Your Own Online Magazine
Make Money Online As A Writer/Blogger
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Niches To Write In
How To Use The Keyword Tool
Creating Knock-Out Titles
Multiple Article Titles In A Blink!
Chapter 2 - Tools
Dragon Naturally Speaking
Visual Thesaurus
MindManager Pro
Inspiration
Rack And Write
Mozilla Firefox
OpenOffice
Chapter 3 - Lists
A Simple Word List
Figuring Out Word Lists From Scratch
A More Complex Word List
Research With Word Lists
Chapter 4 – The Big “G”
The Overall Plan For Research Time
Specifics To Speed Up Searching Google
Chapter 5 – Advice For Writing
How To Pull Your Readers In By The Seat Of Their Pants
How To Leave Them Satisfied In The End 35
Chapter 6 – Connecting With Your Visitors ...
Act Natural, Even If You're Coding
Promote Your Site
Make It Pretty
Chapter 1 – Niches To Write In
As we mentioned earlier, the Google Keyword Tool is one way to help you identify topics through researching interesting keywords. In this chapter, we'll walk you through how to use the Keyword Tool to get the best results. It's not just a matter of sitting there thinking up words, but actually using the tool to think them up for you.
However, that's not the only way to really ramp up your potential topic appeal. The #1 way to make your topics appealing to a wide audience is to have a knock-out title. Yes, that's right, the first step of identifying topics starts with titles and the search engines weight these heavily in their search engine algorithms. So, while you can use the Keyword Tool to help you locate words to use in your title, to give your articles some Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the real way to make them profitable is to make them grab the reader as well as the search engine.
Finally, even having a good idea of what topics you want to address, you still might have to think up multiple articles for the same topic. That's where a tool called Rack and Write Mixer can help you generate titles from various disjointed phrases and power words that you have thought up. This way, it takes a little less time to brainstorm potential topics and they are targeting all of the elements of good Internet marketing too.
How To Use The Keyword Tool
We've talked a little about the Keyword Tool already, but now we will go into the details of how to use this tool to start generating titles that make your topics profitable and optimized for maximum exposure.
Set It Up For The Proper Language
One of the first things you should do is to set up the tool for whatever country and language your major audience happens to be. You can find out what your biggest audience is regionally by checking the administrative panel of your website for the makeup of countries visiting your site. This is important, even for all English language sites because even English is spoken differently around the world. People in the UK will visit a site and see different spellings and instead of realizing that you are an American company, they might think you are just not a very good speller, and thus unprofessional. So, try to suit the tool to the language you want to highlight most.
At the very top of the tool you will see a sentence that says: “Results are tailored to English, United States.” There is a link next to that that simply says, “Edit.” Choose the link and change the main language and country, if necessary.
Search Descriptive Words Or Phrases
The tool can search three different ways, based on a keyword or phrase, based on a URL, or based on some content. For this section, we'll concentrate on choosing to search by descriptive words or phrases by making sure that radio button is selected. Next, you want to enter the word or phrase that you've brainstormed to start the process of finding other ideas or words that might work for you. You will need to type in the letters in the capcha facility that keeps spammers off the site, but it doesn't do anything to your search results.
After you get the results back, you can search through the list and look at the competition for the keyword or phrase, the approximate search volume for the month, and the average search volume. In general, what you want to find is a word that has a low level of competition with a high search volume.
Of course, that's nearly impossible to find these days as advertisers are very savvy. But, you can at least get a good idea of which ones are worth trying to use. If you use something with a high advertiser's competition value and a high search volume, the odds of being in the top search results are practically non-existent because major players are hogging the traffic on those.
There are other search metrics that you can add to your list after it is generated. You have to use the drop-down box that says,”Choose columns to display” to add other columns. One other column that is great to see in the results list is Estimated Avg. CPC, which gives you an idea of the payout associated with the keyword or phrase in the Google Adwords system. Using low competition words with high CPC values is one way to generate more Google Adwords dollars on your own sites, as SEO articles will cue the Google server to serve up ads related to what's on your page. If it sees high-paying words, the ads served that people can have the opportunity to click are often also high-paying ads.
If you find some additional keywords in the results that lead you to new keywords, don't be afraid to pull them out of the list and run them alone in the Keyword Tool to see what comes up. You will find this helps you to brainstorm different ways to find words for your topic title that are going to bring in traffic and money to your sites.
Search Web Page URL
Another way to use the Keyword Tool to analyze the keywords being use on another web page. This is a great way to generate keywords off competitor's sites without too much effort. If you know of sites similar to your own that are already doing a great job attracting traffic, then you should use this tool to find out what keywords they are using.
The way you do that is to switch the radio button from descriptive words or phrases to “website content.” It will then return a results list that will be sorted in groups by whatever the major keyword or phrase used happens to be. This is a very easy way to get a list of usable keywords, but do realize that keywords campaign change frequently as new trends are identified.
Generate Keywords For Already Written Articles
Maybe you've written articles already, but they're not generating much attention. You can still use the tool to help you optimize the articles and change the titles. All you do is choose the “website content” radio button and use the link under the box for the URL to add your text into a box instead. Then, the tool will go through the topic and suggest keywords to use in it. All you have to do is change some words here and there and add a different title to get these stale articles to become stars in your writing lineup.
Just remember that you can't put duplicate content on your website, or Google will penalize you. It doesn't understand that you wrote the same articles, only that they appear plagiarized because more than one copy shows up. So, be sure to make the new articles sufficiently different so that you aren't penalized by Google, or remove the old copies and replace them with new ones.
