Posted by Editing Staff
We have an author here at Content Caboodle who, over the past 3 years, has had a fairly consistant CTR (click-thru ratio) for his resources box links of just about 40%. That’s 4 out of every 10 people who see his articles clicking through on one of his links.
To put that into perspective, the overall average CTR for author’s resource box links is just over 4%, and there is also a fair sized group of authors/marketers who regularly get between 10% and 15% CTR’s.
Obviously, seeing one author hover around the 40% mark for so long we wanted to speak with him and ask his secrets.
Unfortunately, he has been reluctant to agree to any sort of interview or profile piece because as he puts it, “the nature of Internet marketing is so cut-throat, the minute marketers see someone doing something new or interesting that works they pounce on it and beat it to death.”
We certainly understand his position, and would never ask one of our members to ‘shoot themselves in the foot’, but in further talking with him he did agree to share a few general pieces of advice on how he writes his articles and resource boxes and gave us permission to quote them here on the blog.
There are some real nuggets of gold here, and they come from somebody we can verify is ‘walking the walk’ and getting results, so read, enjoy, and take action for yourself:
1) Tabloid titles rule. There’s a reason that tabloids and magazines use the same type of titles month after month, they just work. Use list titles like “7 Ways To…”, or juicy and sensational titles to grab attention and get readers to your articles. Just make sure you deliver in the article on what your title promises.
2) Think of the summary area as a place for a strong sub-title. With most article sites, what you use as the summary will end up being what the search engines use for the link description in the search results, so if you have an attention grabbing title, use the summary space to expand on it more and hook readers in from the search listings.
For example, if a title is “7 Ways To Lose 7 Pounds This Week”, then a good summary (or sub-title) would be something like “These methods aren’t the usual suspects and 3 of them will surprise you”. That’s a strong hook on top of a solid title.
3) Make a personal connection right away with your article. I’ve always been taught that you start a writing with an opening statement about your topic, but that doesn’t work very well online. It’s better to start by talking about a person, or group of people, who are using or affected by your topic. This creates a personal connection with readers, your article becomes a story and they want to know what’s going to happen to the people. Whatever your topic is, if you can make a real person the subject of the article it will resonate better with readers.
4) Give facts, figures and sales messages in tiny chunks through the body of the article. Use short paragraphs, and remember that people take in the first and last idea of each paragraph better than they do any ideas in the middle, so put your wow facts in the first and last sentences of paragraphs, and bury the fluff and any contradicting ideas you want to gloss over in the middle of paragraphs.
5) Longer articles work better than short ones, but keep the body text in short chunks and full of white space. A 1000 word article is better than a 400 word article, but you have to keep the paragraphs short, about 100 words each.
So, a 1000 word article should be about 10 paragraphs, or better still, 10 paragraphs and 2 bulletpoint lists. Online readers like to skim text, by keeping everything short you allow them to skim and still get all of your major selling points or the heart of your message.
6) End your article with an update on the person or people you mentioned in the opening. Readers want a conclusion to ‘the story’, so tell how the person or people have been changed or affected by your topic, whether it’s a product, a service, or an idea doesn’t matter, it works either way.
7) Write your resource box as if it were a P.S. [postscript] to your article. Forget about you, nobody cares about your backstory or experience, and telling them won’t get you any clicks to your links. Instead, now that you’ve wrapped up the article by telling how your topic changed someone’s life, create a question in the reader’s mind of how their own life could be different with your topic, then offer a link “for more information” or “for more about topic”. It shouldn’t sound like a sales pitch at all, but rather be offered up as a choice the reader has to make for themselves.
By posing the question first about how your topic could change the reader’s life, they’re already stimulated to know more about it, so then it’s best to present the link as a choice between getting what they want and walking away from what could be. So long as the reader doesn’t feel pressured or like they’re being sold to, this works great.
8) Finally, write for quality over quantity. It’s easy to think that by writing tons of crap articles and saturating the web with them you’ll get better coverage and results, I used to think that too, but the opposite is true. It’s easier to write 2 articles per day than it is to write 10, but you have to put a little more time and thought into those 2.
Still, I could write 10 cheesy articles per day that get me 1 or 2 daily clicks each, or I can write 2 articles per day that get me 15 to 20 daily clicks each, there’s no decision to be made there. With less writing and work as far as researching topics and submitting articles goes, I’m getting more traffic now, and that traffic converts better for me on the backend because I’ve established some trust with visitors when they first meet me through my quality article.
It’s a hard shift to make, I was there and I worried that my traffic would drop off the map when I cut down to less articles with higher quality, but I found the opposite happened so I say go fo it.
Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, articles, traffic
Posted in For Writers |
