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.

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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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Yet, there are subtle pitfalls that new and seasoned website content writers and blog writers overlook. This article identifies four pitfalls to avoid when writing good quality content.

As an article writer you cannot just write whatever you want. As an article  writer, you must be aware of what the reader wants to read when they go over the article.

If they see things that they find to be inappropriately placed in the article, they will most likely scrap it and move on to find another that better fits their expectations.
Avoid these four simple oversights when writing your website or blog content:

*Poor Research

Make sure that any fact you publish can be verified. You have promised your reader that you have the information he is searching for. Don’t let him down. Do your due diligence. Research your material.

*Poor Outline

Do you want your reader to feel lost? If your article jumps from one topic or idea to another, your reader will soon tire and go elsewhere. His brain will go on overload trying to make sense of an incoherent article. I’m sure you would not want that.

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*Poorly Constructed Sentences

One of the basic skills of a writer is, of course, sentence construction. This means that a writer must know how to create sentences, spell words and observe parallelism.

Sentence parallelism refers to mixing word forms and phrase types that confuse the reader. Here is an example of a lack of parallelism, ‘Dave loves to ski, to bowl, and hunting.” As opposed to, ‘Dave loves to ski, to bowl, and to hunt.’

Sentence construction is important, as it is the main tool in getting the message across to the readers. If in the first few sentences, the structure is already difficult to understand, the reader will find no use in reading the entire article.

*Using $10 Words

It is in our nature to want to impress others, but using big words in an article only intimidates and alienates your reader. Samuel Johnson, British author and critic, said, “Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.”

Besides that, do you want the reader to move away from your article to pick up a dictionary? I doubt he will do that. More likely, he will leave and read a different article.

There are many other things that a reader would not want to see in an article. Try avoiding the problems listed in this article and increase your readership.

If you want to learn how to best get your articles written and how to get more readers, visit this sales page. It is by far the best article writing coaching course on the market.

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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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Besides being sometimes preferable, passive voice can also be profitable. Here are three reasons for choosing passive over active voice.

• Variety
• Emphasis
• Keywords

Variety

Active should be the predominant verb voice that you use throughout your article. It does help the reader understand what you are trying to say. It forces sentences to be more concise.

However, an article that uses active voice exclusively can be too staccato and sound like a monotonous drumbeat. Inserting an occasional passive voice sentence in your article writing will add some variety. In fact, in some situations, you may not have a choice or it would be awkward to use active voice.

Example (passive): “It is written, ‘Thou shall not use passive voice’.” I do not know if anyone has ever written that statement or not.

To change it to active would be awkward. “God, Shakespeare, somebody wrote, ‘Thou shall not use passive voice’.” The passive sentence has a certain mystique or quality that the active one does not have.

Emphasis

Another opportunity to use passive for emphasis is this example. Suppose you are writing an article on reasons why active is the preferred voice to use. One reason could be:

Example (passive): “Visuals are created in the reader’s mind by active voice.” Here the emphasis is on the reason, visuals. To change it to active: “Active voice creates visuals in the reader’s mind.” It is your choice.

Keywords

Here is where using passive is most profitable. As you know, emphasizing keywords in your article writing is critical to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As in the previous example, in the passive voice, you can bring those keywords to the forefront in your titles and in your opening paragraphs to capture the reader’s attention.

Example: Let us suppose that your keyword is “apple jelly”. In a title (passive): “Apple jelly is made from good apples.” To change it to active: “Good apples make good apple jelly.” But your keyword, “apple jelly”, may not be read because it is not at the forefront.

Do not abandon passive voice just because your teacher or some computer program tells you it is not the voice of choice. In some cases, it may be the voice of choice.

Are your article marketing sales suffering? 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.

To learn more about article marketing/writing visit this site now!

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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.

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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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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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