Wondering how to write an article? No worries, it’s a common problem for all enthusiasts who are planning to write an article on their blog/website or planning to publish an article on credible portals on the internet for the benefits that they are looking for.
Why write an article?
This needs to be answered by the people who are in love in writing the articles, many say there are numerous reasons or benefits of writing an article, and as I heard from some many people do acknowledge the following as the main reasons of writing an article.
Writing an article for the following reasons is how it all started,
- Writing an article is a great way of conveying the ideas and opinions
- it’s a way of sharing the knowledge
- The way of getting into the new income/earning
- The way of getting relieved from the stress
- Moreover, it’s the best way of promoting yourself or business
How does writing an article help?
Writing an article in recent times is mostly for commercial benefits availed or for SEO/Marketing advantages, and hence it has turned to be more demanding to have a right process or formats in developing the article.
Here are some of the advantages of writing an article, writing an article helps you to:
- Build awareness about your product, service or yourself
- Drives tons of organic visitors to the website (free traffic from Google), and in turn revenue from the AdSense or through affiliate programs
- Helps to improve the credibility of the websites
- Helps in content marketing
- Drives leads or sales
So, no one wants to miss the benefits availed by writing an article and hence writing an article is very crucial for businesses who are looking for the online presence or who are planning a big growth through digital marketing.
Importance of writing an article is demanding, but meanwhile its only for the content that’s been developed of great quality, the poor-quality articles developed doesn’t make any impact on the internet and one will not reap any kind of benefits from such poorly written articles and hence I will be guiding you on how to write quality articles and also article structures or themes based on the purpose and the website type they are getting published.
Article Writing format:
Article writing format is very crucial as a free flow many times just explains the article from your perspective and may lag user perspective of understanding it, hence its always important to understand your user and to structure the article to make it a pleasant reading for your audiences.
I have covered some of the basic and most important writing formats for the article which everyone should be following to develop great content for the user.
Welcome or Greet- Connect is important:
Welcome or greet doesn’t mean you have to write the following statements, (Don’t use the below statements in your article)
- Greeting for the day
- Best wishes
- Welcome to my blog
- How are you doing?
- Hope you are doing good?
- Introducing yourself etc. are not the greeting
When you are dealing with the topic there is a different language to welcome your audience or greet them in order to establish a connection with your reader, E.G: When I am writing an article on the topic “How to write an article” my greeting would just be as follows,
There are at least 2 million people every year who are looking for the “tips & tricks in writing an article”, and this information makes the person reading your article feel better, makes him warm and helps in connecting himself further on the content you have developed.
The main objective is to make them feel warm by writing the facts or the actual scenario which nobody usually covers in the article.
Usually speaking about one of the pain points, so that user may connect well with your article.
E.G: While watching a movie there are very high chances of you deeply involving it, or must be liking it, or show interest watching further when you can relate yourself in the scenario.
Positive Talk- Cover the benefits/advantages/pros related to the topic:
Have a positive talk in the article, a person who is reading this article must be possibly starting to learn writing an article for a reason, make sure that you make them feel positive about their decision or plan by writing some advantages or benefits around it, that’s the main reason in this article immediately after the first paragraph (greetings) you find the “advantages of writing an article” and some details around it.
Educate – The core of the article:
Educate user on the points that he is not aware of or is actively looking for, that becomes the core of the topic or information that the reader is seeking for.
This educate section should be extremely informative and the information published under this section need to be very well researched, cross-checked several times for its correctness before any statement is made.
This section is the heart of your article and concludes the quality build connection with the user and also makes them revisit your website or subscribe for your blog or articles.
Speak about the pain points- Making it more interesting or involving:
A person reading your article should find value in and that usually happens by educating the user, but then if the user has to trust your information you may have to connect them by speaking the pain points, you should be able to feel them that the article covers exactly what the user is looking for, which again would nit just happen by informative content, but you may also have to tell that you are going to speak about a,b,c as they are most faced problems or questions.
Note: You can address all pain points at a single instance in the article or al alternatively you can incorporate them at different instances so that they make the article more engaging by creating a scope for the user to explore further for the reach of more pain points.
Summarize the Article:
Many times when you are not properly organized the flow would have made the article very lengthy or may have discussed several other things which are less important or may have dealt with things those are irrelevant or in simple it may not be that easily understandable for the user the way you understand it and hence summarizing the article is always better to keep it clear for the user.
The summary usually focuses on what the article is all about, what it is stressing much on, the final opinion or solution to the discussion and couple of other things which you think should be informed to the user.
Apart from the above elements, there are a few more, which are not compulsory or may not make the core of the article but then when used for sure they make the difference:
Infographics/Images- an easier way of understanding things in a simple way:
Infographics are an easy way of summarizing lots of information in the pictorial form or diagrammatic form. Infographic will hold lots of information well-structured/presented in one single view/glance and hence it becomes much easier for anyone to understand a lot of information quickly, due to its ease of understanding users do share it on the internet and this is always good.
In some. Cases some of the concepts can be better explained in a pictorial form and that’s when a simple illustration conveying the concept makes it much easier for the user to understand it.
Videos- The best and successful mode of representing the concept/content:
A video in an article redefines the quality of the article, it does miracles when it comes to engaging the user, educating them, and creating an easier mode to convey the information.
Developing video content could be expensive for many as it needs additional equipment or video and audio capturing devices along the noise-free environment when it all have to be professional, otherwise, just a mobile recorded content too can be fine.
Companies and individuals whoever have realized the importance of video content have started investing lakhs and crores to develop the video content.
