisure time, making exorbitant amounts money, and materialistic values.

Strawberry: Write content that appeals to those who are looking for something new and interesting in their lives. These are people who like to be the first to try something new and thrive on novelty.

Vanilla: Incorporate copywriting that appeals to those seeking classic approaches to business solutions, greater stability in their business and daily lives and a higher quality of life.

After you’ve published your landing pages you need to use analytics tools to test which set of content is converting the most website traffic. The best indicator here is the click-thru rate, measuring how many landing page visitors actually click through to your call to action.

Get this system in place and you’ll feed your own business instead of always having to buy food from others.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

How to Make Viral Marketing Work for Your Business

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Creative Commons License photo credit: llamnudds

One of the most potent forms of marketing today is viral marketing. Viral marketing is the build up of potential energy through one or more channels which then converts into kinetic energy. Once that conversion takes place your marketing uses that energy to spread rampantly throughout the Web. How do you promote that potential energy? Create interest!

Creating buzz about your product, service or industry will boost your business. Business article marketing provides topics of interest that will cause people to talk about your business—one reader tells their friend, their friend tells a few people…and you’ve turned one article into a perpetual-motion marketing machine.

Although this type of marketing may not sound healthy, it’s actually one of the best things that can happen to your business. Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is one of the most common types of viral marketing and is a bootstrapped-budget’s best friend—today’s social media tools deliver an online version of WOM marketing. And you have the opportunity to create a super virus by combining multiple marketing techniques. Bolster your WOM marketing with regular article submissions. Whereas WOM may tend to rally around exaggerations or inflated retellings, articles act as the wiser older brother and anchor these excited claims. Articles can be forwarded on, linked back to, or directly copied and pasted to friends and associates while fully maintaining the potency of their original message.

Your business will enjoy mass exposure by providing valuable content through articles. Give people a reason to share your material with others—it’s got to be interesting and full of value! Give people plenty of reasons to pass on your articles and you will create a self-replicating viral process. Build brand awareness and increase sales through the same process.

It’s got to be entertaining! We’re not suggesting that your piece should have your audience rolling with laughter or excitedly clapping their hands at its conclusion. However, it does need to worded in a manner that encourages readers to talk to others about it (You know, just as you’ll do with this article…hint, hint, wink, wink.). For example, let’s compare articles A and B. Assume both articles cover the same exact points. However, article A reads like someone got their VCR instructions mixed up with their article submission, and article B creates a structured story that has you eager to progress from one paragraph to the next. Which one are you more inclined to talk about with your friends and associates? Article B wins every time here.

An important caveat to note is that there is a careful balance of entertainment and information to be attained. As many benefits as an entertaining article has, if you fail to include enough useful information your piece will seem fluffier than your neighbor’s cat. Professional article writing will help you avoid this potential pitfall and get the most out of your marketing efforts. Never take your readers’ intelligence for granted! Treat them like a simpleton who’s unable to recognize pure fluff and your business will suffer from negative viral marketing—the cousin of business death.

As part of your viral marketing plan you must also pair your articles with the power of social media. Social media is built on the premise of networking, making this a completely natural environment for people to share your useful and interesting articles. Your goal is to target audiences with high social networking potential (SNP) to achieve the highest probability of article sharing. Plug-ins such as “Tweet This Article” buttons for Twitter make it incredibly convenient for people to share your articles.

Check back often for more blogs on making the most of social media and you will monetize this relatively untamed beast.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Article Marketing Promotes Use of Your Core Strengths for Better Business

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Michael Phelps wins 8th gold medal
Creative Commons License photo credit: bryangeek

Although we’d all like to think that we have fantastic abilities that span a great number of skill categories, the truth is that we’re experts in just a few areas.

Of course, you can write and you may have even found a few free article submission sites, but your business is guaranteed to suffer when you take time away from your core capabilities.

Employing the help of a professional article submission service ensures not only that your articles are well crafted and only submitted to verified sources for the greatest potency, it also promises that you’ll stick to your core strengths.

