Article marketing is about generating targeted traffic to a website. The majority of internet marketers submit their articles to Ezine Articles since they receive the most traffic and their web pages rank well on the search engines.

But if you look at the majority of the resource boxes on the website, you’ll notice that a lot of authors don’t know what they are doing. Normally they will mention what they specialize in, what their business does and then place a link to their website.

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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.

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.

This is why there is a huge market for an article writing service. But not many people have really thought about why they need articles and therefore go about doing it wrong.

Here are some common reasons for why you need articles…

Reason 1:  For back links

Within your articles you can place anchor text that links to your main website or product pages. If your articles get re-published by different websites, then in effect, you’ve managed to build a lot of back links to your website which increases your search engine visibility.

Reason 2: To build your reputation as an expert

After someone reads your article, he should find the information useful and be looking for a link in your resource box to click through to know more about you.

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Video marketing is becoming more and more popular. At first people started to question this technique since it takes time and expertise to create a video and they’re not sure if it can really deliver traffic as well as a traditional text web page.

There are 2 important things which you need to know if you haven’t dived in with video marketing yet:

1. Creating videos and uploading it to YouTube is easy. Damn easy.

If you’ve written an article, just paste the text into a PowerPoint presentation, put some nice pictures on it with a call to action at the end and you’re done.

This can take around 45 minutes for each presentation if you do it properly but it’s well worth the effort.

2. Videos generate more traffic than articles.

I’ve proven this with my own marketing material and my clients. Youtube is awesome for traffic. Embedding them on your web page also increases response and stickiness.

One of my clients had an average of 100 views per video. For his articles, the average was 30 visitors. That’s more than 3 times the traffic.

With YouTube you can also befriend other users and expose your video to more people. Having an article marketing and video marketing strategy is the key.

If you have any doubts, try it first. Just do one video, look at the results and compare it with your submitted article.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Being a freelance writer myself and running a company with article writing as one of my services, I see a lot of clients’ resource boxes and give advice on what they should change.

Well I just found out something interesting which will make your articles drive a lot more traffic to your website

Here’s how I found about this improvement

I was doing research for my client’s articles and was browsing through the articles on Ezine Directories.
I was scanning the content and all the resource boxes, gathering information on what type of products and services the writers were promoting.

After scanning through 30 or more articles, there were about 2 links which I clicked through in the resource box. This only occurred to me after a while so I searched through my bookmarks and tried to find out what links I clicked on.

What I found was quite amazing. The 2 links which I clicked on in resource boxes had the same sort of call to action which appealed to me. This was:

“For more information, click on <<>>”

Without seeming too excited, I started to implement these changes for my clients. And the result is….click thru rates increased a lot. A lot as in nearly double the average number of clicks my clients used to have.

My explanation why this simple call to action works is because the reader is attracted to the content by its title. Even if they don’t enjoy the content or glance at it, they would love to click on links that will give them more information.

People are reading articles for information. So simply telling them that you have more of what they want is enough to persuade them to click on your link.

In my tests so far, I have found that this call to action works better than offering the reader a free download to a report or video. It is probably because people are so used to clicking on the words “Click here for more information”.

My tests have not been extensive but so far, it has worked with 4 of my clients I have tested with. Being a freelance writer has helped me a lot in understanding article marketing

Try it for your niche and let me know your results.