Creating Knock-Out Titles
Now that you understand the importance of researching keywords and how to do it, we'll begin to get started creating knock-out titles. The first rule of thumb is that the first three to five words in the title carry the most weight with the search engines. They will determine the success of your article for the most part. So, it's important that they contain some of the keywords and also some power words to the interest of people who are surfing the web. After all, if you just wrote for search engines - let's be honest - no one would
want to read your articles. You need something in there to make the titles interesting to readers too!
As with most marketing, the way to sell something is to invoke an emotional response first, followed by a justification for buying into a particular product. The same is true when you are writing to attract attention. You want to create titles that have an emotional draw to them, but also don't forgo the logical reason why someone should take the time to read your writing. And, of course, you have to include the keywords too.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it's not!
All you really need is a good Thesaurus. You will take the same old titles you think up and kick them up a notch by finding powerful words that have an emotional effect on your reader. For instance, check out any marketing book and you will see that some words have a higher emotional value than others and sell your products better. These words are things like super, improved, gold, platinum, etc. Well, you can use a Thesaurus to kick-start the brainstorming process to get words in your title that have a more direct emotional appeal. And, try to find action verbs that really engage the readers senses and makes your title come alive.
If you have the money, you should invest in a very good program called Visual Thesaurus. It not only gives you alternative words for your titles, but also lets you drill down those alternatives to find even more words that might work for you. Eventually, you will start to develop a list of power words that you can use over and over again with great results!
Chapter 2 - Tools
As you are probably starting to notice, using different tools can really impact your productivity. Speed Writing isn't just about how fast you can type, it's also about the many technical aides that are available now due to the power of modern electronics. Yes, many of them cost money to get, but they also end up being a great investment that can pay you back by freeing up additional time, and some will even help maintain your sanity and health too as you start to mass produce articles for the Internet.
So, without delay, let's get started discussing the great products out there that can boost your productivity into the stratosphere!
Dragon Naturally Speaking
Once you start to type article after article, maybe an e-book in between, you might start feeling the beginning symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. This is a very serious disorder that affects the tendons in your hands and can cause a great deal of pain. It can keep you off the keyboard for long periods of time too! So, getting a program that saves your wrists while it increases your writing speed is really a great investment for you as a content developer.
This program, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, is a godsend for Internet marketers who may have a good idea of what they want to say, but have very poor typing skills. It allows them to speak and have the program type the spoken words into a word processor for you. It may take a while to get used to, but the newer version has about a 99% accuracy rate. You will still need to proofread your work before you send it, but generally that makes it even easier to do. If you type something, you will notice that reading it over for grammatical errors is harder for the writer, and that's why people generally hand off their work to others to proofread. But, if you speak the
words, you're eyes will see the words as new and won't be as likely to filter out the mistakes when you proofread.
If you can't imagine how much this program can speed up your writing, think about this. Nuance.com, the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, estimate that people typically type less than 40 words per minute, but can speak up to 120 words per minute. That's three times faster! So, if you get into the hang of using this program, you will have the potential to be three times faster than normal!
Now, that isn't the only benefit you get with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10. You can also search the web much quicker by using web commands to do your surfing. In fact, you can even create word commands that allow you to insert blocks of texts or images into your documents. This is particularly effective for inserting signatures. The program isn't just used with Microsoft Word. You can also use it with Outlook, Excel, Corel, and WordPerfect. There is even an option to use a hand held device when you're not near the PC to later use with Dragon Naturally Speaking to insert into your documents. It is also compatible with a nuance-approved Bluetooth headsets.
The program is pricey at $199 plus shipping and handling fees. But, it is a software program that is guaranteed to save your wrists and speed up your writing with dramatic effects. Please see the resource section to find a link to this product which is available at http://www.nuance.com .
Visual Thesaurus
Another great program that isn't nearly so expensive. The Visual Thesaurus, available at http://www.visualthesaurus.com , generates a blossom of related word branches from a single word that you put into it. As you see them visually, you can also drill down by clicking on any word in that layout. This is great for brainstorming word lists. It is based on a monthly or a yearly subscription of $2.95 per month or $19.95 per year.
This little online tool can help you generate your power words much more quickly. This will help you build customized word lists on any topic that you can imagine or think up. What's even nicer is that this tool is based on a community concept. If you want to look up other people's word lists, you can! That can save you enormous amounts of time creating power word lists. It comes with over 145,000 English words with 115,000 associated meanings. You can even use this tool with several different languages: Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, and French.
Mind Manager Pro
We talked briefly about this tool in Chapter 2. It is used in our system to create brainstorming sessions that not only increase the speed with which you do steps two and three, structure and research. This program retails for $349, but is well worth it. You can not only map your ideas, but you can also write your articles within the mind mapping program. You can go across more than one page and see everything at once. It's a great way to create outlines that include all your relevant research notes too as each of the branches allows you to inserts notes. You can include links to website URLs, insert images, spreadsheets, and other types of research information that can be helpful when writing the articles. After you're done you can export it to Word and finalize your copy there.
Inspiration
This is another mind mapping program, but it costs much less: $69. You can do about the same things you would do in MindManager, except for generating a table of contents. These programs are great for representing your brainstorming ideas visually, and Inspiration comes with a symbols library.
Inspiration comes with 65 different templates that can help you jumpstart your projects. Another 60 templates are available from other sites. So, if
you're not sure how to get started doing a mind map, you can open one of the templates and let it guide you through a sample one. It will give you an idea of how to organize your ideas and thinking.
