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Member You - How to Write Articles to Sell Your Book
Moldy Homes are a Great Investment nterested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found.Have you seen this in your classifieds? -"Will pay $$$ for moldy homes. Call 555-555-5555"All you have to do is watch the news and you know about mold problems. We hear about Ed McMahan suing because his moldy home killed his pet dog. We also hear about Erin Brockovich and Sandra Bullock's problems with their brand new moldy home.* Mold has been traced to people dying in moldy homes.* Mold has been proven to be the leading cause of sinus infections * (Mayo Clinic 1997)http://www.mayo.edu/proceedings/1999/7409a1.pdf* Mold will destroy the wood in a house.* Mold loves to grow on wallpaper and drywall.* We have actually seen it grow on glass.People have had to move out of these houses. Sometimes even letting the bank take back the house because repair costs are prohibitive for most homeowners. As we all know, the home insurance policies aren't covering these damages any more.Not all people stuck w 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. How Our Home Based Business Saved UsIf you had asked me two years before my wife and I began our home catering business whether I would consider being my own boss, I would have laughed out loud and scoffed at the idea. The company I worked for seemed to be doing well and I was recognized for the “creative genius” that I was. I was contented as a Web Developer in a multi-national corporation, lost in my own world in cyberspace. The pay was alright and there wasn’t any reason to think of other means of income. Looking back, I realized that I was in a comfort zone and being there shut my eyes to all the opportunities that were knocking at my door. Things were about to change though.The signs were classic of a company in trouble. Emails instructing us to take cost-reduction seriously, profit sharing withheld, no year-end bonus, a freeze on all pay rises. Then, it was crunch-time. There was talk of “staff re-designation”. One year later, it became a full blown staff elimination exercise. No retrenchment benefit My author friends asked me to share what I've learned about writing articles for the Internet. I've spent thousands of dollars learning what I'm going to share with you. In return, please help me grow my ezine subscriber base. There are six categories you need to understand about article writing: 1. Article Structure This article follows a typical article structure for email delivery. Note that articles you submit directly on websites need a different format. Each website explains their individual requirements. a. Article Title: (How to Write Articles to Sell Your Book) You need a title that gives a benefit to the reader. There are hundreds of articles telling you how to create a sizzling title. Learn how to use keywords (more about this soon). My first title for this article was "How to Write Articles to Promote Your Book." A stronger benefit to you, the reader, is "sell your book." Another title tip: change your titles when submitting to various websites so you know which title gets picked up more. Another title for this article could be "Sell More Books: How to Write Articles." After you submit your article, search for the title and you'll see where it goes and which title works best. For instance, my article "Feng Shui, Design Psychology and Bed Placement" posted on EzineArticles didn't do as well as "Feng Shui, Design Psychology and Sleeping" posted on thephantomwriters.com. b. Article Author: (Jeanette Joy Fisher) A comment on names: if you haven't started with a website or published yet, don't use a name that can be spelled different ways. I wish I used another name because Jeanette can be spelled many ways. At least Fisher only has two spellings. I'm doomed to having ten websites for my book titles instead of just one for me. If I had used Joy Fisher, my life would have been easier. c. Article Copyright: (2005, All Rights Reserved) Don't forget to Copyright everything! d. Article URL: This is the website link where your article is posted for either preview or copy for others to use. e. Article Autoresponder: (mailto:Howtowritearti...@writertoauthor.com) This is an automatic email service which sends out the article if you send a blank email. Click on the link and get this article in your inbox. You may want to replace letters inside the email address with... so you don't get a lot of junk email. The person asking for the article needs to fill in the blanks. This is because spiders search for email addresses on the Internet. Unscrupulous, mean people use them to send viruses. I lost two computers when I first created a website and listed my email address. f. Author Contact Email: (mailto:jeanette...@gmail.com) Notice how the joy is left out. People who post your article are supposed to notify you, but many don't. And they will post your article without the byline, without links to you. Just accept that some of your hard work will be stolen, but most of your republications will help you. g. Word Count: Number of words in the body. h. Formatted to (65 Characters per Line) You need TextPad or another way to keep your articles formatted to 65 spaces per line - -letters, commas, spaces, etc. I talked my author friend Pamela Armstrong (SurvivingHealthcare.com) through TextPad; this took a couple of hours. One easy way to shorten the lines is to sign up to gmail, yahoo, or hotmail, and email your article to yourself. When you do this, you may find that many of your words have strange marks in them -- this leads to the next article component problem. 2. Article Format Most writers use a program like Word to create their masterpieces. Word has fancy "curly" quotes, apostrophes and other smart fonts that don't transfer into email and onto some website reader's screens. You can remove the smart quotes in Word; avoid using the emdash and other symbols such as three periods. If you copy your Word document into TextPad, you will see black bars in the problem areas and the spell check will catch the curly quotes. To remove the smart quotes in Word: go to Tools, Auto Correct Options, Autoformat, uncheck "straight quotes" with "smart quotes," and the same in Autoformat As You Type. 3. Keywords and Article Titles The keywords are the words people search for related to your topic. When I first wrote "Staging Homes for Top-Dollar Sales," I had the keywords mixed up. There are 3,160 results for Google's keyword search for "staging homes" and 35,300 for "Home Staging." However my article, "Staging Homes" is listed at the top of the search and my article "Home Staging" is on page two. Your goal is to use the keywords in your title that people interested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found. 