Almost all industries benefit from article writing; some may benefit through writing quality content, through blogs and articles, while others may benefit from other types of article writing services. An article that is written well provides insights and useful information to your customers in exchange for their attention towards your brand.
Eventually, this benefits your company by developing customer loyalty and satisfaction, which may lead to greater conversions in the long run. This may have sounded very appealing to you, and it is, so let’s get into article writing.
What is Article Writing?
A piece containing valuable information that is researched upon, written, and distributed to the intended audience is an article. Articles can be written for numerous forums, like magazines, websites, and newspapers. However, brands usually benefit from article writing through their content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy provides the audience and prospects with information about brands that are significantly valuable, which motivates the readers and the prospects to engage with the brand through different call-to-actions, like buying from them, signing up to their newsletter, or any other CTA.
6 Main Objectives of Article Writing
The main intention of article writing is to deliver the value and thoughts to your intended audience while feeding them information regarding your business, product, or service. While there may be several objectives for article writing, a couple of them have been listed below.
1. Interest
Writing an article is all about what you intend to write and what your niche is. You can determine your niche by the interest of your product or business you have in any topic. Article writing brings your business and product into the limelight to make the intended audience develop an interest in your business or product.
2. Information
Writing articles to address the readers’ understanding is another purpose of articles. This helps break down and convert complex pieces of information for the audience to understand better and interpret them. Businesses may use such articles to make their products familiar to users. You can write such articles with the aim of educating readers about various issues prevailing in society while spreading awareness too.
3. Suggestions
You must have come across columns on various websites or articles that offer people pieces of advice and suggestions. This is another reason for article writing. Such articles help people with various pieces of advice regarding personal or professional lives, and even legal or business advice too. Articles offering suggestions and advice are fairly popular too.
4. Influence
There are numerous articles online written to influence the readers to buy a certain product or avail a service. Some of these articles are sponsored by companies to various influencers to convert their audience into the business’s customers. In contrast, the others may be written by the company to convert visitors to customers.
5. Attain Attention
Article writing to achieve as much attention as possible, to promote your business or product is another reason why you might want to write an article. Attaining attention is vital to rank higher on the search engine result page and to boost conversion rates for your business.
6. Engage with Customers
Another objective of article writing is to engage and connect with readers. And this is vital to both the customers and the business for each of them to get to know each other. This can break the ice and create mutual trust and understanding between both parties. It can also help the readers understand that there is a human at the other end.
From writing to convey a subject professionally or to writing an article to practice your writing and enhance your skills, there are several reasons why people write articles and publish them, either online or on paper.
Article Writing Format
The format of an article is of utmost importance to enhance readability and conversions. Following discussed are a few steps:
1. Title
A title helps the reader decide they want to read your article or not. It basically provides the reader with an idea about what your article could potentially be about and what they can expect. A title sets the bars and expectations. Your title must range between fifty to sixty characters, ensuring that search engines like Google or Bing can display your title over their result pages.
Furthermore, it also helps to ensure that your article is attractive enough for a prospect to read and engage with it. A few ways to make the title of your article further enticing is by sharing, answering a question, or adding numbers. Some examples of such titles include; 10 ways to improve your conversion rate, or how can you develop a complete content marketing strategy?
2. Insert Your Name
Inserting the name of your brand or company can help the prospect identify it as a separate entity or humanize your business. This can benefit in creating stronger and better relationships while creating a brand community centered on your content.
This can further urge your audience to pass on comments regarding your articles, start a conversation, voice concerns, question material. And to build further credibility and reliability, you may even share a writer’s profile either at the end of the beginning of the article to highlight the expertise of the writer regarding the topic.
3. Introduction
The introduction of your article explains to the readers what they can find in your article and why they should consider your information fascinating. This is where the reader decides whether they will continue to read your article or click next.
To make them continue reading, you may benefit from some strategies, like adding compelling narratives detailing an issue while promising the intended readers a demonstration of how to fix it. Some other tips include:
- Keeping it short – write a couple of sentences, preferably three to four, to form an introduction for your readers, explaining what they can expect of the article. To keep them captivated, make use of some suspense to evoke curiosity.
- Straightforward Sentences – your sentences shouldn’t be long, instead must be easy to understand, simple, and not too wordy. Moreover, using present tense would be ideal, and don’t use filler words like even, etc., to enhance the quality of your article.
- The first body – before you write the introductory paragraph, write the entire body of your copy. This will help you formulate an even better introduction.
- Fulfil promises – only write what you can deliver. If you can properly explain to your audience the topics and points you’ve mentioned and promised, then only mention them in the introduction; if you don’t do so, you may lose credibility and the readers’ trust. Because they’re only here to read what you’ve promised.
4. Body
Throughout the body, include several subheadings that reflect the topic of your article. For example, if you’re writing about how to get a job, then include subheadings like ‘when should you get a job,’ ‘what sort of a job should you look for based on your education and experiences,’ ‘how to write an effective and unique resume,’ ‘how to ace a job interview,’ ‘how to negotiate your salary offer.’ And then, you can further explain each subheading through unique information.
The number of subheadings may vary as per your topic; however, ensure that you come up with at least two. Adding subheadings is an excellent opportunity to break up long boring paragraphs and make your article exciting and interesting. This can even enhance readability, decrease bounce rates and boost conversion rates.
