Writing Tips

We all want to write great content online that would get some traction but we often get overwhelmed on where to start and how to write an article. We are inundated with thoughts and ideas but don’t know how to write an article that is clear and cogent and gets readers attention. So in this article I will explain on how to write an article online and the steps involved in writing an article.
The following steps help you in writing a good article for your clients or for your readers.

1. Headline

The first and foremost thing is to take care of the heading. The title of your content is the most important factor in getting your reader’s attention. Unless you have a cogent, unique and attractive headline, your readers won’t even open your article. So spend a good time in determining a clickable/click worthy article. For this you need to use adjectives, jargon to emphasize on the heading.

After you have found the perfect title , you need to use the headline analyzer tool to check if the tool grades your headline above 70. If your headline scores below 70, you must come up with different key phrase and jargon to score above 70. The more you score here, higher is the chance that your title will be clicked and read by the audience. The free tool is available online. Also if you are using WordPress, the headline analyzer comes in built. But if you are writing online content for your client/customers, then you can use the following tool to determine the headline. Below I am attaching the snapshot of free headline analyzer tool available online.

2. Structure your content

The content must contain introduction, body and conclusion

Introduction – This is the first paragraph of the content which should not be more than 150 words. Here you have to write the preamble or a brief synopsis on the topic of discussion. Use as many interrogative words and modals to hook the audience right away from the starting paragraph itself.

Body – This is the main content or the descriptive part of the content. Here you can give holistic information/ validation on the topic of discussion. The content should be easy to read and should not bore the readers.

Conclusion – You must give a clear and concise conclusion that should be appealing to the larger audience. It doesn’t matter whether they agree on your point but definitely heed your point of view. After the conclusion, you can give link to your author site/book and also your social networking sites so that the readers can find you if they want to know more related to the subject.

3. Keywords

Keywords are very important for online article. If your writing doesn’t content keywords related to your content, your article will be hard to find on the internet world. This is an important on page SEO that you need to take care. With the help of keywords and key phrases, there is high chance your article can rank online and garner more readers. The keywords are nothing but words and phrases which should be present in the headline, slug URL and body of the article. Remember not to stuff to much keywords in the article content. Approximate 3 to 5 phrases in the entire article are sufficient. The URL slug must definitely contain the keyword which is an important ranking factor as well.

4. Use Outbound links and citations in your article

Don’t forget to give outbound links to give traction to your article. Give links only to the authoritative articles which support your content. And don’t forget to mention citations in your article if you have taken from some other resources in the internet. Proper citations and quotations from other authors must be mentioned in your article. Always remember to give credit to the author you borrowed from the internet.

5. Images

Images add value to your content. People like to visually imagine a content and it gets more traction. Don’t simply download pictures from the internet and paste on your article. There are free stock photo sites from where you can use the photos for your article. Try to use your own photo for article. One important tip while you are using the free stock photo from online, remember to read the licence usage of photo from the stock photo. Don’t simply blindly download photo and use on your article.

6. Plagiarism check

This is also an important step after completion of writing the article. There are many free plagiarism checker tools in the internet to make sure your content is 100% percent unique.

7. Hemingway

This app/editor is useful for writers to check for lengthy sentences, incorrect sentence structure and grammatical errors. This app is widely used by online writers. Once you are done with your writing, you paste your writing in the Hemingway app/editor and get to see the errors and score. The less you score is actually good for your article.

Conclusion

Writing an article online for websites is different from writing a book , writing a magazine or writing for newspaper. But as an online writer, you must learn the art of writing.