Quotes:
In order to make your content more credible, you can seek the help of influencers and their quotes since the influencers or great personalities are very credible you can take advantage of connecting the information you are serving the credible statements from great personalities.
Active Voice:
Instead of being very passive (one-way communication and not addressing anyone in the content) you can switch to active voice, where you will start referring as you, us, I and more, in order to involve them or to help them connect easily with the content or the information.
Active voice also makes it easier to understand the article and also lets them involve themselves either by commenting on the article or replying to the comments, by liking the article, sharing the article on to social platforms and more.
Humor:
There are varieties of people and the majority of them fall to a category when they enjoy humor, they expect humor in everything and anything and when an humor is added in their learning they pay attention and consider exploring further or respect your writing.
Adding humor to your writing is one of the ways that can create engagement.
Facts/Statistical information:
Facts are the most respected content type and the fact represented in the form of graphs is considered to be as the most engaging, credible way of serving the information to the user and hence I suggest to have these kinds of information in the form of stats.
Links to related articles:
A user reading your article may also show interest reading in several other similar or related or series article especially when he has liked your current article and hence have a section to help the user to explore another set of informative and relevant articles.
This help in improving the engagement on your website.
Incorporation and Highlight of the key terms:
Incorporating the keywords and highlighting them is another way of telling that what you are looking for is available in the article and this assures the user that he has landed on right article, but always make sure that you are covering everything around it, don’t just incorporate the key or catchy terms.
Comparison Tables:
Like how infographics and videos helped one to understand the concepts easily the comparison or difference tables too can help in simplifying the things, users can understand a lot at quick glance, hence make sure that you are adding the appropriate tables in your articles wherever they are needed.
Starting with basics of writing an article- Prerequisites to write an article
Understanding the objectives of writing an article:
The most basic and crucial thing to consider in writing an article is objective, there can various objectives in writing an article and based on the objectives the tone, writing style and theme has to change. The objective also defines where it needs to be published and hence one cannot plan anything without knowing the objectives
If you don’t have an objective, I shall brief you some of the objectives:
My objective is to rank high on Google for a specific keyword, E.g. I prefer to rank on Google when someone searches “How to write an article” or Ways of writing an article, article writing format and more
Write interesting content in order to share on social media, so that I can grab attention. E.G: “benefits of writing good content”, “How to become a best content writer and earn easily” and more.
There can be many objectives as stated in the section “advantages of writing an article”.
Be a good communicator:
One cannot develop the best article without good communication skill, despite command over the language people would fail to write the best article when they don’t have command over communication.
Communication is all about the art of conveying the things, grabbing the attention and make them listen to you, but don’t worry by following the steps mentioned in the article writing format would help you to present your content in a better way.
To make sure that you are communicating well you can simply follow the article format writing instructions mentioned above in this article.
Be good at the research:
You cannot make your article interesting until you have great information around your topic, and having great information in the article is possible only by research or being up to date with the topic you are discussing.
Wondering what and how to research in writing an article?
The statement research emphasis on the following and the article developed by considering the following researches can for sure make it the best one.
- Research to incorporate the most used terms to find your content
- Research to incorporate the valuable information about your topic
- Research to understand what is necessary and what is not in the article
- Research to find the audiences for your article
- Research to understand the pain points those have to be addressed in the article
- Research to make your article outstand or best of them all
Know the basics of the editors & Simple HTML Tags
Editors and simple HTML tags will help you to put the content in a specific format such as,
- Fonts styling
- Font faces
- Spacings
- Hyperlinks
- Content bold, italics and more
- Underline of content
- Heading Tags
- Paragraph tags
And many more, hence acquiring knowledge of these things would make you a professional blogger or article writer.
Learning or understanding all these happens once you. Start using any of the Content management system (CSM) and it’s all very easy to learn and work.
Know about content management systems or Blogging platforms:
WordPress, Blogger, Tumbler are some of the open source content management systems (Built by communities and are available for free and anybody can use), apart from these there are several many and there can also be custom built by the individual organization, all these content management systems help you to publish your content to the website and also lets you to organize it all both in the front end and backend of the website.
Acquiring some knowledge around the CMS you are going to use would help to simplify your work or enables you to publish your content in a much-organized way, take care of all the setting needed to enhance the representation and functionality on the article such as sharing, commenting, liking and more.
If you wish to learn WordPress, you can seek our help!
Helping a few thousands of professionals every year.
Know image & Video editing (optional):
You don’t have to compulsorily know all these you can seek the help of someone who can do it for you or you don’t have to put any effort at all if you are not publishing images or videos in your articles.
In case if you are publishing any images or videos there are several free and simple platforms which can do all of your work for free just by some of the instructions or commands you execute on those tools, just google image editing tools, and video editing tools you will find a ton of them which can be used at ease.
Know how to embed content from YouTube or other sources:
Not all content types such as video, image, infographic, presentations and other things can be developed by you and many times you may have to use it from other websites either by downloading them or directly attributing the credibility to them by embedding the same content on your portal, e.g.: you can embed YouTube video on your website, where the videos original host is YouTube but then you can use it on your portal too.
Summary:
In this article of how to write an article you would learn the most important things such as structuring of the article and pre-requisites, the pre-requisites necessity can be more or may be limited, which actually depends on the objectives of developing an article, E.G: if you are a marketer and want to develop an article for marketing benefits you may have to understand the keyword research, intent of the keywords and lot many, which again are very simple to understand.
If you think something is missing you are free to contribute, let’s help each other. Knowledge sharing is everything!
You can also contribute to other topics and we shall publish all of them for free, obsoletely at no cost.
Ramya Teja
Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.
Kandra Digital
