How To Write A Quality Article

How To Write A Quality Article

People hear that they can make money from blogging, well they hear that they can make great money and so they decide that they will give it a go, after all, you can create a website for as little as $60 a year. When you consider the costs of many business start ups that is a great price.

The big problem is when people start to fill their sites with content. They do not know where to start; they write a few sentences and hope that will do. At the beginning it will be hard when you are trying to find your feet. Your first posts will likely be short and not great, overtime they will develop, you will evolve into your own writing style and your posts will be better in many ways.

That is if you care, many people do not care and some do not know that they should care. Your site visitors and readers are important; you should care what you give them, if they do not like your articles and posts then they will not come back and traffic is important for your site. Returning readers is what you want, when someone returns that means they like what you do and they want to read more new stuff. This gives you a reason to carry on and can really keep your motivation at a high.

So, how do you write the perfect article?

Firstly you need a topic idea; one of the best ways to get ideas is to keep reading other people’s blog posts. You will find plenty of good ones and you will learn some new stuff. When you find some articles that you enjoyed reading and learned from then bookmark them and write down the titles in a note pad with a few bullet points and facts that you think are really important. You can also Get Educated Online from the comfort of your home, so you can have the right pointers and facts to work on this, it is easy and  fast.

Another great way to find post ideas is to carry around a notepad and jot down notes when you are watching television, chatting to friends or going for a simple walk into town. You will be surprised at what ideas you can get from everyday moments that can be turned into a relevant blog post.

Once you have a list of ideas and post titles take a piece of paper for each one and start to flesh it out with bullet points and ideas that you want to include in the post. When the ideas start to flow look for possible videos on YouTube that could be included as part of your post, also do a Google search for other articles for more information.

Now you have an idea of what to write about it is time to open up MS or whichever programme you use and start typing. It is advised to write in one of these programmes and not directly into your blog, you can edit and play with your post as much as you like and depending what plugin you use when you copy and paste the article you can keep much of the formatting from Word that you cannot get when using the blogging editor directly.

Once you start writing, keep writing and allow the words to flow, don’t stop to edit sentences, just keep writing while the words are flowing. You can edit and re write parts as you read the post after writing.

A good post can be re read and re written several times as an ongoing process, the idea is to make your posts as perfect as possible for your site visitors. Occasionally grammatical errors and spelling mistakes will pop up in a post now and then but the idea is to eliminate as many mistakes as humanly possible so that they are only ‘now and then’.

You need to respect your readers and site visitors and they will not appreciate sloppily written articles crammed full of errors and mistakes. You will also have many readers from different backgrounds and countries who will have different levels of reading skills and understanding of language so your posts need to be understandable by most people.

You should write your posts as if you were writing for a child or a new beginner. Not everyone will understand deep technical language, avoid adding big complicated words to sound clever, trust me it will have a negative effect on your blog readers.

Unless you are blogging about quantum physics or biology then you cannot avoid using words that are big and complicated but then your readers would expect that and need to know the proper terminology if they are learning from you.

If you are planning to incorporate any pictures with your post it is a good idea to put in picture markers as you write. As an example, you know that you want to include a picture of a people walking through a shopping centre, when you get to the area of the post you want to place the image add the markers…

[Picture 1: People Walking Through Shopping Centre]

Similar markers can be placed for any videos you want to add to the post. I would add the information similar to that of the picture marker and if I had the embed code I would add that in brackets underneath so I have the code and I knew exactly where to put it when I come to add the post to my blog.

A post needs to be helpful, useful, educational and factual but that doesn’t mean your post should be devoid of personality. Far from it, your posts need to have personality and they need to feel as if they are written by you and not a robot. Adding thought and opinion is good as long as you do not go overboard and become insulting or controversial. Some controversy is good but it can be dangerous if done wrong.

Ideally you should write as if you were talking to a friend of a friend, imagine you were at a friend’s house warming party, there will be people who you know and you will meet people for the first time, people that your friend knows really well but you don’t.

During the party you talk to these people but you wouldn’t talk to them the same way as you would your close friend. The slang and obscenities would be kept to a minimum until you knew them better but you would also be friendly. That is exactly how you should write.

Of all of the writing tips I would recommend it would be to be yourself, add your personality and write as if you were talking to a friend and make sure the people who have read your posts leave knowing something they didn’t know before.