Writing articles is immensely popular. People have caught on with this effective traffic generation method. They realize that it can provide short term as well as long term web traffic.
It helps generate backlinks to your website, educate people about your business, generates targeted traffic and improves your search engine rankings.
If you’re hopeless at writing, then your options would be to learn how to write articles yourself or hire a ghostwriter to do it for you.
But how do you know if an article that you paid $40 for, is any good?
Here’s a checklist you can use when reviewing an article writing service.
1. The Article Title
You would want your article to contain the keywords that you’re focusing on if you want it to be found on the search engines. You also need the title to be interesting and beneficial to your reader. The reader should be curious as to what your article is about.
A boring title will kill your article. Period.
Ask yourself, “Would my readers want to read the article just based on just the title?”
2. A Solid Opening
Read the first paragraph of the article. Does it have a solid opening where it continues from the title and excites the reader with what they are about to read?
People have a short attention span. If the first paragraph doesn’t tell them that the article is worth reading, then they’ll click away immediately.
3. The Appearance of the Article
When a person reads an article, the length of the paragraphs, images and amount of white space, affects their motivation to read further on. Don’t overestimate the appearance of your article!
Your reader is most likely going to read if the paragraphs are short, sentences are short, has one or two pretty pictures and has bold sub-headlines to break up the content.
All this makes the article more pleasant to read. Imagine reading this article with just text, huge paragraphs and no pictures. It will put anyone to sleep.
4. The Content
The article should contain content that is not too simplistic for its audience and not too complex. If it’s too simple, the reader will find it boring and won’t bother to find out who the author is or what they are recommending.
If it’s too complex, the reader will lose interest half way and leave your article.
What you need to focus on is interesting content which the reader can understand, use and apply with minimum effort. For more in-depth details, they can visit your website which you will mention in your resource box 
5. A Solid Closing
How you end the article is also very important. A movie with a good ending, will make it memorable. The same with an article.
At the end of the article, make sure that the readers understand what they have learned and how it benefits them. Emphasize what they have gained from your article and how they can use it to improve their lives or solve their problem.
6. Entertainment
When you’ve read the article, you need to think back and decide if it was entertaining. Did it have interesting facts? Did it make you laugh? Did it give you an a-ha moment? Was the tone of the article entertaining and kept your attention?
You would know right away after reading the article, if the content was entertaining. Even if you have breakthrough information to tell everyone, make sure it is told in an entertaining way that excites them. This is one of the skills that defines a good article writer.
7. Aim of Article Achieved?
Ask yourself, did the article achieve your goal?
For example, if you want the article to rank well for certain keywords, inspect the content and make sure that the keyword density is correct and relevant anchor text links are used.
If the aim of the article is to educate the readers on why focusing is important for time management for example, then make sure it has achieved this with you too. If it’s good enough for you, then it’s good enough for your readers.
Conclusion
Notice that I haven’t mentioned common things on the checklist such as grammar, spelling mistake and on time delivery of the articles. It is not because I don’t think they’re important but they’re common sense. They go without saying.
The points on this checklist are things which the majority of people who hire ghostwriters for their article writing, neglect. They think that if the article is delivered on time, spelling and grammar mistakes are fine, then the article is what they need.
This is a huge NO. A good article writing service will ensure that the content is appreciated by the readers, achieves its aim and help you gain respect from the market. This why some article writers charge $5 for a 500 word article and some charge $50. There is a difference.
It all boils down to what you want from the article writing service.
Information product creation is a huge obstacle for a lot of people who want to make money online.
Once you’ve managed to write an ebook and sold several copies using your persuasive sales letter, the battle to make your ebook a best seller has just begun. If your readers love the content, you can sell thousands of copies by word of mouth and with affiliates. This is why you need to write an eBook that readers love and not just something you quickly put together.
In my previous post, on how to determine if you need a copywriting service, I promised that I would tell you about my experience with hiring my first copywriter. Read on because the copywriter is the respected Michel Fortin of http://www.michelfortin.com
Unless you’re a well-known expert or have a huge army of affiliates promoting for you, people will generally buy from you after reading the salesletter on your website. So obviously, your salesletter is damn important when it comes to making sales online.
Anyone who’s been marketing online for a few months would know that article writing is one of the most talked about methods in driving traffic.
