Article writing does not have to be hard, and your article does not have to be a masterpiece, I’ll give you some shortcuts later on in this series to help speed up your writing and get you writing about topics you know nothing about, but for now then know your article does not have to be magazine quality.
I have hired writers who have written things which were just incredible, they really knew how to write and I’d love to be able to write like them. But I am just an average person, with average writing skills, I write this guide like I write my articles, friendly and down to earth, it conveys what I want it to but it is no Shakespeare.
In fact I encourage you to write just like you speak, when I read articles that are all pumped up and grammatically perfect and journalistic, then unless it is on a news site it is a big turnoff. I think most people online prefer down to earth writing as they know it comes from someone like them (of course if your niche is journalism or something like that then ignore everything in this chapter!)
So research your article like I will discuss in the next chapter, then just start writing, write an introduction, a body, and then close off the article, let’s look at each part in more detail.
Introduction: This is the first paragraph where you need to grab their attention, and let them know you are speaking to them, if they were searching for information on how to house train their dog then you need to make sure they know in the first sentence or two that that is what you are going to be talking about.
Try to make it interesting and engaging, and lead into what you are going to talk about or what you have to offer them. Talk about their problem and empathize with them so they know that you are there to help, so you might start off with:
‘Isn’t house training a puppy a nightmare? You try to get them to hold it in and give you a sign that they need to go out, but when you turn your back for just one minute then you hear that dreaded sound of running water… There are things you can do to drastically speed up the process though, let’s go through my top 5 tips on how to house train your puppy.‘
You can see how I have let them know I am on their side and that I have a possible solution to help them.
The body: This is just the main part of the article where you give them all the information you promised them, keep paragraphs short and snappy and break up the content if you can, so if you have 5 tips then number them, or use one paragraph per tip with a short header in bold for each etc, just so it is not an expanse of writing *cough* see how I did that with the headings for this bit… *cough*
Closing it off: Here is where you finish off the article and provide them with information how to move forward, summarize what you just told them briefly or maybe just reiterate the main point or top tip, then give them some action steps so they can go and get the results they want. Finally put in your resource box which entices them to your website and offers, we’ll discuss that more later on because that is incredibly important.
So there you go, to summarize… no I’m kidding, this is not an article so let’s just move straight onto the main problems people encounter with articles.
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