Some claim that beginning an article by selecting the title first is best.  The title should grab your potential reader and customer. Advocates of starting an article by thinking of a title first, argue that unless you have a good title in mind, the body of the text will not flow naturally.

They believe that your focus will ramble and so will the body of the article. They argue that your content will skip from topic to topic without a logical flow. Consequently, your readers will loose interest and leave.

The title must be SEO sensitive and therefore keywords and keyword phrases are the first thing one should focus on.  Search for keywords and phrases that a customer will likely type in a search. Only after you have found good keywords, do you formulate the title. After that you can create the content and populate the content with keywords and phrases.

Others suggest that you create content first. They argue that you can be walking down a park lane and see a worm.  Out of the blue or maybe out of the dirt, you get this crazy idea about the possibility of selling something to do with worm farming.

Learn the craft of Article Writing CLICK HERE.

Ideas come from everywhere and anywhere. If you carry a notebook, you jot down some ideas. If you don’t carry a notebook, you promise yourself that you will remember the great ideas that came to you.

You rush to your computer and the words come pouring out. Now you have several hundred words of wonderful sales worthy content. You find key words and a product that fits your content.

Still, you have no title. After you have the content and said all that you have to say, you select the title again based on keywords or long tailed keywords.

Which method is better? Does it matter?  No.  So long as you ultimately submit an article with good content and SEO optimized, you have done the work.

I prefer to concentrate on the content first, and then I select an appropriate keyword title. My logic is that I choose a topic I want to promote, do the research (dig in the dirt, so to speak) and while fresh in my brain, I write the content.

I then do keyword research and modify my content to accommodate the keywords. Only then do I give my article a title. Others do it differently.

No one way is the right way. What matters is that you complete the task of article writing. Whatever way works for you.

Just do it!

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To spin or not to spin, that is the question. I am relatively new to internet marketing. I chose article marketing as my method of marketing because I like to write. That sounds logical enough.

In the course of writing my articles, I soon discovered two things. One, I am too particular about my writing. I edit and re-edit and re-edit. I know that there are article marketers that whip out ten, twenty, or more articles everyday.  To this day, I am not sure how they do it. I can see slaving over maybe ten articles per day.  But, more than that everyday?

I mean quality content articles, articles that provide information, that say something. Now I am not knocking those that can pump out twenty or more articles of good content. But, just how many of those authors are out there.

I mean really writing solid articles with usable information. Take this article, so far I haven’t said much. I have spouted about my disbelief. Have I truly relayed to you any useful information? No, I didn’t think so. I have almost written 200 words and have yet to give you, the reader, useful information. Maybe, this how and what those authors write to get such volume.

The second thing I discovered is that although content is king, volume is his kingdom. Content without volume is like a king without subjects. Without a kingdom, there are no revenues and the king goes broke.  The kingdom (volume) provides subjects (traffic, readers) which in turn provide revenue.

I concluded that there are at least four ways to increase your writing;

1. Write more.
2. Hire writers to write for you.
3. Buy Private Label Right (PLR) articles and rewrite them or attempt to publish them as is.
4. Spin your original articles.

I have already dismissed the first one for reasons I stated earlier. I am slow. The second way is too costly for me now and I fear that I would be overly critical and end up rewriting them any way. The third method I reject for the same reasons as the second. I would end up rewriting the article.

Besides, what I have seen of PLRs, the best they can do is give you ideas for articles. We are left with spinning your article. That authors spin their articles always had me wondering. Why not just write another article? Surfing the forums you hear horror stories about automatically spun articles that put out un-intelligible garbage.

Why take the time and money to input an article into a spinner only to have it come out reading like alphabet soup? And, besides all that, you are cautioned to make sure that the spun article does not exceed 30% duplicate content. Doesn’t that sound like a complete re-write? I have never been an advocate of spinning articles. It seemed to me that I would just be rehashing the same stuff over and over again.

Many article directories will accept previously published articles. Some do not. Submitting previously published articles is like a writing a syndicated column for newspapers. The same article appears in many different newspapers. Why not do the same with an article marketers article?

There is a difference. One day I was re-reading one of my articles that I came across while surfing the internet. I clicked on the link at the bottom just to make sure the link was working properly. The link worked all right, but it went to one of my blogs. Can you guess what the first post on that page was?

Yep, I had just read the same article. I found that to be annoying and, well, poor taste. I think a reader would quickly bounce off the page and go elsewhere. So, I decided to re-write the article, but I remembered that the same article was appearing in many other directories. I would have to write many different versions of that same article to give the reader some uniqueness and still convey the original message.

