Writing articles to promote your business services has always been a popular marketing tactic. From serious blue-chips to small business owners, publishing such articles is the cornerstone of many marketing efforts.
Article writing has become hugely popular on the web particularly with the demise of reciprocal linking as an effective link building tool. All you have to do is write an article and attach your bio and website address in a resource box and hey presto, ‘hundreds of links’ back to your websites.
In the best scenario, this is a terrific strategy but it does not work for everyone. The principle is sound because it provides value in three ways:
- For your own business, primarily the links and the traffic that will follow
- For the publisher - they get good content without having to pay for it
- For their readers who get useful information.
The perfect situation - winners all round.
Published articles bring credibility
Nick Usborne drives traffic to his new sites such as FreelanceWritingSuccess.com primarily through syndicating articles. His advice is to “write well on a subject you know backwards and provide real value in each article. In addition, I would suggest that people obsess over the article titles. The article title and article description, where appropriate, need to be heavily optimized for both the reader and the search engines.”
That means having an article title that will attract the reader AND contains a keyword phrase for the search engines to pick up.
Trenton Moss of Webcredible.co.uk is certain that the articles he writes bring his company huge credibility. “People read all our articles and it’s immediately obvious that we know exactly what we’re talking about and start to view us as thought leaders. They then contact us for work and don’t even bother looking elsewhere as we’ve proved that we know our stuff.
And of course the links from having articles published externally bring people direct to the site and boost search engine rankings. “We now get 1000 people coming in to the site from Google every day. This is a direct result of the links back to our site contained in the author bio of the article.”
His advice for anyone starting to write articles? “Don’t be afraid! You may not have many ideas, but you’ll find that once you start writing ideas just seem to come out of nowhere.”
The problem with word counts
But there are a few problems with the strategy and you need to think about them carefully if you are going to get benefit from going down this route.
When I was growing up in Ireland, there was a popular sit-com about two London tailors, one Irish, the other Jewish. The title of the show, “Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width” summed up the humor. Namely, “Don’t worry too much about the end result, direct the customer’s attention to something that’s not that important, the ‘width’ in the case of the tailor, the length in the case of article writing.
From the writer’s perspective the things that are important are:
- To have 600-800 words of optimized copy
- A couple of keyword-rich links back to your site and an attractive signature box
- Publication in as many online publications as possible
Now of course this stuff is important, but it is not the most important. What is important is writing well, offering genuine value to the reader - even if they never go to your website.
It is not about length or even time. Forget about writing a decent article in under an hour: forget about writing a newsletter in under two hours; forget about writing an e-book in seven days.
These things may all be possible, but they focus on the wrong things - the length, not the quality. It is just not possible for most people to write quality articles in this time frame.
Good writing makes demands
Good writing demands preparation, thinking and some pain in producing good stuff. There may be some exceptional writers who can just sit down at the keyboard and rattle off 1000 coherent words at a single sitting, but they are a rare breed.
The process of writing is much more involved:
- Choose a topic that is important
- Research the background and the references (if any) that you are going to use.
- Develop a specific viewpoint - what is it exactly that you are saying
- Structure your article, map out the sections and how they all fit together
- Think about what your reader will do next - you’ll want them to think reading that was worthwhile, here’s what I’ve got to do about it.
I keep a notebook for jotting down article ideas. I always have about 20-30 ideas for articles at any one time. I scribble in my notebook all the time - waiting for meetings, on the train, waiting in the airport or flying on a plane.
Then once every two weeks or so, I review my scribbles and pick out the ideas that I think would make really solid articles. I let these sit in my brain and when I’m ready, I’ll go through the preparation process and finally get down to writing.
Exactly how I write depends on how I feel.
- Sometimes I’ll nip out for a cup of coffee and sit in a corner writing
- Other times, I’ll go through all my research and prepare an outline one day and early next morning sit down and write.
Writing for me is a torturous process: I used to do endless drafts and rewrites - until I met journalist Eamonn Rafferty - his advice? “Don’t write drafts - once you’ve done all your research and preparation, go as close as getting it right first time”.
Once I’ve finished the article, I’ll read it out loud. That really shows up awkward sentence constructions that break the flow. If it’s not easy to read out loud, then you’ve still got some work to do.