Highest Income-producing Activities

Take a few minutes and look through your accounts receivable—which factors produce the most amount of revenue for your company? Pinpointing these areas will help highlight the activities that you should invest the most time and effort into. However, there will be overlapping or several contributing factors to consider as well. Perhaps your article marketing produces the most revenue—this doesn’t necessarily mean you should dedicate all your time to that though. It might be the networking you’ve been doing with prospects that’s been getting people to read those articles. Get the picture?

Identifying Core Strengths

Is it more profitable to struggle at writing an article, dedicating five hours to what should be an hour-long task, or to employ your natural networking skills and actively generate new business contacts, taking just one hour to complete an hour-long task? Whether you want to refer to it as maintaining efficiency in the workplace or simply not wasting time, sticking to what you do best enables you to hit your target with less effort and greater strength. Do what you’re best at and then employ the help of others to supplement your core skills.

Improve Your Career Satisfaction

You can also look forward to a greater degree of career satisfaction when you work at what you’re best at. Of course, it can be very rewarding to overcome a challenge that falls outside of our usual realm of skills, but you’re sure to enjoy more consistent rewards when you build off of your strengths. Executing tasks that you excel at creates immense gratification because you’re using your top skills. An administrative assistant with a mind for management will feel like they’re suffocating in the workplace. Give them the opportunity to delegate a few tasks and they’ll breath easier.

Take a Mental Inventory

To help you get started you can take a mental inventory of what you’re good at. What comes easily to you? Start with a bird’s eye view such as determining that you’re good with numbers. Then take a closer look at this ability to see what tasks you most aptly use your number skills with. Keeping track of your business’ taxes is quite distinct from identifying statistical trends in web-user behavior. And what do you enjoy doing? Our enjoyment of activities is often linked to our ability to actually perform them. You can also look into services that are designed to help you identify your core strengths.

Confidence Booster

Not only will establishing your core strengths give your company greater clout in the marketplace, it will also create a confidence booster. A solid grasp on your abilities arms you against the anxieties that can accompany major business challenges. All you have to do in those situations is take a deep breath and remind yourself of how your core strengths will power you through to a successful end. You can also use specific successes in your past to bolster yourself for new challenges. For example, I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain and now use that as my mantra when things seem to be stacking up against me. Find a point of power, a specific success you’ve experienced, and use it to fuel your next triumph.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Excited Prospects Buy Every Time — Learn How to Create that Excitement

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Make your prospects more likely to buy with the power of excitement. It’s a simple formula — the more excited someone is about a product or service, the fewer doubts they’ll have and the likelier they’ll be to spend money with you. Article marketing provides an ideal platform for creating comprehensive excitement — traditional sales pitches are dead!

One of the most powerful aspects of creating excitement is that you develop a wedge between your prospects and your competitors. You could have the same exact product or service as another company (extremely likely in today’s saturated online marketplace), but the right degree of excitement is all it takes to differentiate your business from the others. Generating interest and excitement will make you an orange when all your competitors simply seem like lemons — you’ll get picked every time.

Generate authentic excitement

Your writing needs to create excitement without sounding cheap. The last thing you want to do is sound like an infomercial — it creates doubt and skepticism. Articles create the right type of excitement by demonstrating solid value. Provide people with useful information in an interesting fashion and you set up the perfect mindset for buying.

You need to achieve an optimal balance of excitement and reality — be careful to avoid exaggerated claims. Assume you’re addressing an intelligent audience with the ability to discern realistic claims from miracle cures. Assume that because it’s true!

Take a look at these examples:

“Never suffer from a headache again!” Ridiculous.

“Our business offers a variety of services.” Okay.

“Our business offers a variety of services to help you with your needs.” Better.

“Our budget tools and friendly attitude help you achieve financial freedom.” Best!

Article marketing gives you the opportunity to generate interest and excitement about your offer by providing real-life applications. That’s why the fourth option is best. Don’t just tell people—tell them why and how. This relates to the classic feature and benefit combination. Never leave a feature hanging by itself. Explain what’s in it for your readers.

Quality article writing pairs a feature with a benefit to cement its application. Your prospects want specific questions answered, information that they can use right away, and realistic solutions. Your prospects are guaranteed to get excited by learning about simple solutions they can apply to their daily lives.

