Archive for the ‘Article Marketing’ Category

Writing articles is a great way to promote your affiliate business. How can you make sure, however, that you get your message through to your readers? Here are 6 tips to help you make your articles easy to read.

1. Open your article with a statement about a situation. Next, pose a problem that arises from that situation. And finally, tell the reader you have a solution. This is a good way to introduce the topic, so it can also be used as your separate summary text (where that is required).

2. Use bullets or numbered lists. They break up blocks of text into definite sections that are visually obvious. And, people just love lists of things – they appear to be so organized.

3. Try to avoid complicated or high-sounding words. Keep the whole flavour of your articles simple and to-the-point. If you use words that some people are not familiar with, you will lose them. They may not even make it to your resource box at the end of the article. And remember, your resource box is where your affiliate link is. They definitely need to make it to there!

4. Keep your sentences short. Short sentences have much more impact than long ones. Always look at the length of sentences when you review your draft article. If any sentences go for more than 20 words, see if you can shorten them. You will often find words or concepts that are unnecessary and can be removed. If any of your sentences go over 40 words, apply some major surgery. Be ruthless!

5. The next thing to look at is paragraphs. Right – you guessed it – keep them short. When you review your finished article, there is a trick you can try. Half close your eyes and just look at the pattern that the blobs of paragraph text make on the page. Do you see one that seems too big? OK – make 2 paragraphs out of it. In fact, it is often good to have an occasional one-line paragraph. It breaks the page up nicely.

6. If appropriate, give a live example; some little story that makes the point. I once gave one of my draft articles to a 12 year old to read. She stopped halfway through and asked me what the word ‘retribution’ meant. I told her it meant ‘payback’ and she said, “Why didn’t you say that?” See what I mean?

The way people read text on a computer screen is different to the way they read printed text on a page. If you are reading a book, you are generally quite happy to settle down to read page, after page, after page of solid text.

Reading text on a computer screen, however, seems to be a much more hasty occupation. We want to get to the gist of the data as fast as possible. Think about how you react to opening a web page that is just one big solid block of text. Ugh! But if it is broken up into short paragraphs with some bullets and/or numbered sections, we feel a lot more comfortable about reading it.

Neil Clark writes articles on Affiliate Markering. See more articles here on Affiliate Marketing. You can also see many more down-to-earth tips and techniques on affiliate marketing, including video turorials. Just go to http://www.NewStyleRevenue.com.  Article Source