A good mind map will help you to visualize the inter-relationship of various aspects of your research and ideas. It will help you to organize your thoughts and even use it to create articles that have a sound structure. Then, you can export it to Microsoft Word to finalize the articles there.
Adjective: A power word descriptive word.
Person 1: The person that the article is geared towards.
Person 2: Another person that the article can be geared towards.
The Action: Describes what Person 1 might do, in verb format.
The Action 2: Another verb, this one with a “ing” ending.
Thing: This is a noun that relates to Person 1.
Thing 2: Another noun.
Place: A place that might be involved in the topic.
Place 2: Another place that might be involved in the topic.
Industry: The type of business this refers to.
Problem: A brief problem statement, typically three to four words.
After you add the words you want, Rack And Write will generate some example titles. Not all of them will make sense, but it's a great way to develop titles easily and quickly.
Mozilla Firefox
This browser has some advantages over Internet Explorer. It is free to download, and you can use the tabbed pages features to keep multiple windows open without opening another instance of the browser. This keeps more memory free and allows you to zoom along and not lose your place as your opening articles that you might be interested in reading. You can get a free copy of Firefox here: http://www.mozilla.com .
OpenOffice
This product is very much like Microsoft Office, except it is open source and thus available for free to download. It takes much less space in memory, but it doesn't have all the nice features of Microsoft Office. However, if you just need a good word processor that can convert to Word when done, this is the ticket for you. Updates are free, unlike updates for Office and that saves you quite a bit of money in the long run. You can get a free copy of OpenOffice here: http://www.openoffice.org .
Chapter 3 - Lists
Word lists are invaluable tools for brainstorming related ideas and also for facilitating searching through Google later on. Another type of word list is a frequency word list which is a word list with the words that appear the most in an article listed by order of frequency in a certain topic. The way to use word lists is to keep some great words, either keywords or good research terms that can be put aside in list format to help keep the important details of a topic in the forefront of your memory. Another way is to use the words in your list to help you research the topic more, and thus add even more to your word list to modify it to suit a more thorough representation of the topic.
If you get a project that you have no idea how to start, a word list can be a great way to get you going. The reason for this is that you can simply find articles already written on the topic online, and then use some online tools to check the word frequency within it. Odds are, the more frequent words are keywords or power words being used by the other marketer to generate traffic or income. So, in a way, you can get other Internet marketers to build your word list for you.
If you already know something about the topic, then you can sit down for a brainstorming session. Here you would want to start thinking about the different words that can be used within your topic. After that, you want to start combining words in different arrangements to see how they stir your creativity. After some research on other sites, you may come up with a great word list to actively Google and find relevant research being done already by other online marketers and use it to generate topics.
A Simple Word List
This may sound very complicated, but it's not! Word lists are intuitively simple. So, let's start with a simple example.
Let's say you've been given an assignment to write about gardening. The first way to start generating topics is to free associated and brainstorm different words associated with gardening.
So a simple word list would look like this:
gardening
plants
perennials
gardening equipment
drought-resistant plants
rain barrels
seeds
Burpee
heirloom plants
bulbs
soil preparation
composting
Anyways, you get the idea. From this simple brainstorming session, you may end up getting some great ideas for topics or for the outline to an ebook from a few minutes of using a word list creatively. But, we're not done! We're going to use a more complex word list to eventually target research and articles already written on the Internet in a very precise way. Before we create the complex word list, let's think about the case where you are faced with a blank sheet of paper and a topic that has you mystified.
Figuring Out Word Lists From Scratch
Don't panic! Even if you got a subject that frightens you, we will show you a ridiculously easy way to get past the initial terror that seizes you with an unfamiliar topic. All you have to do is be able to cut and paste, basically, to
have the skills to generate words that go with this topic. That's because you're going to let other people build the lists for you. All, you're going to do is plug in the original topic term into the Google search engine and find relevant articles. After you've got a list of URLs with relevant topics, you can start to use them to generate a frequency word list.
A frequency word list is like a simple word list, except that it tells you how many times a word is used in a piece of text or article. This is really valuable information if you are trying to generate a word list for research purposes or to find out what keywords Internet marketers are targeting on their websites. The higher the frequency of a word, the more important it is to search engine and to the marketer. So, you can bet that some of these words that pop up the most are actually Google Keywords too, at times.
If you are in Firefox, you can facilitate this next process by using the tabs feature. You would open up a URL in one tab for a relevant article, and then in the other tab, you will open up the Build Your Word List program at https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/vocabgrabber . You can even use keyword searching tools that are available online to build a frequency word list instead of this tool. There are many different types of frequency word searchers online. They work about the same. Then, you would simply cut and paste the article text into the Build Your Word List tool and see which words are used the most. These can help you start to build word list without even knowing one thing about the subject! You just use what other people are using to get a starting point in your research.
You will find that in a lot of ways this process is even easier than brainstorming. Some of the tools, besides the Build Your Own List tool, will even give you the frequency of phrases. That way, it can help you to brainstorm combinations of words that are powerful, either because Google likes them or because the marketer has decided they attract attention. And,
just because you did a little brainstorming to start finding articles doesn't mean you can't use this step too to refine your word list even further.
