This lesson is about creating your title. The title is one of the most important elements of your article because it tells the reader within seconds whether or not they should read your article.
Crafting an Irresistible Title for Your Article
How you craft the title of your article is up to you. You can create a swipe file of good titles you have found and model your title after these titles.
Don’t copy these titles. If you do, you will have a hard time finding your article in the search engines. You want to make your article title as original as possible.
There are four types of titles that we will examine here. You can use these title ideas to help you write your own title. Remember, the purpose of a good title is to get your reader to read your article and click through to your site.
1. The Question
The purpose of the question title is to engage your readers. You want them to get involved in the topic of your article. With all good article titles, you want to present the problem and then the solution. You will elaborate these points in the body of your article.
An example would be: Are You Losing Your Hair? Avoid These Three Things
2. The Statement
In the statement title, you make a statement of fact. Use a statistic. Be specific.
For example: 27% of Men Are Losing Their Hair…What to Do to Keep Your Hair Without Losing Your Mind
3. The List
The list is a list of related items. It’s very similar to the How-To because you use a list of tips.
For example: Top 7 Small Business Start Up Tips
4. The How-To
With the how-to, you are telling others how to do something. It’s like a recipe. You are teaching them how to do one thing.
For example: How to Double Your Investments in 30 Days
When writing your titles, include your keywords. This will help you with search engine optimization. Keywords are an easy way to optimize your articles for the search engines. Don’t overdo it.
Keep a swipe file of your title ideas. With a swipe file, it’s easier to avoid writer’s block. Write down all of your title ideas and review them when you want to write a new article. It will make it easier for you to get started writing your article and stay on track.
In the next section, we will examine the easiest type of article to write.
Writing the List Article
The list article is the easiest type of article to write. It is a list of related things.
For example:
- Top 7 Article Writing Tips for Affiliates
- Top 10 Tips for Getting More Business Now
- Top 7 Ways to Start a Business
- 5 Critical Small Business Coaching Tips
Before writing your list article, write your title. You need to know how many tips you will need.
We will use the “Top 7 Article Writing Tips for Affiliates” to write an article.
Your first step is to create a list of tips. All of your tips must be related to your topic. In this case, we are writing an article about article writing as it relates specifically to writing articles for affiliates.
For example:
- Choose a product.
- Create a title.
- Write your list of tips.
- Write an explanation of each tip.
- Write the beginning, conclusion, and summary for your article.
- Create a resource box.
- Submit your article.
Now that we have a list of tips, we want to write one or two paragraphs to further explain each tip.
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For example:
1. Choose a product.
As an affiliate marketer, you have a large amount of products to choose from to sell. To choose the right product to promote, you want to select a product that solves your potential customers’ problems.
You also want to consider the amount of commission you will make, whether or not the product fits your topic, and how you will promote the product.
Next, go through each of the tips and write one to two paragraphs to explain each tip. Keep your words, sentences, and paragraphs short. Remember, your article only needs to be 400 – 700 words. Keeping your article short and answering your readers’ questions will get them to click through to your site.
Don’t forget to use your keyword phrase you have chosen throughout the article. Three to five times is enough. This will help you further optimize your article for the search engines.
In the next section, we will finish writing the article. Lesson five covers Beginnings, Conclusions, and Summaries.
Get the most from your articles. Read some of the Best Practices Guides to Article Marketing. These guides will help you get the most from your article submission because you’ll write articles the article directories want and readers will love.
Summaries, Beginnings and Conclusions
Once you have written the heart of the article, it’s time to put the finishing touches on it.
You can write these parts in any order you like. What’s important is that you put these parts in the right place in the articles.
Your summary is not actually part of the article. The summary is usually what readers see when they visit article directories or blogs where the excerpt function is used.
The purpose of your summary is to entice readers to read the article. A good summary is no more than 400 characters long. It should contain your keyword phrase you are using, and you want to give readers a taste of the actual article. “Sell” them on reading the article.
The beginning is the opening of your article. It is very similar to the summary in that its purpose is to tell the readers what your article is about. It is an extension of the title. In other words, it gives a little more detail than the title.
How long you make your beginning is up to you. It’s really not necessary to write anything longer than one or two paragraphs and then lead into the article.
The conclusion summarizes your article and belongs at the end. It is also a lead into your resource box where you tell others about your business.
Each of these elements should contribute to getting readers to click through to your site.
Keep your summaries, beginnings, and conclusions short and sweet. To write an effective article, you want to keep it within word guidelines, which is 400 – 700. Give your readers a taste of what you offer on your site. This will get you the click.
How to Write Your Resource Box
Although every element of your article is important, the most important are the title and the resource box. The title will determine if your readers read the article. The resource box will determine whether or not visitors click through to your site.
The resource box is like a mini ad for your business. You don’t want to write something that is too commercial. You want to create a resource box that gets your article readers to click through to your website.
There are two types of resource boxes you need to create: a text resource box and an HTML resource box. The text resource box is plain text, something you could write in a text editor like Notepad. Text resources boxes are no more than 250 to 300 characters long. You create this resource box for sites that only accept a text resource box.
In an HTML resource box, links to your sites are made clickable. This means that when readers click on the link, it will take them to your website. You will need to write a small piece of code to create an HTML resource box. An HTML resource box is no longer than 500 characters.
What do you include in your resource box?
1. Establish your knowledge of the topic in some way. Tell others you have more information on your site. If you offer an e-book, newsletter, e-course, or some other resource, you can use this.
2. A link or links to your websites. One link to a website is good; two links is even better provided both links are relevant to the topic.
For example, if you are own two websites, a hair loss resource and a gardening resource, you don’t want to send readers to your gardening site if the article is about hair loss. The purpose of your resource box is to lead your readers to your site. Make the links you include relevant to your topic.
3. Don’t give your life history. Unless your article is about child care, potty training, or another topic where it would be relevant, readers don’t care about things like how many children you have. Your resource shows others you know what you are talking about. What you say in your resource box must be relevant to your article.
4. Don’t include affiliate links in your resource box. You already know not to do this with your article. The same principle applies to your resource box unless the site you are submitting to accepts affiliate links.
If you do include affiliate links, you may be able to bypass this rule by using a redirect page. A redirect page will make the link look like the page is part of your site instead of leading to a different site. Some sites allow this, and others don’t. Check the guidelines before submitting.
If all else fails, you’ll need to buy a new domain and point it to the affiliate site you are marketing. Your best bet is to simply build a content site and send readers to it. Point readers to relevant pages within your site that offer more information.
Here is an example of a good resource box:
Chris Ellington gives effective and easy-to-implement marketing strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. His Simplified Selling program has been a hit with business owners and salespeople around the world. Get your free marketing tips at http://www.SimplifiedSelling.com
Once you’ve completed your resource box, the only other element to consider is your keywords. If you chose keywords for your article at the beginning, you’ve already completed this step.
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