It was then that I became a convert to article spinning. A word of caution, most article spinners are not worth the price, free or otherwise. Be very careful, only select a spinner that allows you full control of the output and then check each spun article for uniqueness.

There is only one Article Spinner that I know of that delivers what it promises and it’s cheap! Click on that link and find out why!

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Do you have the copywriting skills necessary to convert your articles into sales? You can learn to write better articles with just a few copywriting skills. This article suggests learning the skill of copywriting to skyrocket your sales.

Here are three tips you can use to get you started.

Emotional Words

Use emotional words. Use words that excite like ‘fascinating’ and ‘electrifying’, words that fire images of romance like ‘passionate’ and ‘magical’,  and words that paint visions of pleasure like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘gratifying’. These are just a few of the categories that will motivate your reader to continue reading. I am sure you can think of other types of words that will create images in your reader.

Leading Questions

Ask leading questions. Ask the reader a question and answer it for him. “Do you want to make money, now? Of course, you do.” That is an example of a question and answer. Raising a question prepares the reader for a response. By answering it immediately, you have given him a response confirming what he already knows. It directs him to your logical conclusion, which is to buy your product.

Alluring Titles

Write an alluring title. You have just a few seconds to capture a reader’s attention. You can have the greatest content and the best copywriting techniques at your disposal, but without a captivating title your article will go unread. Use those emotional words mentioned in the first tip. If you can combine emotional words with your keywords, not only will your reader want to read your article, but the search engines will tag your article and you will get even more readers.

Gain the skills you need and learn more here.

This short article is not at all exhaustive of the techniques and tips used in copywriting. If you are serious about making money with article writing, Don’t delay in learning the art and skill of copywriting. Learning this skill will dramatically increase your sales.

These three tips alone can improve your sales, but there are many more.

If you are serious about improving your writing skills, and I expect you are, because are reading this, I suggest you owe it to yourself to use a training and coaching course on copywriting  and begin your copywriting journey.

Learn how to use copywriting in your articles, gain the knowledge you need to quickly increase your sales,click here.

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Here are three MS Word tools to improve your articles.

1. Check your spelling – This seems obvious. Still many do not use their spell checker. If you use a plain text editor to create your articles, you can easily overlook even the most common of spellings.

Simply copy your text from the plain text editor, like notepad or word pad, and copy it to your word processor and do a spell check. You will be surprised at the misspelled words you may have overlooked.

2. Write at a fifth to seventh grade level. – Use the MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker found under the Review Tab at the top of the MS Word page to determine the age level that you are writing for. After selecting the spell checker and completing the spell check, it will ask you if you want to continue checking the rest of the document.

Respond with yes and a box will pop up called Readability Statistics. At the very bottom of the box is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. You want that score to be between fifth and seventh grade level. Most of your readers will read at that level. If it is a higher grade level, edit with simpler words.

3. Passive sentences – That same box will also give you the number of passive sentences in your article. You want to keep this at a minimum. You should keep passive sentences to no more than two or three for every five-hundred words. There is nothing wrong with passive sentences and there is no hard fast rule to the number of passive sentences you should use. But, you do want to make your sentences action oriented to help the reader move easily throughout the body of your article.

Learn more about copywriting here.

We have looked at three tips that you can use to improve the quality of your articles and ultimately salability of your articles. Keep in mind that content is king and no tools can create unique quality content like you can.

Quality content and good copywriting skills are necessarily a must. Let MS Word do some of the work for you. Use the three tips and your quality will improve.

Are you writing good content and still not getting the traffic you need to make sales? The solution is in copywriting. Add copywriting  skills to your quiver of techniques and your sales can go nowhere but up.

If you are serious about improving your article writing and maximizing your sales learn the art and skill of copywriting.

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Most word processors are programmed to alert the author whenever the verb is passive. It is not a bad thing. If you write technical papers and articles, it is acceptable.

If you are an article marketer, the passive voice gets a bad rap. Do you know that there is nothing wrong with passive voice? Allow me to explain.

In case you are not sure, let me first show you the difference. Active voice uses the subject of a sentence to do the action. Passive uses the object of the sentence to receive the action.

Example:

•  Bill threw the ball. (active)
• The ball was thrown by Bill. (passive)

(Note: I am using MS Word. Guess what just popped up. Yes, you guessed it. That little squiggly underlined that whole sentence. You just cannot get away from it. Don’t you just want that little squiggly line to disappear?)