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. Short Introduction to Ad TrackingWhy do you need one if you do any sort of marketing online or offline? Because you will need to know where your customers came from and if the bought something or not. This way you will be able to shut down the campaigns that are not working and are only causing you to lose time and money.To explain it simple; you have placed an ad in a newsletter, now you want to know how many saw your ad, how many clicked on it and of course how many did really buy something. And this is what the ad tracker do, it will give you a very detailed statistic (depends on what kind of software or service you use) about the traffic that is related to your ad that you placed in the ezine.The two most important things to make note of is the content you use and where you place your ads. This is often the factors that can make or break your advertising campaigns. You have to test, test and keep testing until you know that the ad is the best one possible out there for your product or servicecked up more. Another title for this article could be "Sell More Books: How to Write Articles." After you submit your article, search for the title and you'll see where it goes and which title works best. For instance, my article "Feng Shui, Design Psychology and Bed Placement" posted on EzineArticles didn't do as well as "Feng Shui, Design Psychology and Sleeping" posted on thephantomwriters.com. b. Article Author: (Jeanette Joy Fisher) A comment on names: if you haven't started with a website or published yet, don't use a name that can be spelled different ways. I wish I used another name because Jeanette can be spelled many ways. At least Fisher only has two spellings. I'm doomed to having ten websites for my book titles instead of just one for me. If I had used Joy Fisher, my life would have been easier. c. Article Copyright: (2005, All Rights Reserved) Don't forget to Copyright everything! d. Article URL: This is the website link where your article is posted for either preview or copy for others to use. e. Article Autoresponder: (mailto:Howtowritearti...@writertoauthor.com) This is an automatic email service which sends out the article if you send a blank email. Click on the link and get this article in your inbox. You may want to replace letters inside the email address with... so you don't get a lot of junk email. The person asking for the article needs to fill in the blanks. This is because spiders search for email addresses on the Internet. Unscrupulous, mean people use them to send viruses. I lost two computers when I first created a website and listed my email address. f. Author Contact Email: (mailto:jeanette...@gmail.com) Notice how the joy is left out. People who post your article are supposed to notify you, but many don't. And they will post your article without the byline, without links to you. Just accept that some of your hard work will be stolen, but most of your republications will help you. g. Word Count: Number of words in the body. h. Formatted to (65 Characters per Line) You need TextPad or another way to keep your articles formatted to 65 spaces per line - -letters, commas, spaces, etc. I talked my author friend Pamela Armstrong (SurvivingHealthcare.com) through TextPad; this took a couple of hours. One easy way to shorten the lines is to sign up to gmail, yahoo, or hotmail, and email your article to yourself. When you do this, you may find that many of your words have strange marks in them -- this leads to the next article component problem. 2. Article Format Most writers use a program like Word to create their masterpieces. Word has fancy "curly" quotes, apostrophes and other smart fonts that don't transfer into email and onto some website reader's screens. You can remove the smart quotes in Word; avoid using the emdash and other symbols such as three periods. If you copy your Word document into TextPad, you will see black bars in the problem areas and the spell check will catch the curly quotes. To remove the smart quotes in Word: go to Tools, Auto Correct Options, Autoformat, uncheck "straight quotes" with "smart quotes," and the same in Autoformat As You Type. 3. Keywords and Article Titles The keywords are the words people search for related to your topic. When I first wrote "Staging Homes for Top-Dollar Sales," I had the keywords mixed up. There are 3,160 results for Google's keyword search for "staging homes" and 35,300 for "Home Staging." However my article, "Staging Homes" is listed at the top of the search and my article "Home Staging" is on page two. Your goal is to use the keywords in your title that people interested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found. 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. Where Can People Find Information About Starting A Business?Approximately 200,000 new businesses are started each year. More people are expected to start a business for themselves this year than ever before. With economic fluctuations rippling through the business world, more and more people are getting laid off every day.People often need help finding the information they need to become a successful business owner; especially first time business owners.The following 10 points of information further explain the kinds of detailed, practical business information that are available:1. Business StartupsThere is tons of information on how to start a business, but almost nothing on starting a SPECIFIC KIND of business. We have scoured the Internet for just this kind of information and brought it all together in one, convenient, easy to use location.2. Home-based BusinessAccording to the latest census information (2002), the number of businesses with one or more owners but no paid employees grew nation get this article in your inbox. You may want to replace letters inside the email address with... so you don't get a lot of junk email. The person asking for the article needs to fill in the blanks. This is because spiders search for email addresses on the Internet. Unscrupulous, mean people use them to send viruses. I lost two computers when I first created a website and listed my email address. f. Author Contact Email: (mailto:jeanette...