What can a popular article do for your business?

An article that gets attention can...

1. Drive targeted traffic to your site 24-hours a day 2. Double, even triple your sales 3. Gain hundreds of valuable, incoming links to your website increasing your search engine position 4. Automatically fills your inbox with partnership and joint venture opportunities 5. Increases your personal branding and credibility - you can dominate your market 6. Springboard for more no-cost publicity such as interviews, magazine articles, profiles, reviews, radio show coverage and more.

What's even more exciting is that you can accomplish so much of this with just one or two very hot articles.

Now, true it may take you a few tries to really hit with one of your articles, but there are some techniques that you can apply to increase attention to your articles.

ARTICLE WRITING SECRETS THAT WILL GET THEIR ATTENTION

1. Choose Your Topic Wisely. Sounds simple, but here's what you need to do. First, your topic must be relevant to what you are marketing. The problem you address in your article must be the same or at least closely related to the problem you are solving or desire you are fulfilling with your website. Second, your topic must be intriguing.

2. Stand Out From The Crowd. What is the unique perspective, experience, opinion, solution or value that you will bring to your topic? Publisher's seek out information that stands out. For instance, can you provide hard statistics based on testing? How about a detailed case study? Do you bring a fresh perspective that will make someone say "that's awesome!"? Are you targeting an area that is extremely popular, where the buzz factor is already peaking?

3. Writing Style. You may have thought professional writers have the edge here, in reality, the opposite is true. Often, an informal, conversational, simple style wins out over a general, fluffy or overly verbose style. Although they are professionals, ezine and magazine publishers are real people that "feel" the tone of an article and are always on the lookout for articles that will touch their readers as well as inform them.

4. Be Specific, Be Focused. The best article writing comes when you are addressing one main issue, problem or desire without losing focus and jumping around. If you are writing about dog training, then you are better to focus on one critical problem within dog training, don't try and cover the entire topic in a 800-word article.

5. Understand How To Write An Effective Resource Box. I have to admit, this one gets me every time. I am both a writer and ezine publisher, so often I have come across well written articles that I choose to publish that I know will not do a good job of delivering my reader to their website. After all, the entire intent of your article should be to capture publisher and reader attention, but ultimately, enticing them back to your website. How much time does the average writer spend on refining the 4-5 line resource box that follow their articles? In most cases, a few minutes, yet this is the most important part of your article. Test the first line, make it risk-free for your reader to visit your site, get their attention by creating a lop-sided value proposition by giving away valuable material.

6. Will They See It? Building a network of eager publishers for your articles will take some time. By following the steps above you will speed up progress significantly. If you are just starting out, then use a few of the more reputable article submission directories - they will mass blast your article out to a refined list of directories and publishers based on keywords and categories. Don't top there. You should constantly be seeking out high quality, high traffic, strategic sites in your market and contacting the publisher's directly with articles or proposals for articles. For your top-tier prospects, be open to customizing articles, committing to regular publishing schedules, incorporating an affiliate link in place of your link so that your publisher gets to share in the profit from any resulting product or service sales.

Article writing is most effective when you tap into an existing demand for information, position your approach as unique and valuable, keep it simple and even entertaining then making sure you get your article in front of the right eyeballs.

One final word of advice, be consistent and persistent. You may have to write 5 articles to have some initial success, you may have to write 20. Fact is you will get better with each article you write and your chances of hitting it big increase each time.

By re-using each article on blogs and in separate article landing pages you will also continue to see advantages of generating content such as search engine optimization and added trust from your market.