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.

When you write an ebook or hire a ghostwriter to do it for you, the focus is on creating a valuable information product so that your market will find it useful and recommend other people to buy it.

The purpose at the end of the day is to make money online with your products and establish yourself as an authority.

But one of the mistakes that I see a lot entrepreneurs getting it wrong is naming their ebook. What your ebook is called is very important in determining how many copies you can sell.

When a reader sees a boring title which doesn’t sell them a benefit or doesn’t make them curious, they’ll quickly ignore it.

It’s like going to a bookstore to find a book on losing weight. Normally you’ll only have 2-3 books to choose from. The reason is because the title doesn’t grab you. Nearly everyone buys books based on the title unless the author is famous.

Here are some tips on what to name your ebook.

Tips On Naming Your eBook

1.  Put your keyword in the title. If your niche is in self confidence, make sure these words appear in the title.

2.  Mention a benefit. For example, Building Self-Confidence Within 7 Days. The benefit here is how quickly the book can help someone achieve their goal.

3.  An alternative to mentioning a benefit is being mysterious. For example, Magical Self-Confidence Transformation.

4.  It’s a good idea to come up with names using a domain registry so that you can get the available domain name that goes with your ebook.

5.  Use a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Tool to find out the hot words that people are searching for.

6.  Go to Amazon and read the titles in your market. Make a note of the titles which get your attention and make you want to buy them. Use similar titles for your own ebook.

Another reason why you should have a meaningful title with your keywords in them is because of the valuable back links that you will have. This will help your search engine optimization because when people mention your ebook, the keywords you are trying to rank for are displayed.

Additionally when you write articles to promote your ebook, you can create an anchor text based on the title.

Makes perfect sense right?

So before you start getting an ecover created, spend a lot of time coming up with  a good name. The time you will spend in thinking of a good name will pay handsomely for itself.

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