A More Complex Word List
So, we might come up with a more complex word list through the frequency word list generation strategy, or we can start combining words on our own in the brainstorming session, or both. Let's say that we are going to take the original simple word list as follows:
gardening
plants
perennials
gardening equipment
drought-resistant plants
rain barrels
seeds
Burpee
heirloom plants
bulbs
soil preparation
composting
And, we're going to start creating a complex list for research purposes and to effectively target highly relevant articles on Google. The term “gardening” is great but too broad. It will come up with all kinds of things. So, we can't really use it effectively in Google and really get anything too specific. So, maybe we combine it with other terms in our list. So, maybe instead, we choose to combine the term “gardening” with other words on the list to put in the Google search box. Maybe we start to brainstorm a more precise list that might look like this:
gardening “drought-resistant plants” gardening “heirloom plants” Burpee seeds
Burpee AND “gardening equipment” bulbs AND “soil preparation”
As you can see, now the list has become much more specific and highly targeted. In addition, we are using some Google searching techniques to refine the search results we obtain from our word list. In the case of putting words in quotes, we are telling Google that the term must appear exactly as we have it in the quotes. It's a way of saying: Return only the articles with the exact phrase. However, gardening is not in quotes, so it is a very general search term that just says we're interested in gardening articles, but also for drought-resistant plants. That means we won't get scientific articles describing the way drought-resistant plants function, but specifically how to garden with drought-resistant plants.
Maybe, we're also interested in particular companies that create gardening equipment or sell seeds. Then, you can just add their proper name in the search box. Finally, when you use the search function AND, that tells Google that you want both terms on either side of the AND function to appear on the same page.
Obviously, it's not an exact science, but you will get the hang of the different operators available to use for searching in Google the more you practice. We will even discuss this further in the next chapter. For now, this is a good way to start your word lists while keeping in mind that the ultimate aim is to get a list that helps you create topics or research them more efficiently.
Research With Word Lists
After you have a great word list put together, always keep it handy as you are doing your research. You can use it to jog your memory too. You can even use them to do some mind mapping and within the Thesaurus to generate power words. The word lists are very versatile and are key to establishing a firm framework for your entire project. At the very least, they will help you build an outline for the projects that are informative and also attention-grabbing, both from a readership and search engine standpoint.
If you get stuck trying to find articles through the search engines or locate words for your word list this way. There are some particular areas that are great for researching topics and the associated words. Here are a few sites that you can visit to research topics and use the articles to cut and paste into the frequency word list generator.
Highbeam – You have to pay to use this site, but the quality of articles is very good. It is a research site with over 60 million articles online. The source of the articles tend to be magazines, newspapers, and trade journals. It is located at http://www.highbeam.com .
Wikipedia – This is a site that creates content like an encyclopedia, however, the content is contributed by many people all over the Internet. For that reason, it can sometimes lack credibility and needs to be substantiated with other more reputable sites. However, for generating word lists, it can be a great source of inspiration and it's free to use. In addition, they have a links section in each of their articles that can eventually get you to more reputable articles that you can use within your research. It is located at http://www.wikipedia.com .
QueryCat – This is a large database of frequently asked questions gathered from all over the web. You do have to search with specific key phrases, so it's not as versatile as some of the other sites. It is located at http://www.querycat.com .
As you are looking for articles to use in the frequency generated list, be aware that keyword optimized articles may or may not be a good choice. If they are older articles, this will not be relevant for you because the search terms that are popular change from month to month. However, a very recent article with great targeted keywords can be a gold mine for Internet marketers and saves time in doing your own research. So, although it's not great for generating really broad and interesting word lists, it can be a way
for Internet marketers to located some terms that make sense to include in their articles to attract attention from search engines. Don't focus solely on keyword articles though, as the best way to generate a word list for research is to give it a much wider scope.
Chapter 4 – The Big “G”
Now, we come to the part of writing which can be endless, unless you have a strategy. While part of the charm of the Internet is having a vast library of information available at your fingertips, the down side is that you can go into information overload. How do you know where to start? How do you know which article or website is relevant? How do you organize all that information so that when you start to write, you can easily look things up? How do you get exactly what you want from Google without wasting time with search results that just waste your time?
It's not as simple as just typing a few words into the Google search box. To be a really good researcher (and, thus write awesome articles), you have to know how to quickly find information, how to store it carefully for later use, and most importantly, knowing when to stop researching and start writing! Here, in this chapter, we'll review some strategies for searching on Google, and also the overall plan for your research time.
The Overall Plan For Research Time
Before we get into the nitty gritty details of finding the articles on Google that are most relevant, let's discuss what you are going to do with them when you find them. Some people just decide to capture as many URLs as they can for a particular topic, but that isn't the best strategy. For one, without any kind of idea as to what each URL includes, you can't organize your thoughts well enough. You will open one URL after another trying to find the one that you remember that had a specific topic. Or, you won't even remember the information in each URL and you will find your topic outline and research to be water downed or of poor quality.
The moral here is that you can't rely on your memory or just a cursory system of URL links to be able to generate great topics and decent outlines.
You need to have a better view of the research that you did and how to eventually organize it in a way that reduces the amount of time you spend searching or re-reading article after article trying to locate the one that you remember. While a list of links is a good memory aide, it's not really a system for organizing research. You want something that you can open and by briefly reviewing your organized research, you have the facts and information you need almost instantly. That means that you aren't just going to need the URL, you will need to do more than that, although the URL is a good start.
File It All In One Place
The best way to organize your research is to put it all in one file. Later, if you ever get another assignment for the same topic, you can always open that one file and use some of your old work or add new items to it too. And, yet, it's always in one place, filed in a one document available and easy to find based on the name of your topic. For this exercise, a Word document is one that works very well. You need something that you can cut and paste entire Internet articles into without reaching a space limit or a problem with formatting. So, don't use Notepad, try to use a fully featured word processing program like Microsoft Word. If you don't want to go through the trouble of using a paid program, you can use OpenOffice to create your files too.
