Since May of this year I’ve been doing more article writing since it’s part of the weekly blogging services I provide. Then when I recently started my micro niche websites, article writing became an even more important part of my backlink building. This is when much work is done to try to rank all my niche sites in Google’s Top Search Engine.

Well today as I was thinking about what to write for my next blog post, I figured it would be a good idea to critique my own past article writing and share with anyone interested on what are some of the changes I am making to achieve my current objectives. On the same breath I will also share some changes that I’ve recently implemented too.

Why is The Article Title or Headliner so very important

Besides the author’s bio provided at the resource box, the article title or headliner is the most important text in your article.  Now just to put things into perspective here if I may compare an analogy with what experts giving Tips on Public Speaking say “…. the first 10 words are more important than the next 10 minutes…” Similarly people giving article writing tips say “…the first 10 words (the title) are more important than the next 300 words (the body)…”

I strongly believe this to be very true and I can just show you one particular article I wrote in Ezinearticles dated May 8, 2009 and the same article re-written on June 12, 2009:

the one on May 8, 2009:

the one on Jun 12, 2009:

Clearly you can see that the first title looks much better, more inviting and asks a question which is one of the recommended article writing tips. Because there is such a big gap of readers’ views it does make perfect sense to spend that extra effort to write a more enticing article headliner don’t you think? Also if you noticed the first one, 112 readers clicked the author bio’s link compared to just 6 for the second. Well what can I say but first impressions last!

Write Short Articles

Ever since May 2009, I have changed my article writing style to write short articles and have the contents list the numbered points or tips I’m presenting e.g. “Discover 5 Article Tips To Make Your Writing Quick and Easy”. This is perhaps the simplest form of writing an article, at least how I’m finding it. I prefer to write short articles because:

• it’s easy to write and it’s easy for the reader to understand just what you are writing
• it takes a shorter time to write – Ezinearticle accepts 250 words minimum articles so it suits me fine.
• if I write too long I could use the extra points to write another new article with similar topic thereby maintaining the 250 minimum I like to keep at. I get to publish 2 instead of 1 article in this way.

What’s your Objective in Article Writing?

Different writers have different purpose or objective whenever they write articles and publish them at article directories. That determines the kind of topic you can write about. This is especially true if you have lots of websites with diverse niches in your business. For example for my micro niche adsense websites which I focus entirely on products, I never write articles on products as that would be too boring. Instead I write about things that interest me like Internet Home Business which is a lot easier with many broad categories that I can focus on. Fortunately the article directories I submit to do not care much if the content is totally different from the resource box in terms of niches and topics.

My main objective of my article writing today is solely for backlink building for my niche sites and not for any traffic generation strategy. The traffic comes when the keywords I’m ranking for them achieved Google’s Page 1. So far together with Angela’s Backlink Building Program, it has yielded me the results I want.

A new way of getting contents to write your articles

If like me, you have been writing for a while there is one quick and easy way to get contents to write – yes re-write them just like the example I showed you above. Sometimes when I read some of my earlier articles, I couldn’t believed I had written them so poorly. But it’s understandable, we like to think that over time, we learned how to write better, more enticing articles.

A new way of getting new free backlinks from your old articles

I am quite sure for most of us, we have purchased many different domains over a period of time; created many websites and some of them may be inactive. You probably like to terminate them at the next domain renewal. Well if you have written and published articles with links on your resource box pointing to such domains, you are about to get free backlinks. Just go to the particular article directory and edit the links to point to your other websites. I have just got some of them this way over the last one week. I won’t be surprised if some of you didn’t realize that, being caught up in the frenzy of ‘too much to do in so little time’ syndrome.

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Article Marketing is one of the best free effective methods you can use to promote your website and all your marketing campaigns.

If you’ve gone through my blog archives, you would have noticed that I don’t have many posts on article marketing. That’s not to say I don’t believe in it or know how essential it is for getting backlinks and free traffic to your website or blog.

I stopped writing to article directories temporarily for at least a year because I wasn’t getting any traffic then, despite getting lots of backlinks. I used that break to focus on other aspects of the business, blogging being one of them. Well now I’ve resumed doing article marketing. Want to know the reason why?  Well I am now doing freelance writing articles and every week I write at least 5 articles and publish them at selected article directories. But most importantly I found the mistakes I made that caused me not to get much traffic for the articles I posted one year ago.

Article Writing Mistake #1 – Lack of Article Marketing Research

When I first started article writing I did so without doing any research on how successful authors write and the techniques they used. My mistake was to just focus on the relevant keywords and start cracking. As a result, my posts were generally too long. The correct technique is to write short articles about 270 – 300 words.

Article Writing Mistake #2 – Article Contents not Scannable

Whenever I visit an ezine site looking for ideas, I usually don’t like to read long articles. I’ll just read the first paragraph and moved on. However if it’s long and has good sub headers, I’ll just read these headers only. If they are long, without eye catching presentation, I skip them. I realized now I was guilty of many of these same article writing mistakes then.

Article Writing Mistake #3 – Article Headlines didn’t grab my readers’ attention

I learned that in an article, there are just 2 places where you can grab the attention of a reader. The first is the title or headlines and the other is the bio text. Looking back, I have to admit most of my articles’ headlines or bio text could have been better written in these 2 areas.

How you can use these article marketing tips to help improve your web traffic?

1. Reaching out to more people

If you think you have written a good article, don’t you want to share it with others. When you choose this method of submitting your articles to ezine directories, nothing really stops you getting the traffic. If you are are new marketer, it gives you better results than writing on your new blog which may not be indexed, have no traffic or no search engine ranking. But when you submit to article directories, all it needs is good content and good article writing technique to bring in traffic.

2. Get High Search Engine Ranking

Even with a short article, you could make it search-engine friendly by optimizing your article using good keyword phrases that can give your articles a high search engine ranking.However avoid using too many keywords. In fact for a 300 word article, I usually use about 3 keywords.

3. The Use of Readers’ Comments and Testimonials

When you received good reviews and testimonial, put them to good use on your website or blog. Find a relevant post in which you can use them to promote your products or substantiate an opinion on your topic of discussion. It does give you that extra weight besides looking nice on your blog or website as it helps to build your reputation, or the authority that you site projects or at least tries to.

IMHO testimonials are very powerful statements as they come from people who shared similar experiences or who have just used and loved your product or services. Sometimes they serve as your customers’ deciding vote before buying your product.

Final Thoughts

Even after one year of neglecting article marketing, I’ve finally realized how much I could have gained had I known some of the things I learned only recently. But on the other hand I prefer to look to the future and not what could have been. I’m pretty fired up on article writing especially after having learned some of the best kept Article Marketing Secrets from the gurus.

I’ve been very encouraged by the good article stats I’m seeing in my Ezinearticles submission. In fact it was this one post which got 100+ views the day after it was published that got me curious as to how that came about, something unheard of when I last wrote articles for them.

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