Article Writing – Getting The Most Out Of Your Authoring Efforts

It’s a good feeling to be a full-time writer and an ever better feeling if that work pays the bills and a bit more. Writing for online audiences is different from creating content for other types of media, there are few simple ways to maximise your hard work to deliver concrete results.
I’d like to share a few tips that have worked for me.
Get the Headline Right
It’s the biggest contrast from writing for print, in that medium you want snappy engaging and clever headlines that draw your reader’s interest and get them “hooked” on reading the rest of the article. That technique is a complete failure online. Why? Because your audience isn’t flicking through a magazine or a newspaper, they’re working through literally millions of results from a search engine. If your title doesn’t include the words they’re looking for, they won’t ever see your work at all.
That means your headlines must be straight to the point and keyword rich, and you need to front load your titles to get the best results from search engines.
The No-Nonsense First Paragraph
Again if your work is to appear in a nice glossy magazine, you have some time to set the stage for your reader, to draw them in and pique their curiosity. You don’t have that luxury online, your audience is scanning the first part of your article to see; “what’s in it for them”. If that’s not immediately obvious, they’ll move on.
Get the Keywords Right
Your initial keywords will be developed from tools such as Google’s Adsense, which is great. Over time though, you’ll come to realise that certain keywords affect your total readership volume much more than you’d expect. If you use article syndication a good provider will show which keywords bring you the most traffic – mould your headlines and initial paragraph content accordingly.
Most Important of All – Evaluate the Results
Article marketing is a numbers game, and the more you write – the more successful you should be. Despite all this, a perfectly targeted piece will bring far more results than 20 badly aimed ones. You don’t care about visitor volume; you care about selling your products and services. Month on month you should be evaluating the number of leads your campaigns are generating and how many are materialising into sales. That’s the most important figure of all, just because you’re prolific doesn’t mean you’re successful.
When you write for the web, you need to write for search engines first and foremost. But don’t neglect the people aspect, you have to engage your readers and help them make that all important purchasing decision.