The first thing you want to do before you start a research session, is to open up your word processing document and add a descriptive phrase of exactly what you are looking to research. This will help you later when you are pulling up files to see if they include information you can use in other articles. It also precisely funnels your energy in the right direction and gets you ready to look for a specific area of research. So, pay attention to how you phrase your descriptive title or phrase. It sets the mood for your research session.
Start The Session
Now, you will begin by using the word lists you generated in the previous chapters to help you locate relevant articles in Google. We will go into more detail about this at the end of this chapter. But, for now, in the overall view, you want to be able to be able to decide whether the URL you open in the research results is going to aide you in writing an article or not later on.
For that, you need to keep in mind whether it matches your needs, as stated in the descriptive phrase at the top of your document. If the information is too general, not for your particular audience, or too detailed for your descriptive phrase than this can be a reason not to include it in your stored research. In that case, you will need to either drill down more into Google, or put different words or phrases in the Google search engine. The exact strategy for this will be detailed at the end of this chapter.
However, if the information does match your needs, then you will want to store a few bits of information for later use.
Include Matches In Your Research Document
You finally found something relevant! Well, now you have to include it in your research document by cutting and pasting the ENTIRE article into the document. That's why you need something more than Notepad. You will want to include the URL at the top, so that if you ever need to locate the document again online, you can. And, for the last step to organize this research article to make it most effective, you will want to highlight all the parts of the article that you found most helpful in your research. The reason for that is that later, when you are writing, you don't have to re-read the entire article. You can just skim the highlighted sections and find what you want much more quickly.
Specifics To Speed Up Searching Google
Google has various features that make it ideal for researching. On the main screen you can see three of these features: Advanced Search, Preferences, and Language Tools. The most important of these is the Advanced Search feature, but we'll discuss all three.
Advanced Search
The advanced search allows you to refine the criteria that the search engine uses to return a set of results. Instead of just putting in a key phrase or keywords from your word list, you have the option to see a visual guide that serves the same function as some of the operator we'll discuss later. For instance, you can exclude certain words in your search. You can have one or another set of words be included in your search results. You can even tell Google which format file to include in your search results. You can also use Google to search a particular domain or website on the Internet and ignore all others. This can be great if you want to only look for videos on YouTube or even just pull up articles from domains with a .edu extension.
One of the nicest things you can do with the Advanced Search feature is that you can tell Google to add more results per page. So, if the standard 10 results slows down your research, you can pull it up to 20 or even 50. It will take longer to load but you'll spend less time hitting the next page option too. It will give you a quick view as to whether the keyword or phrase you are using is worth continuing with or to move on quickly to another.
Preferences
There is also a place in preferences to set the number of results per page. And, there is also a way to have the results open in a different browser window. If you use Internet Explorer, this will load a whole new copy and then open the window, slowing things down. If you use Firefox, it will open the new page in a different tab, making your search that much more
convenient, if it doesn't apply. You don't have multiple copies of the browser loaded and you can easily view the results and the articles from different tabbed pages.
In this area, you can tell Google that you are only interested in articles written in English, or any other language in the “search language” area. This is also the place where you will find out how to block results with explicit sexual content. Since many of those sites also contain viruses and tracking cookies that can bog up your research by infecting your computer with hidden programming that hogs your memory and slows your machine to a crawl. So, you can have it use strict filtering, if you know that's not the topic you're researching.
Language Tools
This area isn't as important as the other two areas, but you should know something about it. It does offer you a language translator, in case you get back an article in a different language that you want to read. It's typically easier to avoid non-native speaking articles to keep your research moving quickly though, unless there's some reason why a foreign article is appropriate to your topic.
Understanding Operators
Just like math has operators for plus, minus, and so on to facilitate operations when you combine numbers, Google has word and sign operators to facilitate combing keywords or phrases in their search box. We discussed the AND operator prior, but there are a great many more than can help you find what you are looking for in a laser-like fashion, helping to speed up the entire writing process.
Let's go over a few symbolic operators for you to get to know and work with:
The “+” sign – In Google, the plus sign tells the search engine that the word is necessary for the search. This is important because Google ignore certain words to speed up search results; words like a, the, an, at, for and more. So, if you are searching for a book title, for instance, and want to see articles about The Search For Truth, then you will either have to put a plus sign next to those stop words of the and for or you will have to put the entire phrase in quotes to signify that you want an exact match for the entire phrase. So, you could type into the search box: +The Search +For Truth or “The Search For Truth” and get what you want. However, if you just type in The Search For Truth, your results will ignore the word The and For in the majority of results.
The “-” sign – This one works in the opposite way to the plus sign. Instead of forcibly including the word next to the sign, the minus sign forcibly excludes any articles with that word from showing up. It's a great way to narrow down the topic search results so that it becomes very highly defined. It works for things where marketers also may be hogging the first few pages with extraneous results that are meaningless to your query. For instance, say you are looking for cell phones, but don't want to include Nokias, your query would look like this: “cell phones” -Nokia.
The “~” sign - This sign will include all the synonyms of the word that it is placed next to. For instance, if you wanted to find articles with different nuances for the word fast, you would add the tilde sign next to it and it would add in articles that might reference quick, rushed, speedy, and so on. In that case, your query for fast games would look like this: ~fast games.
Allintext: - Google will try to return results for a set of keywords, but if it finds some and not others it will still return the page if that's the best it can do. In order to tell it that you want only those articles with all those keywords in it, then you use the allintext: operator. So, for example, say you want to include articles with cell phone that are cheap and only from Nokia.
