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 For readers who have always doubted
the power of well written articles as an online marketing
weapon, I recommend this one article test. When I started
off posting articles, I wrote only one article and as
ignorant and inexperienced as I was in those days, I still
got some traffic and response from it.
Of course I have learnt a great deal since then. This is
the knowledge you are about to receive in this article so
that by writing only a single article, you will be able to
receive loads of traffic to your web site or blog. If
nothing else, this should be able to help you gauge how
effective articles will be for you in the long term.
Actually all you need to do is to observe these 4 simple
rules.
1) Your headline is everything
Probably the most important thing to consider is your
headline. Spend much more time on your headline than on
the writing of your article.
Here is a simple example to show you how important the
headline is. When you visit a site, even your favorite
site or blog, how do you decide what you are going to
click on and read? It is from the headline is it not?
The greatest article in the world will be useless if the
headline does not cry out to be read. This is precisely
the reason why an article I posted last week already has
over 100 hits at one of the sites where I posted it and an
article I posted three months ago at the same site has
hardly managed 30 hits.
If you want a single article to have an impact for you,
you will have to come up with a headline that will
generate clicks, lots of them as people click to eagerly
read what you have to say.
As a matter of interest, this article you are reading
started out as an idea and my first headline was;
“How to use articles to get loads of free traffic”
How boring. There are so many similar headlines available
already on the net. Very few people would be interested
and it would not matter how good my content was, it would
just not get read by enough people.
Look at the final headline I arrived at (above) and learn
what I am trying to say here.
One word of caution; do not trick readers with a catchy
headline and then fail to deliver. Make sure you can fully
justify what you promise in your headline.
2) What do you want your readers to feel?
The next step is to write your article and before you do
so, you will need to decide what it is you want your
readers to feel after reading your article. Excitement is
good objective to have although it is difficult to
achieve. Still if you can manage it, it will show in your
traffic by the hundreds.
Curiosity is another strong human emotion to aim for with
your article, and much easier to achieve most of the time.
If you can make you readers curious and hungry for more
information, they will have no problem doing what you ask
them to do in your resource box.
When writing most of my articles, I start out with all
these objectives in mind as I focus on the particular
subject at hand. When I finish my first draft I usually
know which emotion I will go for or emphasize on as an
objective for the article.
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