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.

Finally back with my ghostwriting service after the Chinese New Year.

A whole week of relaxing and not doing anything is nothing to be ashamed of.

But back at the office, I have to pay my debt. All the orders for ghostwriting are piled up. The money is paid but the work’s not started yet

Now that everything’s back to normal, I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a client.

Basically she told me that she had nightmares working with the previous ghostwriter and it wasted her time and money. She paid $200 for 50 articles.

That works out to be $4 per 500 word article. I would never write for that price.

Anyway, the articles were delivered on time — which is excellent.

But the quality sucked big time.

Here’s a sniff of one of the articles:

“Being environmentally friendly is one of the advantages of doing good things for the environment. If one wants to be green to the environment, there are many chances”.

The words are in English but it sure hell doesn’t make any sense.

This is the problem with offering ghostwriting services. People expect you to charge a low price, deliver quality and on time.

And when they come across someone delivering garbage to them, they start screaming and yelling.

There are hundreds of stories where hopeful ghostwriting projects have turned into disasters.

Here’s some tips on how to avoid them.

There are 5 indicators that the freelance writer is going to give you a nightmare.

1. He’s offering his writing services at shockingly cheap rates

2. When you communicated with him, he had difficulty understanding your needs

3. He was slow with his response to your questions

4. He couldn’t give you advice on your articles such as the title and keywords

5. His websites look pretty……Pretty awful.

If you see or experience any one of the above, hold on your cash.

Chances are, you’re dealing with a non-professional ghostwriting who is about to drain your time and money.

The golden rule when outsourcing your information product to a ghostwriter is to make sure they are experienced internet marketers who understands selling online. — This is a big help.

So following the above set of guidelines, you are now much better prepared when hiring a ghostwriter.

For more information on ghostwriting services, visit
http://www.eliteghostwriters.com/infoproducts.html

Here’s an article which I wrote a few weeks ago and is on the Ezine Articles as the one of the most viewed in the last 90 days.

You can check out the link here ==> Create A Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters

Below is the actual article I wrote.

How to Create a Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters
By Alan Cheng, Elite Ghostwriters

Create information products to solve people’s problems is one of the most profitable and easiest online business to be in. It’s much cheaper than setting up a traditional brick and mortar business. A digital information product doesn’t need you to keep an inventory and you profit the full 100% for every product you sell. Here’s a business plan of how to start this business.

1. What Information Products To Sell?

The best type of information products to sell is ebooks, where the content is delivered in a PDF format. However, instead of creating information products to sell in different niches, you need to focus on one niche. Make this decision on what niche you want to focus on before proceeding further.

For example, in the self-help niche, you can create information products on public speaking, self confidence, anxiety, anger control, build better relationships etc…

2. Getting Ideas

Since this is a business you’re running, you need to be serious. You need to study the niche and become an expert. Go to fourms and understand what problems people have. Read magazines and see what topics are related to your niche. Read newspapers and see what relates to your business.

If you do this, you will should have no problem coming up with ideas on what information products to create. Make a list of ideas regularly and choose the best one to start working on when it’s time to create a new information product.

3. Create The Information Product

Your next step is to create your information product. If you haven’t written an ebook before, go and buy an ebook from your competitors and see how they layout the ebook and the content that’s inside.

Do some research online and write your own information product. Make it something you’re proud to sell. Start off by writing your own information product first. You can hire a ghostwriter to do this task for you later on when you see how the business works.

Alternatively, hire a ghostwriter right away if you absolutely hate writing or you don’t have the time for it.

4. Packaging

This is what makes your information product sell. People will want to buy your product if the packaging is good. This means the design of the website needs to look professional and your sales copy needs to be convincing.

If you have no experience in writing sales copy and if you are not good at creating graphics, get them outsourced. This is a must!

As I said, it is the packaging that will make prospects buy from you. Some ghostwriters are experienced in creating information products online. Try to find one that will deliver a complete service including the sales letter and website design as well as ghostwriting the ebook.

5. Getting Traffic

Once your product is ready, it is time to drive traffic to it. Here are 3 ways how you can drive traffic to your website to test the response.

1. Write articles

Write about 10 good articles on your niche that is related to your information product. Again, if you don’t like writing, you can outsource this to your ghostwriter. Submit these articles to article directories and ezines.

The articles will get you backlinks to rank your website higher in the search engines and get visitor to your website. Articles are excellent in increasing your exposure.

2. Blog and Forum Commenting

Make a list of blogs and forums which have good traffic and are related to your niche. Take time to comment on them regularly with a link to your website.

Offer valuable advice and don’t advertise your information product otherwise people will think you’re a spammer. Just have a link to your website. This will enable you to “steal” some of the traffic from other websites.

3. Pay Per Click

Use pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN. Create some ads and drive traffic to your website. Monitor how well your information product sells.

6. Create an Affiliate Program

Create an affiliate program for your information product either by submitting it to Clickbank or use PayDotCom. Let people know they can promote your information product for commissions of 50% or more.

7. Collect Your Contacts

Always collect email addresses with everyone who comes in contact with you – Your visitors, your affiliates and your customers.

8. Repeat

Now you can just repeat the whole process with a new information product that focuses on the same niche.

However, once you’ve created the information product, you can email to the list which you have. The prospects and customers may buy this product from you if the previous one was good. Affiliates will want to promote your new product since they will earn more commissions.

The more information products you create, the bigger your 3 lists will get. After several information products you may have several thousand people on your list. Sending an email to them about your new product could produce thousands of dollars without doing any promotion of your own.

Following the business model above, if you sold an information product for $37 and 1,000 members of your list bought from you, that’s $37,000 in sales instantly. Don’t forget that your product will continue to sell as long as your website is there. The critical success factor is the professional ghostwriter you hired to create your information products.

About the author
Download the report How To Build Your Own Information Products Business at create information products. If you want to outsource your information product creation, visit hire a ghostwriter – Alan Cheng, CEO of Elite Ghostwriters