Writing quality articles for your blog and article marketing campaign is essential to establish yourself as an authority in your chosen niche. Every day, people post tens of thousands of articles in blogs and article directories. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start producing authoritative and resourceful articles that others will read, bookmark, and promote using social media sites.
A quality article provides benefits to its readers. Neither it should be detailed and lengthy to put readers to sleep, nor it should be a laundry list of items for others to scan and forget. It should have enough information to put the written words into actions, but not more.
Before you start writing an article, make a list of all the non-textual contents that you will include in the articles. Non-textual contents may be images, videos, sketches, links to other resources, etc. Collect all the non-textual resources in one place, preferably in a folder in your laptop.
So, where do you go to find all the resources you need before you start writing your article? People who churn out low quality articles rely on Google search engine and article directories. While Google search engine may be a source, you should never use an article directory as a resource for your article-writing project. Finding a good article in an article directory is like finding a needle in the haystack.
Start with your own online bookmarks. You should have already developed a habit of using an online book marking service like delicious to store links to interesting contents. These online bookmarking services allow you to tag your bookmarks for easy organization and later retrieval.
Also, check out the marked articles in your RSS reader. In your RSS reader, you should always mark quality contents that you may use for your own articles later. In the Google reader, you can use the star mark and get to those marked articles later with a click.
Use blog directories like Technorati and Goolge blog search. You will find more recent articles in the search results of a blog directory, compared to a web search using Google. Use keywords like best, top, and reasons in the search query. You will find what others have said about the same subject. For example, if you are writing about benefits of eating apples, search for top reasons to eat apples.
Use Flickr for your image search. Click the search box to go to the search page and than click the advanced search link. Scroll down and check the creative commons check box. The Creative Common license allows you to use Flickr images in your blog, provided you credit the original source with a link.
For videos, use Google video search. It will find videos from YouTube and other social video sites like Metacafe, etc. Please review the licensing requirements of each site before you publish it in your site. You don’t have to download the video. You should get the embedded code for the video and embed that in your page html.
Locate a niche database using Google search. For example, if you want to find nutrient values of banana apple desert, search in Google using key phrase food database. You will be able to locate the USDA nutrient database. Similarly, you can locate movie database, etc.
If you want to build your blog readership or people who will specifically look for your contents in an article directory, quality article is the only way to go. Search engine optimization techniques on poor quality articles will not benefit you in long run. People will lose trust on your materials. In the future, trust will be one of the most important factor in generating sustainable online incomes.
