Write Well-Structured And Compelling Articles

Do you write articles? Does your business need you to publish article, so others know you and your business better? The following points are worth considering when writing articles so your articles are compelling to your audience and are well structured.
Define your audience very closely and based on that, identify what is important and of value to them.
You may be personally very fond of strawberries and cream but fish prefer worms. So when you go fishing, you don’t think about what you want, rather you think about what “fish” like and bait the hook with that. This is what we all do when we go fishing, but we usually don’t apply it to other things in life. When your article is not appealing to the reader group it is supposed to be, they simply don’t read it. So if you want your articles to be read by your audience, you should think of what they like and give it to them through your articles, which by the way might not be what you personally like.
There are a couple of ways to define your target audience: You could either target the people just like you or you could target a completely different type of people. In any case the following questions will help you a lot in deciding what you are going to include in your articles.
1- What do they do for a living?
2- What struggles do they face?
3- What is important to them?
4- What are their core values?
5- What is their current income?
6- What are their income goals?
7- What are their hobbies?
8- How do they define their own success?
Choose your own keywords.
Since you want to post your articles to a 100+ web sites so they show up in the search engine results, and ultimately have the readers click through to your blog or web site, you may want to choose the keywords that are searched by people the most, include them in your article, if they are really relevant. But how do you know about people’s key word choices? Well, there are some web sites that educate you on the key keywords people use, or have used the most. One of them is freekeywords.wordtracker.com. There are two terms that you should familiarize yourself with, “long-tailed keywords”, and “short-tailed keywords” Short-tailed keywords are those suggested by web sites like wordtracker.com to you when you search for a specific word. Long-tailed keywords on the other hand, are those that you make up, for example in your article title using the short-tailed keywords you have found in the search results. For example if you go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com and search for “marketing”, you will be suggested all the short-tailed keywords that have been used by people on the search engines over the past 365 days, like, “marketing”, “internet marketing”, “online marketing”, “email marketing”, etc. These are your short-tailed keywords that you can use in your article.
However, as important it is to organize your article around those keywords, it is not as important as writing your article in a natural way, so they reflect your own authentic natural flow of thought. Your articles are meant to add value to your readers, and more importantly let your audience know you better and familiarize themselves with you as a person.
Since your articles can show up in the search engines for specific keywords, you will want to optimize each article for a long-tailed keyword. Once you have chosen your short-tailed keyword, and based on that, your long-tailed keyword, choose one of your long-tailed keywords for your article.
I will post another article later specifically on this topic so you know how exactly you can optimize your articles based on the keywords that are really converting for you.
Select your topic:
Once you have chosen you long-tailed keyword, choose a topic closely related to it. For example if you choose “best online home based business opportunity”, then your topic could be “How to Find the Best Online Home Based Business Opportunity” or “How to Know If you are in the Best Online Home Based Business Opportunity”
Here is how you can easily come up with article topics:
1- Write down the top 5 concerns you had about starting a new business before joining the company you work with now.
2- Write out the solutions offered and provided by the company you joined to each of the concerns.
Pay attention to the fact that those who are reading your article probably have the same concerns that you had before starting your new business. This way they feel that the article they are reading is perfectly angled towards them; they will like it, and will keep reading to the end of your article where they reach the point where the link to your web site or blog is located. Even if they don’t click on your link, you have built a relationship with them and that alone was worth all the time you spent on your article.
Another important point to bear in mind is that people are highly controlled by their emotions. Your articles are going to be read by human beings mostly governed by their emotions. So if you trigger one of their specific emotions, you will get their emotional response back. For example if you use the word “frustrated” in “Are you frustrated with spending a long time on your MLM business and getting not much back?”, you can make sure that you will get the emotional response right back from those this is a concern to, which by the way is a concern to lot of people working online.
Select your article’s angle:
Based on how you angle your articles, you can create five different kinds of articles having the same keywords and topic:
1- A how-to article
2- A review article
3- A problem and then a solution article
4- A personal experience article
5- A comparison article(You could compare your former profession to what you are doing now)
Write your article:
Writing articles is easy. Your articles do not have to be necessarily perfect. Once you start writing, the words will keep flowing and you will finish your article in less than 20 minutes.
You may want to keep this framework in mind so your articles are easy to understand and readers can take information out of them easily.
1- Make a list of three main points you want to discuss in your article. You will then organize the three main points in the first three sentences of the first three paragraphs of your article.
2- Write down 3-5 sentences that back up and support each of your three main points. For example the first set of back up sentences would look like the following:

Main point #1
Back up sentence #1
Back up sentence #2
Back up sentence #3
Back up sentence #4
Back up sentence #5
And so on for the rest of your main points.
The 3-5 back up sentences you write will make up the body of each paragraph.
3- Write your introductory paragraph.
Tell your readers what you are about to tell them. Write 3-4 sentences that sum up your three main paragraphs.
4- Write your closing paragraph.
Tell your readers what you just told them, again. Write 3-4 sentences that sum up your three main paragraphs and then provide them with a solution.
Write your article title:
Once you have written your article, follow the following points to create a title that really describes your article in a few words.
1- Include your whole keyword in the article title whenever possible.
2- Move the keyword as close as possible to the beginning of the title. If possible, start your title with the keyword.
3- It would be great if you formed a question with your article title. Our brains don’t like it when compelling questions go unanswered. You could keep your readers engaged by posing a question as your article title, give them some solutions in your article body while again keeping them engaged in the article body as well. You could then pose an indirect question in your article body, maybe formed as a result of the combination of the whole main paragraphs, and then have them click on your blog or web site link where they expect to get more information or have the indirect question answered.
Publish your article:
There are a lot of web sites to which you can publish your articles. They are like directories that have a huge data base of articles in there, classified based on the articles’ subjects, and other classification methods. They are called “Article Directories” All you have to do is to register yourself with them and keep publishing your articles on their web sites. If you keep publishing your articles to some of them consistently, you will gain a lot of popularity and credibility on the Internet in a short time, especially if you choose your keywords right. The more your article page is visited by viewers, the higher it moves on the search engine page rankings.
Posting your articles to article directories can take a lot of time especially because the number of the article directories you publish your articles to grows over time as you become more experienced in article marketing. There is some software however, that post your articles to 100+ article directories automatically. Those usually need you to make a one-time payment of around $100. You could go to http://www.automaticarticlesubmitter.com/ for this purpose.
That was all about writing articles I could tell you for now. Remember that practice makes perfect. The more your write, the better you will write. I will write more on writing articles later, but in order not to make this any longer, I will end this here. Thank you for your time and stay tuned.