Then your query would be: allintext: “cell phones” ~cheap Nokia. It's also good for keeping out search results that aren't text-based articles.
So, now you are starting to get a view of how to combine the different operators to really get the exact search results you need. In the above example you used three different ways of redefining the search query. You used the allintext: and the ~ and the quotes. If you hadn't put cell phones within quotes, you might have gotten something to do with cell batteries or cell towers. If you didn't add the ~ next to the word cheap, you wouldn't necessarily pick up all the different synonyms of cheap and yet, you asked the query to return only those articles with these keywords. So, if the ~ sign weren't there, and instead the article talked about inexpensive cell phones from Nokia, the query would have ignored it. With the ~ sign, it will pick it up as being allintext too.
Allintitle: - This is similar to allintext, except the focus is on the title of the page, not the text of the page. So, if you want only web pages with some of your phrase or keyword within the title to be returned, you would use this operator. For instance, if you were looking for articles on exotic birds and want that as part of the title, your query would look like: allintitle:”exotic birds” or allintitle:exotic birds. The first would mean the words in the title would have to show up together and the next one means they can be anywhere in the title.
Allinurl: - This is also similar to the last two, except the focus is to find every website url with the specific search terms you specify. It would work exactly as the above example, except using allinurl: instead of allintitle:.
There are many more operators that one can learn and use when doing Google researching. These are just a few of them, and this ebook doesn't have sufficient space to include them all. However, the intent is the same: To refine the search results so that you spend less time weeding through page
after page of Google search results that aren't relevant to your research. For that, we have one final word of advice to weed out the wheat from the chaff, and that's the website called “Give Me Back My Google.” This type of service is necessary as the Internet grows and more and more marketers flood the library with what essentially comes out to be spam. Fortunately, if you go to http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com you can use that service to help eliminate many marketing sites that flood the search engine with results that are worthless to writing articles; sites like Price Runner, NexTag or other price comparison sites.
Chapter 5 – Advice For Writing
We've gone over how to get prepared to write: having a plan, finding great topics, using tools to enhance your productivity, and tips for researching. So, now we're ready to start writing! This chapter is about learning how to increase your writing skills so that your articles are not only written quickly, but they are of topnotch quality.
If you search the web, you will find many articles written by marketers that have keywords, and may even be somewhat comprehensive, but they read like a machine put them together, and not a human being. While this may be great for search engine results, in the final analysis, it is people who will be reading your articles who will decide whether to come back to your site or not based on your content. And as all good Internet marketers know, it's far easier to sell to existing and loyal customers than it is to generate a new customer. In the same way, if you know how to retain your existing readership with quality content, you won't constantly have to mine the Internet for new people to visit your site. And, you will begin to build a personal relationship with these people that is the beginning stages of building your contact list so that you can start to market your products to them too.
Even though we know what makes a good topic now, and how to brainstorm to make multiple interesting titles, we still have to know how to put all our information together so that the articles grab the readers and literally pulls them into your content, and by default your website. There really is no mystery to it. And, in the next few pages, that mystery will be revealed in a simple and easy to follow path that helps you whip out articles that are not only search engine friendly, but people friendly too.
How To Pull Your Readers In By The Seat Of Their Pants
The key to a great article is the first sentence. That's often known as “the hook.” You want that first sentence to be a big giant hook that comes out into the audience and grabs them by the seat of their pants to get them engaged with the topic. Sometimes the hook is a few sentences long, but rarely over three sentences. If your reader is not hooked within the first three sentences, typically you've lost their interest. They may skim the rest of your article reading titles, and bullets, but they won't be as involved as when the hook grabs them and sends their imagination whirling through your fantasy world.
Thus, the beginning of an article is the second most important piece of an online article, next to the title. You want something that is refreshing, alive, and interesting enough to hold your reader's attention. It should be able to swoop in and just weave them into the story in a very personal and engaging fashion. For that, we will offer six different ways that are highly engaging to most readers and that you can use to develop fascinating and provocative articles, from the first few sentences.
Ask A Question
Questions lead the reader into an interaction. Asking a question begs for an answer and lubricates the reader's mind to get involved and at least imagine what a possible answer might be. For instance, say you were writing about the financial meltdown, wouldn't a good question be something that the reader can relate to? So, you might say:”Do you know how Wall Street's melt down affects your pocketbook?” Obviously, you've targeted the audience that might most want to read your article and you've also helped them to realize that they may need to be more informed with relationship to their personal finances. The more the question engages a response from your audience, the more likely they will read the next sentence and more.
Stunning Statistics
This strategy isn't just great for medical or health articles. It can also be good for human interest and scientific articles. Any stunning statistic that grabs the reader and makes them think is a great way to start an article. For instance, say you are writing articles for the elderly population, people getting to retire. You might start the article with a relevant stunning statistic like: “One in four people in the United States have failed to save enough to retire by the age of 65.” If you happen to be reading this and you are wondering if you have enough money to retire, that statistic will grab a hold of your collar and practically obligate you to read the article.
Memorable Quotes
This is where your research really pays off. If you followed the instructions to put your research in one folder, you probably highlighted some memorable quotes that now you can use to hook your reader into your articles. It's okay to do this as long as you give credit to the original author. You will also want to keep track of where you found it, if the source is offline and you just added it to your research file manually.
At any rate, just like all great books have hooks that become memorable quotes, memorable quotes also make unforgettable hooks. So, as long as you give credit to an author and source, you will be able to use their imagination and creativity to spice up the beginnings of your articles. For instance, maybe you are writing some stories about the stock market and want to bring people into it more. You could open your article with:
Plato said: “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.” But, that doesn't mean any us like the idea of seeing our stocks take a nosedive.