In most cases, active voice is preferred. Active voice is better in the body of your article. Why is it better? It allows the reader to read easily through the body of your article. Active voice makes it easier for the reader to visualize what you want to communicate. More importantly, it gets him to the resource box quickly.

When is it acceptable to use passive voice? Let me show you two cases.

1) When you, the author, do not have a specific subject in mind or you want to emphasize the word or words affected by the action use passive voice.

Example: “Article marketers are not paid for their articles.” That sentence does not identify who it is that does not pay article marketers. The emphasis is on article marketers.

You could change it to active voice: “Publishers do not pay article marketers for their articles.” With this sentence, the emphasis shifts from the article marketer to the publisher. You may not want to do that. But, then again you might.

2) You may want to be vague or politically proper. You can use passive voice.

Example: “The critical remark was made by the wrong person at the wrong time.”

To change that sentence to active voice: “Tom made that critical remark at the wrong time.” Or, “The wrong person made that critical remark.”

In both cases, MS Word will alert you that the verb is passive. So what?

In the first, you want to emphasize “article marketers“. You want to emphasize the fact that they do not get direct compensation for their work.

In the second, you do not want to name names.

Do you see the difference?

Just because MS Word or some other word processor implies that it is wrong, it is not necessarily so. Before you change the sentence, make sure it does not change what you meant it to say.

Do you want to learn how to write, publish, and market your articles? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles. Read this article writing review.

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The theory being that because of its quality content, more people would read it. That it would or could become viral. That is, it would become like a virus spreading all over the Internet. That is a good idea. The concept is certainly worthy of a place in an ideal world. I like the idea of writing good quality content. It makes me feel that I am contributing to the knowledge base of the internet with tidbits of information.

The problem is that we are not in an ideal world. A book author writes one book at a time on a subject and then moves on to write another book on a different subject. A magazine article writer most often pre-sells his article idea or topic to a magazine editor before he actually writes the piece.

You might argue that if it works for a book author or a magazine article writer it should work for article marketing as well. Not so, the difference lies in compensation.

A book writer sells his work to a publisher. For every book sold, the author gets a royalty. Compensation for his work is up front. Upon acceptance, a free-lance magazine writer sells his article to the magazine publisher based on the amount of words in his work. His compensation is up front.

As you well know, the article marketer is not paid for his work. His compensation is totally dependent on traffic to his article or website. He may write fifty articles on the same subject but only one of those catches the eye of the internet buying public.

The blogger’s opinion mentioned at the beginning of this article fails to account for the public’s whims. Writing one article regardless of the quality of the content will more than likely be lost in the sea of cyberspace.

Whereas, writing several pieces on the same subject written in different ways may be the difference that the public is waiting for. No one knows which of the several articles will strike the public’s fancy.

The article marketer does not have the benefit of a high paid editor and sales force to market his words and create a best seller of his work. And, unlike the magazine writer, the article marketer has no way of knowing if his work will generate income. The magazine writer gets paid up front.

An article marketer must test the waters with his articles until one of them is written in such a way that the internet public will make it a “most read” article and the trickle of clicks from his work filters down to a product, producing income for the marketer. Writing just one article is not a good idea for the article marketer.

Are your article marketing sales suffering? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles. Click here.

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Copywriting

In its simplest form, copywriting is nothing more than using your words to convince a reader to buy your product.  It is consumer psychology 101. Unconsciously we use it verbally everyday. It comes naturally to us.  We use it with our friends, our enemies, and our families. It is a simple technique.

Have you ever asked anyone to choose between two items? You probably have. What you have done is create a picture in the person’s mind of the two choices. Most often that person’s brain has focused on those two things and on no others.  You have controlled the outcome of his decision by limiting his choice to one of the two items.

That is just one of the many techniques that you can use to motivate readers to take action. Other examples include offering pleasure vs. pain, gain over loss,… As you can see, copywriting stirs emotion.  You use words to paint a picture in the brain that evokes an emotion.  The emotion then converts into action.  You, the copywriter, direct that emotion to buy your product.

Can you be a copywriter? Of course, you can.  It is a writing skill. It is a learned skill. With practice, you can accomplish anything. Remember, you use it naturally in your everyday speech.

Article Writing

I am sure you are familiar with this form of writing. In its purest form, it provides nothing but information to a reader. It solves a problem, gives instructions, or it may just spout an opinion. Article writing is much less a form of advertising than its brother, copywriting.  The author is selling his information to the reader, not necessarily selling a product.  Readers of this form of writing, for the most part, do not expect buy something after reading the article.