Hit your audience’s hot buttons

Your best bet is to forget about all the money you can make and always keep in mind how your products can help others. This will help you maintain the prospect’s perspective, which gives you the keys to their hot buttons. Figure out your target audience’s most frequent problems and worries as well as their aspirations and you’ll set your sales on fire.

Another highly effective way to generate excitement is to make your prospects feel like pioneers. There’s great excitement in feeling like you’re among the first to try something new. Promote the impression, without exaggeration or deception, that they will be part of a new wave of technology, cutting-edge business practices, innovative techniques, breakthrough daily living practices and so on. Make it novel! Make them proud to be early adopters. People want to feel like leaders and you can give that to them.

You can also fall back on the time-tested technique of creating urgency. Creating urgency promotes excitement and catalyzes people into action. Some classic examples would be providing limited-time offers, first-come-first-served offers, and letting them know that supplies are limited. You do need to take some caution with this approach though. For example, if you claim it’s a limited-time offer make sure it is indeed limited! You’re guaranteed to breed skepticism if you continue to extend a limited-time offer.

However, if you haven’t hit a required sales quota and must extend your offer then you need to provide a believable explanation: “We’ve received many messages of heartfelt thanks for our sale price, so we’ve decided to extend our special offer.” Or, simply try hard-line honesty: “We have some more widgets remaining at this low price, so we’ve decided to offer this special offer for an additional week.”

The excitement you create will not only encourage prospects to buy from you every time, it also sets you up for viral marketing. People are always more likely to talk about or refer your business when they’re excited about it!

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Ready…Aim…Fire: Shoot Yourself in the Foot with Article Spinners

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

If there’s a common thread that runs through all article spinning products and services, it’s this: they won’t deliver what they say they will.

Why? Because they can’t, that’s why.

Their purpose in life is to produce high volumes of low quality derivative content; the exact thing quality content publishing sites shun.

Article spinners may be able to change enough of the original text to sneak past a duplicate content smack. They may even get by a beginning blogger’s inexperienced eye, but they won’t get through the careful eyes of a quality publisher’s editorial staff. And that’s where you want your articles, right? On high quality, high traffic sites, right?

The ultimate goal of a successful article marker is focused on the needs of a highly targeted reader, not the desire of the author for arbitrary backlinks from nowhere. If you want your articles read, quality content counts; it’s a simple as that.

So, what have you really accomplished if your articles are only picked up by sites looking for quantity of content and not quality? Probably not near as much as you had hoped for when you distributed them. Your work is merely content fodder in the food chain of someone’s little known, rarely visited money site. The only “eyes” that will ever see it are those of the search engine spiders.

You won’t find article spinners at Content Crooner for that reason. It’s not even in the “being considered” phase of thinking. You won’t find the review team approving spun articles, either. Our goal is to help, not destroy, the careers of article marketers in the community.

Don’t take my word for it. Watch the videos below and see what Chris Knight, CEO of Ezine Articles has to say about derivative content produced by spinning articles. (Ezine Articles is the premium publishing site for article marketers on the Internet. It is the target most successful article marketers aim for instead of their foot.)

(Note: These videos are current to the week of 10/29/09.)

As always, the ultimate decision rests with you: the individual author. You can fail or sail in your career as an article marketer. The choice is yours to make.

Until next time,

Mike

“Crooner Rocks”

A New Day With Old Problems

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

First, let me thank everyone once again for your patience with us while we work hard to get things sorted out. You have been more than gracious. The only accurate report I can offer you is that it is all being worked on, your support tickets are being addressed in the order they came in and it will all be finished when it is done.

How’s that for ambiguity? But I didn’t want to tell you something I didn’t know for sure. I would much rather you be upset with us for being slow than telling you misleading information.

Here is current status report as of my last briefing from the tech guys:

* The system is distributing articles like it should, it is just doing it super slow. This, of course, is causing articles to be delayed and possibly missing their distribution date. The tech team is going top to bottom, left to right through the whole program attempting to isolate the bug and kill the little devil.

* The tech team thought they had the “What can I do” blank page problem fixed globally. Apparently that is not the case. We are still getting isolated reports here and there from authors with this occurring. This culprit is being hunted down as well and will be dealt with accordingly.

