How to Write an Article

Transcription

1 How to Write an Article Sharpen Your Pencil Articles are one way for you to promote your Website or Blog. The idea behind this is that you select a keyword that appears in the content you want to promote, write the article using the keyword several times in the article and provide a couple of links at the end of your article to allow the reader to get more information at YOUR Website or Blog. An article can also be a page or post on your own site. This tutorial will help you add content to your site as well. When adding content to your site, focus on one keyword or idea and create your page or post. Deciding what to write about is an ideal topic for another tutorial. In fact, this has been done several times in the training here. Search for "Niche Research" in the training. Now that you have your idea, you need to do a bit of research to fill out your idea. I was surfing the other day and came across an article in the Huffington Post regarding a Blue Lobster that was recently discovered in a catch by a Maine Lobsterman. To illustrate the process that I go through, I will walk you through the process that I used when writing my last article called "The Rare Blue Lobster" I'll provide a link at the end of the tutorial so you can read what I've written if you like. Let's start by looking at the keyword [Blue Lobster]. Pop over to the WA keyword tool... If you have not yet joined Wealthy Affiliate, you could use your 30 free searches from Jaaxy.com

2 Keyword Research The WA keyword tool gives 81 pages of results out of 479,000 results. Since I know that Google lies and adds to their results all similar terms, I need to determine is what the real results are. 81 Pages have 10 results per page so I can be pretty confident that there are actually 810 results not 479,000. I'd like to see a search volume of greater than 100 and a competition of less than results is still more than I like to compete with. I'll look a bit deeper by adding the word Rare to the front. So now my search term is [Rare Blue Lobster] This is not an ideal keyword, but it is close enough for my purposes. All I was interested in was writing an article to break out of my funk and as a recreational exercise. I did a bit more research and found 2 more good keywords, the last entry [rare blue lobster

3 caught] and [Maine Lobster Harvest]. As these are not my main keywords, I can get by with less searches than 100. Maine Lobster Harvest seems to be a very good one. I'll leave it to you to check these out.

4 Content Ideas Now that I have some keywords to work with, I need to learn a thing or two about Blue Lobsters. I haven't spent much time on a Lobster boat and my only experience with them is on the plate. Well, I did buy some off the dock in Maine one time but I'm not an expert by any means. Google to the rescue Googling [Rare Blue Lobster] gives me one result that is usually good for some information, Wikipedia. I usually start my research with Wikipedia anyway. Now I will open a Notepad, either a paper pad or a text editor, and grab some information that I might want to include in my article. What makes a Lobster Blue. Answer at Wikipedia: Crustacyanin, Astaxanthin. What's in that: Check deeper into Astaxanthin. Looks like an entire article on this stuff. What about the Maine Lobster Harvest: Nice information, a record numbers for the last few years. Why is that? Google a bit deeper to identify additional information. Found a research project worth mentioning on Lobster population studies. I collected all my notes from about 15 minutes of reading and Googling the pertinent facts. Then I organized them into a few paragraphs.

5 Format I typically will use the 5 W's to get some ideas. 5 W's??? Who What Where When Why and of course the odd man out How If I can answer these questions for my reader I will have a good article. I will use a standard format that I learned way back in grade school. Introduction Body Conclusion Each of the ideas becomes a paragraph in the Body of the article. I wait until I have the content in the body before I do the introduction and conclusion. If I am sending people to a specific site or page I will include the keyword for the destination page in my link. I ALWAYS make sure it is relevant to both the article and the destination page. Putting it All Together In my Intro for this article I started with why. Why did I write this article. First paragraph, what...what makes a Lobster Blue. 2nd Paragraph, where and added some data dredged from the web under one of my keywords. 3rd Paragraph, When...sort of. Dropped some historical perspective into the article 4th paragraph, Who...some folks messed with the Blue Lobster population 5th paragraph, How...less Lobster predation due to a loss in the Cod population Conclusion As I was creating my notes I organized the facts into groups. When I completed the groups I checked for an overall idea and used that for the main idea of the paragraph. When all this was done I sat down and wrote the article.

6 Most of the work was already done. I just needed to fit the facts in a coherent manner and make a case for my main idea which was, Blue Lobsters aren't really more common we are just seeing more because there are more being caught. I hope the process I go through to make an article was helpful for you. If I have a subject that I don't need to research, I will still check for keywords to see what I can include in the body of the article to help it rank. I find that putting the ideas down in an outline format helps the writing go much faster. I don't always stick with the outline but I use it for a guide. Here's a Link to the completed article: Feel free to follow me and comment below or on the article page at Street Articles. If you want you can follow me both places.