Article writing is also a learned skill. You are not required to have the imagination of Jules Verne or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Have you ever written yourself a “to do” list? Have you jotted down a reminder note to yourself?  Sure, you have.  Well, then, you can write an article. If you can read, you can write an article.

The Difference

Perhaps, now you see the difference. Copywriting sells. Article writing informs. When we combine the two skills we have a very powerful tool, article marketing.

Do you lack copywriting skills? Now you can learn how to use copywriting and create articles that are more profitable. Are your article marketing sales suffering? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles.

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What comes first, article or marketing? Yes, you are right. It is the word article. It is not only because it the first word in the title, “Article Marketing”. There is an even greater reason that it comes first. Let me explain.

Article marketing is the marriage of writing and marketing. There seems to be some confusion among many writers and marketers about this tool. Marketing takes many forms. As you know, it is advertising. You can advertise in different media like video, audio, or writing. You can do it on TV, on the radio, newspapers, and you can do it on the internet.

Advertising usually requires a written script. You know that its primary purpose is to convince you to buy a product or an idea. You know it when you watch a TV commercial or read a billboard. That is what you are expecting. Copywriting is the art of writing advertising copy. It is a highly paid profession. It takes great insight and skill to persuade people using words.

Articles, on the other hand, are for the most part informational. Yes, I know they sell something as well. They educate, inform, and even may attempt to convince you of the attributes of a given subject. In that sense, they too are advertising.

The difference lies in what the reader of an article is expecting to read. Imagine reading this in an article about prostate cancer: “BEWARE! CANCER KILLS! You must see your doctor annually and check it out. Take XYZ pills and relieve your future suffering NOW!” That isn’t the best of copywriting, but then I am not very good at it. I think you get the point.

As a reader of an article, wouldn’t you expect something more like: “Medical studies have undeniably shown that cancer kills. Physicians advise and recommend that men over 40 have an annual check up. XYZ pills may provide some relief, but first check with your doctor.”

I am sure that you see the difference. The first piece obviously and blatantly is selling you XYZ pills. The second piece is also selling XYZ pills, but it at least gave you one piece of information, men over 40 should have an annual check up. You are reading an article, not watching TV.

Article marketing is unique to the Internet. It is a method used to inform and to sell (advertise). As an article marketer, consider the readers expectations and that is an expectation of information. The buzzword is “content”. Provide the reader with content. Copywriting has its place even in article writing, but content reigns supreme.

Article writing is not copywriting. Its main purpose is to inform; its secondary purpose is to sell. That is why the word “article” is first and the word “marketing” is second in Article Marketing.

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Can you think of a business that has access to over 3.5 Billion potential customers? You guessed right.  Internet marketing is the answer.  Never mind language barriers, many browsers now have translators that will translate text in their browsers.  That makes for one heck of a potential market.

Is it easy? Before I answer that, let me ask you a couple of questions.  Is working nine to five for a boss easy? Is sitting in some office pushing paper easy? Is lifting a pick and shovel easy? You get my drift.

Article marketing is effective because it does not cost you, the marketer, any money to advertise. Wouldn’t you like to advertise across the World Wide Web free? Sure, you would. Imagine reaching out to the billions of internet users with your free advertising.  Wouldn’t you like to own a business and have a potential customer base of over 3.5 billion customers? Of course, you would.  Who would not?

Article marketing/article writing has a learning curve but you can easily learn to turn your words into money.  It is not just about writing an article with good content. It is also about writing with persuasion.  Article marketing is a craft. You can learn it. It’s not hard. It just takes knowledge and practice. As some say, “It’s not rocket science.”

It is effective because it stays on the Internet indefinitely.  Years later, your article will be there. It will continue to generate income.  Even your heirs can benefit from your work.  Assuming of course, you hire a good lawyer to draw up a good will.

It is effective because the search engines in their infinite wisdom catalog your article and rank your article. With proper training and experience, you can have your article appear on the first page of a search engine’s catalog.  With that kind of exposure, called “organic” advertising, you are sure to have a large amount of traffic going to your own site or your product site and you will make more money. And, it’s FREE!

Affiliate marketing/article writing offers you an opportunity like no other.  You can own your own business without the hassle of inventory, employees or customers and make money.  You can get started with a very small investment; under a hundred dollars maybe even less.

It will cost you, mostly your time and energy. Best of all, the potential for financial independence and freedom is near unlimited. You owe it to yourself to try it.

Do you want to start a home based business and make money as an article marketer/writer? Learn how to write, submit, and market your articles.

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