So, find ways to weave in quotes to the hook and you'll have an excellent jumping off point to gather attention and give your articles a little timeless wisdom. If you're looking for places to find memorable quotes, check out the resource section at the end of this ebook.
Start A Little Conversation
If you want to really get a reader involved, you can start a small conversation relevant to the article. Say, the article is about the advances in breast cancer treatments. You might start a small dialogue with a patient finding out the lump is cancerous, and the emotional impact of that revelation. That will definitely pull a reader into the story and help to set the stage for the rest of your article.
Stage A Drama
This strategy is to stage a drama that engages the reader into a startling situation. It should be relevant to the topic of your article, but it can be anything you decide to imagine and invent, or a true-to-life story. So, say you are trying to write about GPS systems. You can start with a little story of someone driving into a strange town in the middle of the night, being low on gas, and trying to find a hospital where their daughter is giving birth. It doesn't have to be really terrible, just something that startles the reader who might see themselves within a similar situation and can get their emotions involved too.
Tell A Good Story
This is similar to staging a drama except that is less startling and more descriptive. People love a good story, but you have to set the scene first. So, you will start my creating a great environment from where to tell your story, and that story will end up being the topic of your article.
As an example, say you are writing about home builders. You might start by setting the scene as a potential homebuyer as follows:
The first one we went to see smelled like dog urine and cigarettes. The second one looked like a mini-gingerbread house from the curb, and we were finally excited to step through the threshold for the first time, only to be greeted by walls painted a bright flamingo pink. We almost despaired of finding our new home, until the realtor took us to the new Glendale community at Riverside Park, built by Pulte homes.
How To Leave Them Satisfied In The End
Just important as the beginning of articles are the endings. Is your reader satisfied that you delivered what you promised when you started the article. Was it sufficiently engaging and interesting to make them feel as if it was worthwhile? In this section we'll give you five different ways to wrap up your articles so that your reader leaves feeling satisfied.
Wrap Up The Loose Ends
If you told a story or began a drama, don't forget to finish the story to the reader's satisfaction. Don't leave them hanging wondering what happened to the main character in the little story or drama. If you do that, they will not trust you the next time one of your articles come up. In a way, you'll have proven you are more of a tease than a full-fledged author. So, always remember to wrap up those loose ends.
Draw Conclusions When You Experiment
Say you decided to ask a question and use that as a basis to describe an experiment that you employed to solve that question. Don't just describe the results, but actually draw conclusions in a very straightforward fashion. The reader may or may not agree with your conclusions, but the other option is to leave them hanging and ready to draw their own conclusions. If you are
trying to sell an idea and you don't draw the conclusions for them, you may end up finding they draw a totally different conclusion or don't have the initiative to do it themselves.
In fact, when an Internet marketer refuses to draw the conclusion that the buyer should buy their product, the sales prospect will normally not draw that conclusion themselves. All Internet marketers know that, even after an especially powerful sales ad, you must ask for the sale. If you don't draw the conclusion that they should buy this product, they won't either.
Plan The Next Step For Your Reader
Maybe the article was an introduction to a vastly complex subject. Where should the reader go next to find out more? Maybe the structure of the article was informative or a review. Do you know what the reader is expecting next? Maybe they want more “how-to” or a place where they can go and purchase the reviewed product. Always anticipate what the reader might want at the end of your article and offer it to them. It will make them eternally grateful to you.
Spotting Trends
Just like the New Year's psychic predictions are popular, people really desire to be told by experts what's on the horizon for them. This is particularly true of informative articles that are giving a broad general sweep of an industry trend, people in the spotlight, or current events. So, if you know of new trends that are coming down the pike for the future that relate to your story, it can make a perfect way to end a story and give the reader a satisfying dessert with their meal.
Closing The Deal
If the article has one main point that you want to emphasize above all others, you can do a review of all potential comparisons and options, and then focus the ending on that main point. It's a way to close the deal in a way that guides the reader into what their final conclusion should be regarding the topic they just read.
Chapter 6 – Connecting With Your Visitors
Part of what makes people want to click on your links is good content and another is the way that content looks and feels in a visual way. There are things you can do to click with your readers, so that they will click on your links in return. Some of that is learning how to use your keywords and phrases in natural sounding ways. Another way is to always promote yourself and your website in appropriate areas in interesting ways. And lastly, make sure that when you write, that you pay attention to the layout of your article. Often, if the article is not visually appealing, it can be a huge turn-off – no matter how interesting and enlivening the content happens to be.
Act Natural, Even If You're Coding
Let's face it, when you use Google keywords or phrases in your articles, you are going to sound a little stiff. Some phrases sound so unnatural that it can be jarring for the reader of that article. While many Internet marketers don't pay enough attention to this detail, it can affect the amount of readers they retain and thus the audience they have to market. Especially, if they are following a format to write keyword articles, the final result can be grinding to the inner ear.
So, what is a person to do if they want to use good SEO tactics and include their keyword or phrase around 2% of the time, with it showing up at least twice in the first paragraph? What if on top of that your formula says that this keyword phrase should show up in headings and subheadings too? It really does grind down your creativity and the style of your writing when you have such rigid writing guidelines.
Luckily, if you understand the Google search engine algorithm, you can still use keyword phrases and make them sound natural, even when they're not. All you have to remember is that punctuation is allowed and that Google will
ignore stop words like: a, the, for, an, at, be, and so on. So, if you end up with a keyword phrase that appears to be sound completely unnatural, try to get it into a more natural structure using punctuation or stop words.
