An Easy Way to Write an Article

When I first started writing to promote my websites, I had to learn how to write an article. More than that, though, I had to learn how to write many articles efficiently. I realized that the money generated from each article wasn't much, so I needed many articles if I was to write my way to a livable income. I looked for ways to quickly crank out interesting articles. The following is the easiest way I found.

The "Top Ten" or "List" Article

I set the goal for myself of learning to write an article in an hour or less. My wife and I had built a website called Houses Under Fifty Thousand .com, based on our experience buying a cute house in Montana for $17,500. It has information on towns where you can still find affordable houses. I spent several hours writing and rewriting the first article to promote that website.

Then I realized I could do a "list" article on cheap towns. The keyword "cheap homes" had good search traffic, so I started with, "Cheap Homes - Six Places To Find Them." A short introductory paragraph told how and where we found a cheap home, followed by five more cheap towns, with a paragraph on each. It may have taken forty-five minutes. It's been read thousands of times, and still brings in traffic to our website years later.

How to Write a List Article

One way to learn how a basic "top ten" or "list" article is written, is to look at examples. You can do this at any article directory, or just use a search engine. Search for "ten ways to" or "ten tips for" or similar phrases - in quotation marks. Pay attention to which results grab your attention and keep you interested, and see what the author is doing to accomplish that.

You can use this technique for almost any topic. If you have a website about cats, you could write "The Six Best Foods For Cats," or "Five Cat Toys You Can Make," or "The Top Ten Cat Breeds." You simply look for any way you can take what you know and make it into a list.

If you sold incense on your site, you could have an article titled, "Incense - The Ten Most Popular Kinds." It might start with an introduction that explains why people use incense. Then it would have a list of the incenses, with a sentence or two about the qualities of each scent.

Here are some possible formats for list articles:

Ten Ways to...

The Top Ten...

Six Great Ideas for...

Top Ten Tips for...

Ten Secrets About...

Three Steps to...

The Best Ten Techniques for...

You can wrap up the article with a summary, but this isn't always necessary. Each topic is different, and you'll have to use your own judgment on this.

By the way, not only is this one of the easiest ways to put an article together, but it's also one of the favorite types of articles for readers.

To really get the clicks through to your site, let the reader know that there are more than "six ways" or "ten tips," and that they will find the others on your site (but keep this "sales pitch" in the resource box, as we'll discuss soon). Always give useful information, but remember that the whole point is to make a reader into a visitor.

I'll go into more detail on how to "tease" the reader and entice them to click through to your site in a Lesson 9. I'll also have a lot more on how to write an article in several different lessons. For now, though, here is an outline of what an online article typically consists of:

Title - 2 to 7 words.

Introduction - A sentence or two about the article.

Keywords - Three or four phrases readers will use to find your article in search engines.

Body - 5 to 10 paragraphs - about 400 to 800 words.

Authors Resource Box - Something about yourself and a link to your site.

Continues with Lesson 4 here... The Best Article Directories

Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters on the home page.

Writing Tips
Sell E-Books
Writing for Money
Writing an Article
Get Paid to Blog
How to Write Articles
Article Writing Software
How to Write Articles

Other easy ways to write an article or to produce website content will be a regular feature of my newsletter...

Note: If you went ahead and submitted an article or two after the last lesson, you may have noticed that it can be tricky at first, especially if you don't know HTML. This is why I suggested that you start with GoArticles.com. They have a system that allows for easy editing of your articles after submission.

EzineArticles.com, on the other hand, has quality control, and will only allow ten article submissions at first. Then they review your work and decide if you can be a "platinum member," with the right to unlimited submissions. This directory is the best, and you'll want that platinum membership. For this reason it's better to write an article or two (or ten) for other directories first. That way you'll really know how to write an article and properly format it before using EzineArticles.