by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 28, 2009

How can we go about writing better articles and getting them more views and traffic at the same time? There is no doubt that the Internet is growing and becoming more competitive with every day that passes, so it is becoming more and more crucial that we utilise every ability and tool at our disposal if we are to generate that much needed through traffic.

The first step, once we have decided what we are to write upon, is to think of a catchy title for our article, assuming of course that we are writing to a site which permits us to do so. It should catch the reader's eye and make them want to find out more. Imagine someone scrolling through page after page of Google responses - how can you make your article stand out?

There is a maxim that every good story should have a good beginning, middle and end. That is equally true with articles. Our first paragraph is therefore our introduction. The visitor took the bait we offered as our title - we now have to make them swallow it. This paragraph should be fairly brief and to the point, giving a very simple overview of what is to come.

As we write the article, stay relevant to your topic. Don't wander off at a tangent and discuss sub-issues - they will keep for a later article. Provide the information that your reader is looking for in a logical and precise fashion.

Keywords or tags are words which are pertinent to your topic and feature regularly throughout your article. Be aware, however, that inserting such words too often in your text is off-putting for the reader. The article begins to sound corny and becomes repetitive and your readers will become frustrated and much less likely to either visit any of your articles again or recommend you to a friend. I notice this mistake made frequently on Helium and I will be perfectly honest and state that I do not favour such articles well when I am performing this site's rating process!

Linking from your article to other relevant articles or websites is always a good idea, for two reasons. It gives your reader the opportunity of finding out more about your subject without having to go back to Google or another search engine and it also boosts your standing with the Google spiders crawling your article.

The concluding paragraph of your article should be precisely that - a brief summing up of what you have discussed and perhaps a suggestion as to where your reader can find out more.

Once we have published our article, we then have to promote it. No matter how good it is, if no one knows its there, our views and traffic are simply not going to happen. The first step here is therefore to add it to the popular bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.icio.us. There are of course a great many more. We have created our outbound links, so we need also to create inbound ones.

If the topic of your article is one which you know a lot about - and it should be! - you now have the opportunity to write another article on the same subject, from a different perspective perhaps, and link from it to your first one. Associated Content is but one good site upon which we can do this.

If, of course, we have a great deal of material on our subject, we can look at building a page upon it on either Squidoo or Hub Pages, earn more money from those sources and link of course to our articles. Remember, though, never duplicate content - fresh content at all times is vital.

Social bookmarking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Yuwie also afford us great opportunities to promote our work.

These are but some of the many ways in which we can promote our articles online to get them more views and traffic. I very much hope that you can see the value in them and will try them out for yourself with great success.

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