Essay Online

Anyone who wants to make money online with their own website should learn how to write articles because “content is king”. If you want your website to appear in top positions in the organic search engine results, you will need to make sure it contains plenty of pages of unique, valuable content.

If you are not accustomed to writing, you probably think you would not be able to write worthwhile articles for publication. If you are really unable to write your own articles, you could employ a ghost writer to write articles to order or you could invest in PLR (Private Label Rights) articles. Having articles ghost-written to your order is the better solution but can be expensive.

If your budget won’t stretch to hiring a ghost-writer, buying good PLR articles would be your only real option. There are two points to note here:

1. They must be good PLR articles, the more expensive kind which are sold on a limited edition basis. Don’t waste your money on cheap PLR articles that are offered for sale to thousands of people and which read as if they had been written by a drunken foreigner.

2. PLR articles should not be used just as they come, they should be re-written to at least some extent (25% change to the content at the minimum, although more is better) but, of course, if you don’t want to do any writing at all, this is not really going to be the answer for you.

It is far better to learn how to write articles, and I believe almost anyone with normal literacy skills should be capable of producing good articles with a little effort and some practice.

Why do people assume they can’t write articles? The main reason is that writing articles is an alien activity for most people once they have left school or university. Most of us never have to write anything longer than a text message or a greeting in a birthday card, and writing articles is a skill we have to learn from scratch. This is where younger people (particularly if they are still students) have the advantage: they are quite used to essay writing for school or college, so they can easily adapt to writing articles.

If you are up for the challenge of learning how to write articles, there is no shortage of resources to help you: just doing a simple search online will locate numerous articles on the subject of writing in general and writing ezine articles in particular. You can also download (free of charge) my book, Ezine Article Writing - 10 Steps To Success, from my website. You can work through all 10 steps at your own speed but, first of all, I would recommend studying the chapter about how to structure an ezine article. Once you understand how to structure an article, and have completed your first article, becoming proficient at article writing is just a matter of practicing.

The hardest article you will ever have to write is article number one.

If you are a webmaster you will know that writing articles for publication in ezines is an excellent way to get free publicity for your website. One thing that holds many would be writers back is that they don’t think they will be able to find enough to write even on a subject they know well. Webmasters who have never written an article before tend to feel their minds go blank at the suggestion of writing for publication. One of the most common reasons for not writing articles is that people do not think they will be able to write enough about a topic. This worry is usually overcome during the writing process but, even if you run out of words too soon, there are a few useful tricks you can use to increase your word count.

Most article directories will not accept an article consisting of fewer than 500 words; the most suitable length for an article is between 500 and 700 words. Let’s go for 500 words for our first attempt. That might sound a lot but, if you look at the structure of most articles you will see that they are broken down into three sections: introductory paragraph, main content and closing paragraph. In turn, the main content will be broken down into 3-5 paragraphs.

If you plan your article to have three paragraphs of main content, you only need to find 100 words to write in each paragraph and that is a far easier goal to think about than finding 500 words. When you write the article, you obviously won’t have exactly 100 words in each paragraph but this rule of thumb gives you something to aim for. Decide in advance on the sub-topic of each of the main content paragraphs, you can give them subheadings if appropriate, otherwise just use the sub-topics to plan your structure.

To get a feel for structure, let’s look at an idea for an article. Our subject can be planting spring bulbs and our plan will look something like this:

Introduction - general information eg about types of bulbs available for spring flowering, type, varieties available, colors available, best time to plant, benefits of using bulbs in preference to other forms of planting.

Para 1 - choosing the right bulbs for particular situations eg shaded ground, containers, mixed planting, indoor displays etc.

Para 2 - planting techniques e.g. choosing growing medium for containers, choosing containers, depth to plant different species, color schemes

Para 3 - general care e.g. watering, when to cut down, propagation, naturalizing

Closing - brief summary of topics covered or something along the lines of “if you follow this care guidance, your bulbs will provide a colorful display year after year”.

In this plan our closing paragraph is very brief but there should be no problem in writing well over 100 words for the first paragraph. In fact, if you are a bulb expert, you could write several articles based on each of the sub-topics.

If you feel you need to write an article on a particular subject but really run out of things to say, there are a couple of simple ways to bring your word count up to the level required by the article directories. Make it a rule, however, that you never use artificial padding to inflate your word count. The trick is to add words that enhance the value of your article, not just puff it up. These are legitimate ways of boosting your word count:

1. Add a sub-title to the article and use sub headings (if appropriate) for each paragraph.

2. If you use acronyms or initials, place the full term in brackets after the abbreviation. eg if you are talking about PPC, add “(this stands for Pay Per Click advertising)” after the abbreviation to add seven extra words.

3. Use quotations or statistics. Some articles can be uplifted by the use of a famous quotation. Inserting the quotation and author name adds several words but you can expand this by adding a brief biographical note about the author eg “the famous Russian metaphysical poet”. If the article is not suited to the insertion of quotations, you might be able to add an interesting statistic. The information together with details of its source will add more words.

If you follow the steps set out above, you should find it comparatively easy to write an article of sufficient length for Ezine publication.