One of the best ways to avoid this problem altogether is to submit articles that are going to pass review in the first place. I have gone in looked at many of these flagged articles during this launch process and most are rejected for easily preventable mistakes. Here is a list of the most common problems I have encountered that will trigger an auto-rejection from the review software:

1 – Titles and subtitles not in proper title case.

2 – One sentence paragraphs are not allowed. A single sentence paragraph is seen as a subtitle by the review software that is not in proper title case.

3 – A space after the last period in a paragraph is seen as a hard return and adds an extra space to the document. This causes a rejection because you are not allowed to have extra spaces between paragraphs.

4 – No space between subtitle and next paragraph.

5 – And last but not least (and one I make my ghostwriters cry for when they send me pieces with this in it), the sentencegraph. These are sentences that have up to 40-60 words in them. They often comprise the whole paragraph (which is a double violation: see above). Good paragraphs for web copy are 3-5 sentences long with 8-14 words (occasionally up to 20 or so) in each.

A really good rule of thumb here is: if you have to take a breath to read it outloud, it’s too long. It is harder to read online than off and people take about 20% longer to do so. If your articles are a pain to read, they will click off of it anyway. Even if you sneak these by the computer review, expect them to be rejected by the human review team. We want your work published on the far end and not in a publisher’s waste bin.

I can’t guarantee your articles will get through review by obeying these simple rules. But I assure you they won’t if you don’t.

Grab a copy of the Best Practices Guide over in the Newsletter subscription box in the side bar of the blog. It’s free and a quick review of it will save us both hours of grief over time.

Until next time,

Mike

“Crooner Rocks”

What do Publishers and Readers Want from Your Content?

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

The art and craft of article writing involves the creation of a distinct piece of communication. Through the medium of the article, you hope to make a connection with your reader. You must also make a connection with a publisher. They do the initial work of placing your work in front of interested readers.

Therefore, successful article writers take a two-pronged approach to their craft. They study both what publishers and readers want, and then compose accordingly. This does not stifle their creativity in any way.

In fact, knowing exactly what these two groups want enhances their efforts. They learn to say things in new and varied ways to conform to the parameters both groups set. With that in mind, we’re going to look at what each group wants from a writer.

What a Publisher Wants from Your Articles

Upon article submission to a quality content distribution service, an editor goes over your work. Of course, this is providing you choose an article marketing enterprise that employs live reviewers. Many do not. This input from an experienced reviewer ensures your content is suitable for the viewing public.

What exactly are they looking for? Reviewers look for 100 percent original content. This content must be informative, useful and practical. Publishers want value in articles. They have a readership base to satisfy. This is why they love a steady stream of fresh, new useful content heading their way.

Another thing publishers want is objective, interesting, non-sales hype content. Yes, there’s a time and place to promote your business, products and services. Articles intended for distribution online to myriad publishers are not the vehicle for doing so.

Your articles facilitate your target market finding you through linking back to your website. There you can engage them further and blatantly promote. Publishers don’t want articles in their publications to read like late night infomercials.

Publishers also want the “mechanisms” in your content in tip-top shape. This involves format, grammar, spelling and tone. These are the basics, common to every good article. They are the basic building blocks that keeping an article humming along smoothly.

Think of a car and its mechanisms, ensuring that the car moves properly. Your article won’t read smoothly if the reader becomes annoyed with grammar, spelling and other errors. You hasten the publication of your articles when you submit them free of these types of errors. You gain the respect of publishers by taking this professional approach to content submission.

What a Reader Wants from Your Articles

Readers are the true end-user of your content. When you embark on an article campaign, you direct your articles to a certain niche. This niche has specific wants and needs.

Primarily, they want timely, relevant content. Readers searching the Internet look for articles relevant to what’s going on in their lives now. They do not want a rehash of trite fluff that doesn’t offer them anything new.

This doesn’t mean you cannot present historical data or concepts with a rich tradition of use. It does mean you present this foundational information in a new and fresh way. You make this information uniquely your own.

