Article Writing How To

Article Writing How To, Help and Software

Thoughts on Article Development A properly written, humorous, topical, technical or informative article is an important ingredient to the usefulness of the Internet. The Internet is but a Library at your fingertips and is only as good as the quality of content published to it. The old saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out!” With this in mind, proper research, good article writing skills, and useful content will make this whole Internet endeavor worthwhile.

Article Format

You can well imagine that there are as many reasons to publish articles to the Internet as there are published articles. Many reasons are altruistic, but most are to drive focused traffic through the Internet, more specifically, to your website. The better your content, keywords, research and writing skills, the more likely the article will prove useful to your reader and finally direct them to the end game, or your intended result.

The Four Main Phases of Internet Article Writing:

I. Article Idea or Article Concept

II. Article Research For Article Content

III. Article Writing

SOME GENERAL THOUGHTS

IV. Article Submission and Publication

Phases Of Article Development

Phase I is the first of the four main phases in the progression of an article. It is the development of the article idea or article concept. This is the most critical step as it is where you formulate and attack the development of your article, but more importantly, it contains the strategy towards getting your desired results.

Phase II is the article research for article content. The researching and gathering of relevant, accurate information and topical keywords for the article content is crucial. It is still recommended to “hit the books,” as they say. So, here’s the rub! If all you can gather during your Internet research is poorly written, uninformed or incorrect information, then your article can and will suffer. Then, so it goes for the next person in line who researches your article for content, thought and accuracy in the development of their article. It becomes a vicious cycle of gobbledygook that is short sighted and will ultimately turn off and turn away targeted readers, the entire reason for this exercise.

Phase III contains the current and most commonly used format for writing articles. In the outline above, article writing is generally divided into five parts containing the Title, Introduction, Body, Conclusion and Resource Box.

Part 1 is an Article Title that should state in clear and interesting language what the article is about. An article title must also be topical to the content of the article, grab the reader’s attention and contain the main keyword(s) for search engine placement.

Part 2 of Article Writing is the Introduction. The first sentence of your article serves basically the same purpose as your title in the sense that it must grab the reader’s attention or imagination, so be creative with it. For example you can pose a question, state a fact or show irony, but most important is to be creative. Readers will usually read the first 3 to 5 lines of the article before determining what the article is about so spend the most time refining the article introduction.

Part 3 contains the Article Body where you present the information in a clear, concise and logical manner. For the reader this is the meat and potatoes of the essay and where the most information is gleaned. The body in effect supports the introduction and conclusion with facts, information, discussion or analysis.

Part 4 concludes your article. An Article Conclusion summarizes the information presented before it and draws a conclusion about the article. In the outline shown above, you will see that this is where you tell the reader what you told them. In fact the conclusion is a writing summary of an article. Basically you are tying all your thoughts together.

Part 5 is the Resource Box. This is where you toot your horn, but more importantly, provide links that direct people to areas on the Internet that you want them to go. Relevancy of the article’s content, if you’re linking to your Website, is very important here. Submitting an article about Home Improvement and linking it to a website where you sell Trinkets is a huge error. At some point down the road I will produce articles that explain the intelligent way to link and take advantage of the search engines.

Phase IV is Article Submission to article sites. Submitting an article is generally an easy process and currently there are many free article sites that are available to you. Unless you are reading this article on our Website, then it is located at one of the top article sites and you should heavily consider this as place for submission. Look for article sites that are ranked very well as the article links back to your Website can help improve your site’s ranking in the search engines.

Article Submission

Once an article is completed, the preferred format to submit is as a Microsoft Word document. However, there are several sites that will not accept an article written in Microsoft Word, as this software tends to place a lot of ancillary code in the background. Your best bet is to submit the article having used a simple program like Notepad for its creation. Notepad does not add any additional formatting code that can cause great difficulty to the article site. You must study the submission requirements for each Article Site.

In a few cases, the article may be rejected outright. The publisher's agreement could require that you assure the article is original without any copyright or third party intellectual property right infringements. By following the precepts discussed in this article, you have no worries. However, if you did a direct copy and paste with little or no paraphrasing, or basically plagiarized another document in whole or in part then that work would fly directly in the face of this article’s purpose. If you ever have concerns about your article, you can always run it through Copyscape. Just remember that original content is always the best.

All in all, the concept is to produce an article that has sufficient merit to warrant a readership. The content should be useful to someone in the sense that it addresses a topic that someone is interested in. An unread article will not be cited and the likelihood of it being absorbed onto other websites is reduced.

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