Content Caboodle Blog

Write For Readers and Gain Customers

While many use articles simply to gain resource links for their web sites, the most popular articles are those which are well thought out and thorough in covering the topic.

Why would you care about popularity for your article if you just want the resource links?

Two reasons, first if the article is more popular then that means others link to it on their blogs or in forums, which increases the value of your link(s) in the resource box.

Second, becaus we’ve spoken with authors of our more popular articles and they overwhelmingly told us the same thing, their articles are generating traffic and customers for them.

That makes sense, a well written article is going to prompt more real readers to follow the resource box links to the author’s web site.

So, what’s the best way to write for readers? That’s really subjective and a lot depends on what your readers are expecting based on the topic of your article, but here are a few points that should work in most cases to make your articles better for reader consumption:

1) Use a descriptive and provoking title. Work in your keywords for SEO if you can, but your first focus point should be “will someone seeing this title click it to read the article?” Also make sure your title tells people what your article will be about. If it doesn’t, readers feel duped and will reject your article (and links).

2) Make sure your article is direct and focused. If you jump around from idea to idea in the article you’re going to lose readers. Your title should tell what the article is about, and your article should only be about that one thing.

3) Focus each paragraph, sentence and word on human readers of your article. It’s okay to keep in mind that you’d like to rank for certain terms with search engines, but never stuff keyword terms just so they will find them. It makes your article “clunky” and turns off readers from your message and links.

4) Entertain your readers, even when providing instructional or technical information. A big mistake we see is writers who obviously have a technical writing background submitting fact filled, cold and impersonal articles. Sure, the information is great and specific, but the average reader isn’t going to connect with the “just the facts ‘Mam” presentation and that results in less clicks on your links. But, find a way to present the same information in a slightly more personal or entertaining manner and you will see far better results.

5) Be an editor! Our editors review every article submitted, and we will reject articles with lots of grammatic errors, but we aren’t spell checking your work for you–and neither are most other article directories.

It’s up to you to proof read your own articles prior to submitting them, and you really should. When readers find tons of spelling mistakes in an article they begin to wonder if they can trust the information, and that means less clicks for you.

6) Make sure your resource link is a call to action. Just saying “Click Here” doesn’t cut it. Tell readers why they should follow your link for more information. Give them an implied benefit of following your link.

Technorati Tags: article writing

Posted in For Writers |

Improve Your Backlink Building With Articles

I was going to write a nice long posting on how to best use articles and article directories like Content Caboodle for building backlinks to your web site(s), but then I came across this video that one of our site partners made several months ago that was all about this very thing, so I thought I’d just share that with you instead.

Web site mentioned in the video, RSS Specifications: www.rss-specifications.com

Technorati Tags: article directories, articles, backlinks

Posted in General Interest |

Article Marketing Tip: Don’t Lie!

It should be obvious, but lots of folks don’t seem to get it. Even the giants behind long time veteran marketing agencies can goof up now and then.

There’s currently a class-action case that illustrates this, started by user Anthony Michaels against the web site Classmates.com because their email marketing copy told him that former school friends and classmates were trying to reach him, and that he had to upgrade to a premium membership for $15 to make contact.

As a free member of Classmates.com myself I know these emails are impersonal and seemingly triggered by anyone–whether they know you or not–searching for your name (which hundreds around the world may share) or visiting your free profile page on the site.

The assumption being that if someone visited your profile or searched for your name then they must be looking for you.

But that wasn’t the case for Michaels. Nobody was looking for him specifically, and so in essence Classmates.com could be said to have mislead him with their sales copy and end up paying out a lot more than they earned to those who have signed on to the class-action suit.

The lesson here is simple and hopefully obvious, and it applies to every piece of copy or content you create, don’t lie or imply anything that may potentially mislead somebldy who consumes your content.

Consumer fraud laws are broad and aggressive, and while some might laugh at Michaels for launching what they consider a frivolous suit after being duped by a word-play technicality, the fact is the government does tend to act first to protect individual consumers in such cases.

Keep this in mind when writing your articles. Don’t make unfounded claims about products or services, and never imply any benefit that doesn’t truly exist.

The best rule of thumb is to always under promise and over deliver. It keeps you safe of legal actions and makes your customers or end users more enthusiastic with you in the long run.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, classmates.com, lie

Posted in Article Marketing |

AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

We see a lot of authors here submitting articles that could be great, but often miss out on mass appeal for some very basic reason.

