Writing an article isn’t as easy as it sounds, and you would be surprised at the number of people that do it without having the faintest idea what they are actually doing. In today’s world of the internet, an article is no longer a piece of text that is supposed to give people information. It is a piece of text that attracts and engages people and calls them to action. Only after that has been achieved will the text become about giving information.
The Recipe for a Good Article
In this article, I will aim to give you an easy to read recipe for writing articles. Think of me as the Martha Stewart of copywriting in other words. Here’s what you need to prepare yourself:
- One topic
- A pinch of research
- A dab of understanding on how you can provide beneficial information
Mix them all together and hey presto, you have yourself an article. Okay, it’s maybe not that simple but remember that Martha Stewart didn’t baste the perfect turkey on her first attempt either.
One Topic
Make sense really, doesn’t it? In order to write something, you need to know what you are going to write about. It seems very easy to just write about what your website is geared towards. Perhaps you sell stationery, so you will be writing about stationary. Or if you have a news blog, you will write the news. So finding a topic isn’t all that difficult. As I will show, the topic is actually one of the least important parts of the article itself.
A Pinch of Research
You need to know what you are writing about. Take the news blogging website. If you are writing about a specific news topic, you need to know some basic principles like the location of where the news took place, the demographics of that area and so on. A personal mistake I made the other day, as an example, was thinking that the State PA was Philadelphia. When I Googled it, however, it turned out to be Pennsylvania. I spent ages trying to find out what the “code” for the State of Philadelphia actually was, eventually embarrassing myself by posing the question on Facebook and finding out that Philadelphia isn’t actually a State but rather a city in Pennsylvania… Oops…
A Dab of Understanding: How You Can Provide Useful Information
This is perhaps the most important ingredient in the whole recipe. What you need to do here is know how to engage your reader. Your first step, however, is to write your article in such a way that it is actually found on the internet. That is done through keywords, so you need to go back to the research stage and find out what keywords are and how you are going to use them to your benefit.
Next, you need to think about your title. If you use keywords the right way, your internet page that has the article on it will come up on the first page of Google. But so will 20 other results so you need to make sure that people click on yours. That is done by making your title interesting and engaging. Before you write the text, think of what you want to achieve (do you want your readers to learn something or do something) and make sure your language is easy to understand and makes people want to read on.
In writing this specific article, I have applied the recipe myself and hope that I have succeeded in showing you what a good article looks like. Get it right and you should be on the way to offering your own copywriting services in no time at all.