Writing articles on the net is not an easy job. Your article must be informative and at the same time hold the interest of the reader to buy your product, or at least to visit your site again. In fact, writing a short article is much more difficult than writing a book. Within a fixed limit of a few hundred words, you have to get your point across and make the impact felt on the mind of the reader. You have only so many words to impress your reader and make them a regular client of your website. Quite obviously, writing articles is a job that requires talent. Not everyone can begin writing them just by reading a self-help book or articles like this one. But there are some basic things which article writers must know. This article enlists such basic things. You must consider them as the raw material to which you must add your talents and create your articles.
(1) Research – Once you have the keyword with you, the first thing you must do is scour the internet for what information is already available on the topic. Generally you must start your research with an encyclopedia like Wikipedia (available at wikipedia.org) or an informative website like Ezinearticles (available at ezinearticles.com). Be sure that the article you are reading is written by an expert and not by some other amateur content writer. You will come across many facts and points that you might want to include in the article. Make a list of those points. This would be your rough draft. Prepare your rough draft using information from at least ten different websites.
(2) Arrange your points – Once your rough draft is ready, quickly assess how you would like to sequence the information. The more defining and interesting points should come first. On an average, reader interest in any article over the web does not last more than 30 seconds. Hence the better points must come first. This will induce the reader to read till the end. Paragraphs are very important. The smaller are the paragraphs, the better. Format your information in bullets where possible. This is quite easy to read.
(3) Make your language simple – Okay, you may be having a doctorate in English literature, but that kind of a language will not work in a web article. Write to the point, and trim out all flowery language. If your readers needed decorative language, they’d be reading Milton or Wordsworth! Just stick to the facts. Where possible, use local language. If you are writing for Europeans, use their idioms and slang.
(4) Include your own point of view – Your article must contain something the readers haven’t read on other sites. Otherwise, what would be the purpose of reading it at all? When you are done establishing the facts in your article, delve on some observations you have made if possible. Tell the readers how the topic you are writing on could affect their lives. This kind of a personal approach works wonders with readers. Even if you are writing on something like diseases, you must write about the prevention and vaccination – this is what the layman wants to read the most.
(5) Stick to a word count and use the keyword – Do not get carried away when writing an article. You have a word count to work up to. Hence say what you want to within that stipulation. Do not make your article too long; as it would bore the average reader. At the same time, if your article is too short, the reader would feel cheated. Do not neglect using the keyword. The keyword is the string of words which potential readers will type in the search engines. If your article deviates from the keyword then it will not show in the search results and will not generate any traffic. There’s absolutely no use writing if no one is going to be able to read it.
(6) Check for plagiarism and copyright issues – One commandment of Internet writing is ‘Thou shalt not copy’. It is a huge crime to copy and paste information from other websites directly; it could put both you and the website owner in great problems. When your article is done, you can check whether any part is inadvertently copied. articlechecker.com is a good resource to check for plagiarism. If you want to use any information verbatim, then you could mention a reference in the footnote. Ask the website owner if you can do so.
If you are planning to enter the world of content writing, you must spend some time reading some good articles over the web. Writing for websites is much different from writing a newspaper article or writing a book. Reading articles on popular websites will help you a lot to develop your own style.
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