Using Punctuation
Let's take a look at an example to understand how to use punctuation with awkward keyword phrases. How about the following: Raleigh real estate markets. If you use this over and over in your article, it will be obvious that you are coding. However, if you add punctuation, you can in use in with various sentences that won't sound unnatural in the least.
For example:
I live in Raleigh. Real estate markets here are booming!
Another way to use the same keyword phrase could be:
Why would anyone want to move to Raleigh? Real estate markets are affordable and unemployment is low.
Finally, you can even punctuate near the end of the phrase:
If you are interested in Raleigh real estate, markets for homes have never been better.
Thus, you can use the keyword phrase and punctuate it to make it sound more natural. However, when Google crawls your article, it will strip the punctuation and it will see that Raleigh real estate markets is the keyword that is given most weight and it will also assign it more weight in their algorithm.
Using Stop Words
How about using the same keyword phrase with stop words? Now you can write the following and it will be equivalent to using Raleigh real estate markets as a keyword phrase:
Look to Raleigh for real estate markets that are booming!
Or:
Raleigh real estate, a market that is booming!
It's all the same to Google, but it makes a world of difference to your readership.
Promote Your Site
There's no reason you can't toot your own horn, particularly if you are doing article directory marketing. That's when you write articles to put up on other people's directories to drive traffic to your site. Many of these sites don't allow you promote your products or site within the article text, but they do give you a resource box at the end where you can typically promote yourself, your website, and some other link. Just be careful not to send people to a sales page, if the guidelines say that's not allowed. Many of these article directory sites are getting very stringent about allowing marketers to use their site to promote their products, so you will have to add an intermediary page from the resource box back to your sales page, in some cases – like a link to a blog or website page which isn't promotional but has links to your promotions. To be sure, read the guidelines before you add information to your resource box to see what is allowed.
When you promote yourself, don't just say:”For more information, go to my website...” Most people reading that know it's a plug to end up at some
marketing page. So, instead, you need to be a little crafty with your resource box. You might try the following leads to get people to click into the link in your resource box and capture traffic from the article directories you post within:
Before you go, did you know [link here]...
To learn more about this topic, go to [link here]...
Psst! There's an additional secret you should know [link here]...
Want a free report on how the top way to do [link here]?
Let me ask a quick question, do you know [insert title of article linking back to webpage here]...
As you can see, this is not the typical way to grab someone's attention and that's why it tends to work.
Another way to promote your site, that you can see a little of in the above example, is to give away promotional incentives for clicking into your site or for registering to your mail list. The free promotional incentive works best if it is some infoproduct like a free report that you can deliver automatically to people who click into your site where you have a download button. This gets them to your site and delivers the product without you having to engage them manually. So, anything that can be easily downloaded from your website works. That can include articles, videos, music downloads, and even software. Just be clear in the resource box that they are going to get a freebie for clicking on the link you provide and you will see your response rate shoot upwards.
Make It Pretty
Finally, layout is very important. Your articles have to be visually appealing for them to be intellectually or socially appealing. You can write the best copy ever, but if it is displayed in one large chunk of text with no formatting or even paragraph spacing, there will be very few people willing to even attempt to read it. The reason for that is that the text on your computer can be a strain to read, unlike the text on a page in a book. And, even in books,
you will see attempts to make the text visually appealing with some sort of guidelines. Well, you have to incorporate guidelines to make your web copy attractive too, except in this case, what you don't write is more important (in some cases) than what you do write.
We're not talking about adding all kinds of colors or unusual fonts to make your page pretty. In fact, one color and one font is the best way to keep your readers from feeling too strained as they read your text online. What we are suggesting is that you make the article layout easy on the eyes by adding white space and different formatting to draw in the reader, and not overwhelm them.
When you think about the way people read online articles these days, you know that people naturally skim text and then decide whether to read the entire article or not. They just don't have the time or patience to sit through a huge article, otherwise, they'd just buy a book and sit down to have a good read. Online, people are looking for instant information and that means that the layout becomes highly important. It should be visually appealing and easy enough to read and highlight your main points so that when readers skim the article, they know which sections to read, or whether to they want to read the entire article or not. To conform to those standards, you need to include white space to isolate and highlight different headings and also you need to use special formatting to keep the eyes dancing through the page as it skims along the main points.
For that, you want the following:
Bold title – Bold the title so that it's easily picked up within a listing of other articles. It draws the immediate attention of someone who is looking at titles only to decide whether to read or not.
Capitalize key words – If you really want to draw attention to specific words in the title, just capitalize all of the word. Just be careful not to
overuse this formatting as it can look like you are shouting to the reader.
Break up paragraphs – In real word writing, you don't change paragraphs until the topic changes. This is not appropriate to online writing where the eye tends to tire from reading the screen much more easily. Instead, break up paragraphs into short chunks. Some online marketers will even go as far as to insert a new paragraph every three to fine lines of text.
Add subheadings – Even if you break up the paragraphs, that doesn't make it easy enough for people skimming it to know what each one is about. So, add subheadings that quickly give the skimmer a synopsis of what's in those paragraphs, that way they can choose to read it or not.
Add bullets and lists – Bullets and lists help to break up text and provide a quick encapsulation of relevant points. Always include subheadings in them so that the skimmer can pick the bullets of interest to them.
As you can see, you can even combine these elements to give them more emphasis, as in the list above. We not only created a bulleted list, but we added subheadings, and bolded the subheadings to give them special emphasis. What comes out is a list that is easily skimmed and then evaluated for the most important topics to the reader.
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