Approaching An Article

Pen And Paper By Eleaf - Flickr

In the previous post “my article topic finding process“, I went over how I am finding topics to write about in an article, this was basically the complete process I take when I need ideas for new material to write about. Now i`m going to go over the article itself because I now have a topic and a related affiliate product to work with.

My main objective when writing an article is not only to make sure it’s decent, but also to give out good information without giving everything away. I want someone to find the article after they search for a particular phrase in the search engines, then I want them to stay on the page reading the article in full leaving them with two options, click on the affiliate link to learn the final solution, or click off the page.

Obviously I want the person reading the article to click on the affiliate link rather than leave the page altogether, so in the article copy itself I want to make sure it’s engrossing enough to keep their attention right down to the bottom of the text!

A good tip I use here is to study the sales page of the affiliate product I want them to buy, its at this point I want to copy and paste the headline of the sales page, as well as any bullet points that may appear on the page into a separate text file.

The reason I keep a small text file like this for every article is because it gives me an idea of what the creators of the product are using to grab peoples attention on the main product page, after all they have done all the research for you to find an attention grabbing headline in the first place, so why re-invent the wheel?

I then re-write the headline in my own words and customize it for the article, but still keeping the theme of the headline the same.

I use the bullet points from the sales page in the same way, but I will also re-write and expand upon them creating an entire paragraph out of each to include in the article. Using this method means that I can write a decent article on a subject I don’t really have a great deal of knowledge about,  and all without spending hours on research.

So I now know I have a pretty good headline, and the content is also solid. After all its the job of the products sales page author to keep the visitor engaged in order to make the sale, so they need an attention grabbing headline, and the bullet points will usually voice the greatest concerns/questions that the reader may need the solution for.

The length of my article is determined by other articles with a related topic, so if I search an article directory for similar topics I’ll be looking for two things, the first is how many words the author used, and the second is the amount of views/reads that article has. If I find a related article with 600 words and a ton of views, then I’ll be looking at writing around about that many words too.

Most of the articles I’ve been finding during this research are only at around 200-300 words, very short, good news for me right;)

Depending on the article directory and where you can place your link, you might only have one chance to add this important link right at the bottom of the page in the bio. If this is the case what you write here can be as important as your articles headline, as this is your last chance to ask the reader to take action(meaning click your affiliate link).

What I will generally do here is take what I believe to be the best and most appealing bullet point from the sales page, and then re-write it including my link in the bio.

example..

Discover Why Taking —– Can Actually Give You A Stroke – Learn The True —- —–  —– Remedy

Remember to use your –keywords– in your text link;)

I now have an article written that should be enticing enough for the reader to want to click on my affiliate link, If they do, then I have done what I wanted to accomplish with the article.

Next post I will go over how I redirect links to affiliate pages using php, and what I then do to try and get the articles flying up the search engines.

Tags: affiliate pages, affiliate product, article writing

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under article writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.