This involves updating the information with new facts, statistics, and data. It also involves presenting the information from a different viewpoint, with a new twist on the subject. Information you give readers must satisfy their need for a fresh perspective on the topic. If they wanted the same old, same old, they would consult an encyclopedia.

Your readers also want an easy read as they learn. This involves proper construction of sentences and paragraphs. Long rambling sentences and huge block of unbroken text do not make an easy read. Your readers will abandon your articles quickly if it’s a chore to read them.

In addition, your readers want complex subjects presented clearly. Attractively formatted content means nothing if the meaning of the content isn’t clear. Clarity of thought and logical presentation of information is the order of the day in article writing.

Readers of online articles want to “get in and get out.” They look to access information quickly, read it quickly, absorb knowledge, and move on. They want the reading experience to be enjoyable and in no way confusing.

You owe it to publishers, readers and yourself to submit articles that meet the above requirements. You satisfy the needs of publishers who want to give value to their audience. You satisfy the needs of readers who need useful information that answers questions. You also satisfy your need to gain credibility with both groups and build your online business.

To your success,

Kenneth Vogt

Kenneth Vogt is CEO of Content Crooner; a quality content distribution service. He is an established internet marketing professional and respected Web expert.

Discover how quality content is a driving force behind highly targeted traffic and improved page rank in our Free Report.

Follow Us on Twitter: ContentCrooner

What Constitutes Well-Written Content?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Engaging in article writing to communicate with your niche involves a commitment to quality. The Internet abounds with sub-standard writing. Providing useful information within properly constructed articles means setting yourself apart from mediocrity.

Your primary concern as a quality content producer is your audience. You must focus on two main elements as applies to this audience. The first is the kind of information they want and need. The second is the best way to present this information to them.

Therefore, a well-written article consists of useful content spread over a sound structure. It’s akin to a useful concrete pedestrian walkway spread over a supportive steel grid. Thinking of your articles this way means you present information to your readers in a logical, organized manner.

An effective article marketing campaign depends on using a quality content distribution service. They gain you that broad exposure your articles require. However, you don’t want broad exposure for poorly constructed content. This harms your credibility as a reputable information provider.

What results when you lose, or never ever gain, credibility with information searchers? You lose traffic to the website where you look to promote your particular business. The following are tips to ensure you create well-written content for your readers and build credibility:

Concentrate on the Actual Content

Before you can utilize your structure, you must have useful information to place within it. It all begins with performing the necessary research. Quality research gives you the data, facts, statistics, opinions, viewpoints and more that you need.

You gather this information in various ways. This can include both offline and online research. You may interview experts in a particular field. You may access research materials in a library or read an online whitepaper.

You accumulate vital knowledge as suits your audience’s needs. Research must focus on what your audience wants, not what interests you. What your audience wants and what you want is not always the same thing.

Concentrate on Classic Article Structure

Now you organize gathered information based on time-tested classic article structure. This involves employing a proper title and an opening or introductory paragraph. You want to pique your reader’s interest right away.

A headline doesn’t have to be funny, trendy, or shocking. It does have to let a reader immediately know what they can expect from your article. An introductory paragraph to open your article presents the focus and intent of your content.

Next is significant main body copy where you disseminate the bulk of your useful information. This main body copy may include sub-headings and bullet points with attendant information. These accomplish two things.

First, they allow readers to scan and hone in quickly on major points. Scanning also gives readers a quick overview of what they are about to read. Second, sub-headings and bullet points break up large blocks of text. This makes an article easier to read.

In the main body of your article, you present, point-by-point, your information. This helps your reader gain knowledge in a systematic fashion. Intelligently presenting vital information, linking paragraphs logically promotes faster learning and knowledge retention.

This organized approach means you, the writer, don’t wander off topic. It also means you hold your reader’s attention. A haphazard approach to presenting information increases the chances you lose your reader’s interest. After the main body copy, you employ a concise conclusion, which ties everything up precisely.

Concentrate on Spelling and Grammar

Of course, you must do all of the above with attention to spelling and grammar. In the rush to get articles online, these two elements often get the short shrift. We often rely too much on spell-check programs and forgo rereading our articles.