To help some of those writers I’ve decided today’s post should focus on one of the most basic rules to writing effective copy, AIDA.

Attention  - This is what headlines are for.In the past there’s been a lot of focus on keyword usage in titles online–and with good reason because search engines placed a lot of weight in headlines with keywords.

But search engines are finally catching up to the traditional practices of good copywriting, and basing more and more search indexing results on LSI (latent symantic indexing), which means online marketers have the freedom to produce attention grabbing headlines just like in the print world without having to strain over forcing their keywords into the title.

Search engines placing importance on LSI aren’t looking for (or limited to) keywords in titles as much as they’re looking to find clusters of related words and terms in the full body content. This means that in theory they should be doing a better job of indexing content, and writers can do a better job of writing effective copy–which starts with an attention grabbing title.

Interest -  Once you grab a reader’s attention you’ve got just a few seconds to convince them to read your full article. Your opening pararaph needs to describe what your article is about, and define why the reader wants to read on.

Desire -  Once you’ve got the reader past your opening statement it’s time to build their desire in whatever you’re promoting. No matter if it’s a product, service, web site or idea–your article has a purpose of spreading some message and just stating that message isn’t very useful, you want your readers to believe your message and desire the results your message promises.

Action -  Here’s where the author’s resource box links are used, however once again there has been a focus on keyword stuffing these links for search engine bots rather than using them effectively as “calls to action” for your readers.

You’ve gotten your reader’s attention, raised their interest and built desire for results, use this space wisely to provide a clear and easy path to getting those results for your human readers.

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You may have heard all of this before, but we thought it worth mentioning again–even as a reminder–because we watch the results of every article in our directory and I can tell you that the writers who focus on their human readers rather than search engine bots with their copy are getting far more clicks to their links.

We understand that many web masters use articles for link building and want to appeal to search engines with their copy, but let me ask you this; at the end of the day are  search engine bots or targeted human visitors going to support your business?

Technorati Tags: AIDA, effective copywriting

Posted in For Writers |

Using Content From Article Directories

With all of the various opinions online about duplicate content filters and other matters of SEO importance we wanted to comment on this briefly.

We know first-hand that articles from our directory are being republished on external sites, and those external site pages are being indexed and ranked by search engines in many instances.

Looking at some of the examples we know of where the articles did get indexed, and also some where articles didn’t get indexed, we’ve formed our  own opinion on the duplicate content question. Please note, this is just our opinion, we have no special insights into the secret-workings of the search engines, our conclusions and opinions are only based upon the results we’ve witnessed.

When search engines read a web page they read the whole page, not just the body content but also all of the content residing in the header, sidebar(s) and footer of the page.

The majority of sites where we’ve seen republished articles seemingly get indexed fast and rank well  have had lots of unique text content in those perimeter locations.

If you think about how a duplicate content filter might work, it would have to compare the text of 2 web pages to see if they are identical or close to identical.

So this all makes sense to us. If you have a good deal of unique text content in the header, sidebar(s) or footer of your site then when you publish an article on your page that page will contain the article plus your unique content, meaning it won’t be identical (or even close if you have lots of unique content) to any other web pages, so won’t suffer from any duplicate penalties.

Again, this is only our conclusions and opinions based upon the results we’ve seen.

Our point to posting this is because we believe it improves your web visitor’s experience when you can offer them additional information on your site topic(s),  and our purpose behind Content Caboodle is to make good information on a wide range of topics available for publishers to use in that way.

However, we don’t want to see publishers being penalized by search engines just for trying to improve their visitor’s experience, so we hope this information will help you to expand on your use of repurposed content from directories while avoiding the risk of being penalized for your efforts.

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, publishing

Posted in For Publishers |

Get In Your Reader’s Head

Here’s a great way to waste your time: write marketing articles without first thinking about why your reader would be reading your article.

Let’s say you are promoting a web site that offers some skin care product, you research the topic, select what you believe are great keywords, and write a fantastic article describing the proper usage of the skin care products.

But, did your article begin with discussing the reasons why someone would want or need to use these skin care products? Because most of your readers are going to be people who have some skin condition they’re trying to overcome and if you don’t connect with them right away you lose their attention.

If you article began with “how great So-And_So’s skin care products are” you’ve missed your chance to connect with the average reader. However, if you began your article discussing the condition(s) your reader may likely be afflicted with you’ll make that connection and then have a reader more willing to accept your advice and recommendation in the resource link.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, connecting with readers, writing

Posted in For Writers |