Article Ideas - How To Get Them
Coming up with article ideas are easy once you know a few
tricks, and articles are one of the best ways to promote your
website or blog. The following is an excerpt from Lesson Sixteen
in my ebook You Can Make Money Writing, available
at www.999articles.com There is a link at the bottom of the page
if you are interested in ordering the book or signing up for
the free course that is also offered.
Need article ideas? Hopefully you have
a website about something that you have a passion for. It is
much easier to have ideas for articles when you have a deep interest
in a subject. With or without that interest, though, there will
be times when you think, "what can I write about now?"
Here are some ways to start cranking out those articles again.
Make Your Pages Into Articles
When I first started writing articles to
promote my websites, I started from scratch, coming up with ideas
as I went along. Then one day it occurred to me that I had hundreds
of pages on my sites that could be made into articles. A quick
rewrite and they were ready to go. That made article writing
efficient! To do this properly though, be sure to read Lesson
17. It covers rewriting in detail.
There is some argument in the world of
optimization experts about targeting the same keywords in your
articles as on your pages. Many think that it doesn't make sense
to be "competing against yourself," and that you're
better off trying for traffic from a different keyword you haven't
yet targeted. I don't agree. It makes sense that you probably
shouldn't do two articles for the same keywords. If you have
the opportunity to target new searchers with new keywords (and
you always do), why not take it?
On the other hand, targeting the same keyword
for an article that you have already used for a page is a different
matter. First, there are times when you can't compete very effectively
on a given keyword on your own website. In those cases where
your page isn't showing up in the first page or two of search
engine results, there is no worry about competing against yourself,
right? But a decent article directory might get your article
targeting the same keyword into those top search results, so
why not try?
Of course, if you get no natural traffic
for a given page, you also are benefiting from the readers who
are browsing a directory with your article of similar content.
You might even link to that page, especially if you have a "list
article" and half of the list isn't included in the article.
This then, gives you a way to compete.
Also, competing against yourself isn't
that bad. For example, I just searched the keyword "dirtbagging"
(rough camping). The first of the ten results in Google was my
page on the subject. Four of the rest were my article, which
has been used on various websites. Searchers can come straight
to the my website, or might read the article on another site
and then click through to mine. In any case, half of the first
ten results give me an opportunity to get a visit - that's not
so bad.
By the way, the best keywords belong on
your website. By best, I mean those that you are most likely
to be able to compete on and that have decent search traffic.
If you use them for both pages and articles, that's fine, but
if you use a great keyword for only one or the other - make it
a page. Direct search traffic is always preferable to hoping
they click through to your site after reading your article somewhere
else.
Look At Related Keywords
Suppose you have a website on cats, and
you need ideas for articles. Using the Wordtracker keyword tool
you type in "cat" and get 100 related terms. Scanning
the list, you see that 21,200 people searched for "cat names"
last month. Maybe it's time an article on how to choose a name?
Type "cat names" into the box
(with wordtracker you can just click on the keyword), and you
see more keywords, including "popular cat names." It had 700 searches last month, and
it's an easy keyword to compete for. An introduction, two sub-headings
for "male cat names" and "female cat names,"
and a list of popular names - an article!
Try as many related words as you can think
of. A search of "pets" just now showed that 11,650
people searched for "pet training" last month. If you
have a personal story about training your cat, you have an article.
Look at those keywords, while asking yourself, "What can
I say about this?"
Lesson Sixteen covers a few more ways to generate article
ideas. To learn more go get my ebook You Can Make Money
Writing or at least go sign up for the free Online
Writing Course.
The
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