Spell-check programs, because of their general nature, don’t always catch unique spelling and grammatical occurrences. Reread your articles and look for these situations. This extra attention to detail ensures your content is of a higher quality for your readers.

Focused attention to spelling and grammar also present you as a professional. It shows you respect the writing discipline and your readers. In addition, article distribution services and publishers demand this attention to these elements.

On top of all that, articles with proper spelling and grammar are easier to read. You get your points across with clarity when commas, periods, quotation marks and such are in the right places. Additionally, spelling mistakes don’t stand out like sore thumbs, breaking your reader’s concentration. This contributes to enjoyable reading for your audience.

Follow the above tips to create well-written content. Informative content presented over an organized structure with attention to grammar and spelling enhances your writer reputation. This means a growing audience for your articles, and the websites linked to them.

To your success,

Kenneth Vogt

Kenneth Vogt is CEO of Content Crooner; a quality content distribution service. He is an established internet marketing professional and respected Web expert.

Discover how quality content is a driving force behind highly targeted traffic and improved page rank in our Free Report.

Follow Us on Twitter: ContentCrooner

A Good Explanation of Keywords

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Trying to get a handle on keywords and how they work in your article marketing campaign? Read this article by Damadora Sarma for a good explanation:

Good Keyword Selection Techniques Boost Traffic and Search Engine Rankings!

You’ve got a website up and going, but you’re wondering why you’re not getting significant numbers of visitors, nor ranking well on the search engines. One of the main points of reference in both cases is keyword selection. Here we take a look at some techniques you can use to determine which keywords will bring focused traffic to your site, as well as improving your position on the search engines.

You need to think from the point of view of the person searching. That person is going to enter two or three words most relevant to the information they’re trying to find. As an example case, we’ll use a website which sells gardening tools and garden products.

Here’s how the search engines index sites. The spiders ‘read’ the HTML portion of each of your pages and establish the relevancy of each page’s contents to a given search. The algorithms used are fairly intelligent, picking up on both terminology and related keyword phrases. For example, if one of your pages contains an article which describes how to plant bulbs and the various tools and techniques used in the process of planting bulbs, it’s likely that page will rank well.

In this case, good keyword selections might include ‘bulb planting tool’, ‘soil amendments’, ‘spring blooming bulbs’, ‘summer blooming bulbs’, ‘soil testing’, ‘bone meal’ and so on, with the main keyword phrase being ‘how to plant bulbs’. If you were the person searching for this information, the main keyword phrase would be the most logical starting point.

On the other hand, if you do a search on that keyword phrase and come up with millions of results, you’d want to refine and focus your keyword selection to a more specific, albeit narrower audience. Suppose the focus of the article is on planting cyclamen bulbs. The searcher is looking for information on planting a specific type of bulb and would be likely to include the name of that bulb in the search query. Thus, a keyword selection of ‘plant cyclamen bulbs’ as your main keyword phrase would have less competition in results and bring more visitors to your site who are more likely to buy. The related terms within the article would need to be relevant to the particular terminology, such as ‘winter blooming’ and perhaps named varieties. Other keyword selections for the article might include some of the gardening tools and fertilizers the cyclamen planter would need.

When working with keyword selection, you want to be careful to avoid what’s known as ‘keyword stuffing’, repeating the main keyword phrase over and over. Not only does the text no longer read naturally, but the search engines are wise to this tactic. Instead of improving your rankings, you may well be penalized or not indexed at all!

It’s also best to optimize individual pages with ads and links which are relevant to the reader of that specific page. For example, alongside your article on planting cyclamen bulbs, you’d want to advertise tools, fertilizers and links to related articles on planting other types of bulbs or sites which sell cyclamen bulbs. Target your specific audience!

Keyword selection is important on every page of your site. Permeate your site with keywords and related terms that clearly defines the purpose of your website and stick with your subject area. Don’t be tempted to put up a banner ad for cell phones simply because you think everyone uses cell phones and a visitor might click through, bringing you a nice commission. This strategy only dilutes your relevancy in the search engines. However, a page of affiliate products, such as a select group of quality gardening books, will have the opposite effect and will probably make you some money, too.

Using good keyword selection techniques can do your business a world of good!

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