5. Conclusion
To summarize your entire article, restate the most important points of your entire article in conclusion. This gives the readers a better view of your article and adds more information, in case they skimmed the article or missed out on important points. It also helps reflect the main points of the article with the topic.
It’s ideal for adding a call-to-action to the concluding paragraph, and this time a straightforward one, urging the reader to perform the intended action at the moment. You can create a sense of urgency by incentivizing your reader and adding an action verb like ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Hurry.’ Or refer to a couple of ideas below:
- Schedule a Call Today!
- Download Now at a Discount
- Sign Up Today and Receive a Promo Code
- Hurry and Buy Now, Before the Offer Ends.
Step by Step Guide for Article Writing
We’ve put together the ultimate guide on writing a rich-quality article with high conversion rates to enhance your business's content marketing strategy and product quality articles.
1. Topics
Determine a topic that you’re going to base your article upon, preferable something that tempts your intended audience, while something that allows you to explain about your business.
To pick the best topic that checks all boxes, start by forming a list of topics that are engaging, and then determine the relevancy of each to your intended readers. If you’re going through a creative block and want to add more to your list, perform research about keywords that resonate with your intended audience.
This will help you come up with a list of articles that are highly ranked on the search engine. You can cut off options from the list that aren’t relevant to your audience and business and are too difficult to understand.
In the event that you’re facing trouble searching for keywords, you can always make use of numerous keywords research tools available online, like Ahrefs.
After performing the research and concluding upon the list of topics, its ideal to create a content schedule to help identify the best times and days to publish which article. Moreover, this can even help impose a deadline upon each article, ensuring that they are consistently posted.
2. Research
After you’ve come up with a list of article topics, its crucial that you conduct research regarding each of them; the research will help you in delivering content that is rich in quality and accurate, too, to your intended audience.
For example, if you’re going to write an article about how to take care of indoor plants, start by searching the selected keywords on a search engine like Google or Bing, and have a look at high-ranked articles because that is where you aim to be. Note down the headings and subheadings, look around for any other information they have covered, and use all of this to form a draft for your article.
You can conduct additional research, too, by giving evidence to aid and make your main points more credible and authentic. Such pieces of evidence can include:
- Stats and facts
- Quotes
- Definitions
- Current Affairs
- Facts from newspapers
- Unique and Fresh Data
3. Drafting
With all the research, you must have gathered enough data to form a draft of the article. Start by creating a rough draft to give your ideas and information a structure. This can help you form a direction about where your article is directed.
These ideas and information will lay a foundation for your article, and the stronger the foundation, the stronger the article. Jot down ideas and information that you must include in your article. Create a separate file for your research; to refer back to it and link it to your article.
4. Read It Out Loud
After you’re done drafting the first draft of your article, please give it a loud read from the starting to the conclusion. Keep referring to your research from the separate file to match your tone. For instance, if you are doing article writing for a tourism company, you would want to highlight the benefits of traveling all year.
While reading the article aloud, correct any errors you encounter while focusing on the sentence structure and flow. Keep making notes to add a human element to your article, making it more engaging for the readers and staying connected until the end because ensuring that your readers stick till the end can boost conversions and chances of the reader performing the CTA.
For instance, if your reader clicks on a CTA in the article, it increases the chances that they may further explore other options or review your products or services. There’s no harm in asking for help; reach out to an editor friend for additional edits and insights to enhance the quality of your article, adding more conciseness and clarity.
5. Final Edits
After making edits based on the previous step, read aloud your article once again to understand the tone and humanization of your article. Next, make any further edits if required to further enhance your article’s quality. And in case you’re following a format or a style, make sure it aligns with it as well.
Tips for Writing a Good Article
While it can be easy to follow a guide for article writing, that may not be enough; ensure that it is rich in quality and engaging enough to keep the reader connected and perform the CTA until the end. Presenting to you are some tips on how to write an article that is compelling, high in quality, and engaging.
- Aim for rich snippets – a snippet is a concise piece of information that shows up top on the first page of the search engine’s result page. It gives a small insight into the entire article regarding your query. If you’re able to come up with keywords from your article that are searchable, use them to create a rich snippet as a foundation for the kind of content you’re writing.
- Add visuals – adding visuals such as videos and pictures can make your readers stay connected with your article. Infographics can deliver more information while adding context to already present information or boost the clarity of your article.
- Create audience personas – a persona is an imaginary depiction of the intended readers. Developing one can help you with figuring out the tone and style of your content and making sure that what your write attracts the intended audience.
- Remodel your research – the research that you conducted for your article can be repurposed for content other than your article for your website. You can recycle the information you gathered to develop other content like podcasts, case studies, or eBooks.
How Do Articles Work with Content Marketing?
Brands or companies often draft many resource articles as part of their content marketing strategy at once. But before beginning to write the article, companies start with keyword research. Keywords are specific words and phrases that prospects use to search for their target, and they’re most times related to the business or industry.
For example, as part of his content marketing strategy, a publisher would come up with articles such as; a guide to publishing for the first time, drafting an engaging story, or writing a new York times best-seller.
Every one of the articles will attract a certain kind of reader to your website. Through call-to-action elements placed throughout the article, you can persuade a prospect into engaging with your firm. CTAs may include placing a call, downloading a guide, or reading and engaging over other articles on your website.
Do you find it exhausting to produce high-quality articles consistently? Why not outsource your requirements to Writing Services Hub instead? Their team of professional writers and editors know all the ins and outs of producing excellent articles. Get in touch today!