@gmail.com) Notice how the joy is left out. People who post your article are supposed to notify you, but many don't. And they will post your article without the byline, without links to you. Just accept that some of your hard work will be stolen, but most of your republications will help you. g. Word Count: Number of words in the body. h. Formatted to (65 Characters per Line) You need TextPad or another way to keep your articles formatted to 65 spaces per line - -letters, commas, spaces, etc. I talked my author friend Pamela Armstrong (SurvivingHealthcare.com) through TextPad; this took a couple of hours. One easy way to shorten the lines is to sign up to gmail, yahoo, or hotmail, and email your article to yourself. When you do this, you may find that many of your words have strange marks in them -- this leads to the next article component problem. 2. Article Format Most writers use a program like Word to create their masterpieces. Word has fancy "curly" quotes, apostrophes and other smart fonts that don't transfer into email and onto some website reader's screens. You can remove the smart quotes in Word; avoid using the emdash and other symbols such as three periods. If you copy your Word document into TextPad, you will see black bars in the problem areas and the spell check will catch the curly quotes. To remove the smart quotes in Word: go to Tools, Auto Correct Options, Autoformat, uncheck "straight quotes" with "smart quotes," and the same in Autoformat As You Type. 3. Keywords and Article Titles The keywords are the words people search for related to your topic. When I first wrote "Staging Homes for Top-Dollar Sales," I had the keywords mixed up. There are 3,160 results for Google's keyword search for "staging homes" and 35,300 for "Home Staging." However my article, "Staging Homes" is listed at the top of the search and my article "Home Staging" is on page two. Your goal is to use the keywords in your title that people interested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found. 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. Getting Out of Debt - Teacher Takes ResponsibilityI teach second grade. I wouldn't trade this job in for the world. As a kid when I read the book a Wrinkle In Time I couldn't believe by reading I could travel through time and be transplanted somewhere else, that's why I wanted to be a teacher. To bring new worlds to my student's eyes. To make them see beyond themselves and their own families and communities.I didn't realize I needed this same lesson until I wound up in debt without any plan for getting financially sound.When I went to college to become a teacher I never thought my students loans and the credit card I used for books and school supplies would get the best of me. I figured I would get a teaching job and pay off the loans. Boy was a naive! Trying to pay off $60,000 in student loans and $45,000 in credit card bills on a teacher's salary that's not much above the poverty line got the best of me. Pretty soon my health suffered from all the stress. I wound up with a bad ulcer, insomnia and way too many f your words have strange marks in them -- this leads to the next article component problem. 2. Article Format Most writers use a program like Word to create their masterpieces. Word has fancy "curly" quotes, apostrophes and other smart fonts that don't transfer into email and onto some website reader's screens. You can remove the smart quotes in Word; avoid using the emdash and other symbols such as three periods. If you copy your Word document into TextPad, you will see black bars in the problem areas and the spell check will catch the curly quotes. To remove the smart quotes in Word: go to Tools, Auto Correct Options, Autoformat, uncheck "straight quotes" with "smart quotes," and the same in Autoformat As You Type. 3. Keywords and Article Titles The keywords are the words people search for related to your topic. When I first wrote "Staging Homes for Top-Dollar Sales," I had the keywords mixed up. There are 3,160 results for Google's keyword search for "staging homes" and 35,300 for "Home Staging." However my article, "Staging Homes" is listed at the top of the search and my article "Home Staging" is on page two. Your goal is to use the keywords in your title that people interested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found. 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. Article Writing For Affiliate Marketers and OthersIf you are starting out as an affiliate marketer, one thing I am sure you are interested in is low cost advertising. If you are like me, I am a stay at home mom looking to make some extra income for my family, you have time but not a lot of financial resources. I can put in the hours, but I don’t have a lot of extra money to invest.Article writing is a great way to get extra exposure to your website without any cost involved. It works like this, you write an article that gives helpful information about a subject, or product available. People read your article to learn the information that you have available. At the bottom of each article, you are allowed to write a small amount about yourself as well as a link to your website. If people are interested in what you have written about, they have the opportunity to follow the link to your website, where you can share more information and hopefully get them interested in the product you wish to promote.You can’t use anterested in your topic search for and to get your article listed on the search engines where it's easily found. 4. Article Content If you cut and paste information from your book, tone down the writing style; make it informal, and concise. Your content needs to relate to your book's benefits without being a sales letter. Chose a major benefit that the reader will enjoy from reading your book. What is your answer to: "Why should I read your book?" "What will I get?" a. Introduction or Hook: Just like home shoppers won't get out of their car if curb appeal doesn't attract them, you need your first sentence to grab the reader with a benefit for reading your article. b. Body: Web readers need short paragraphs filled with BENEFITS. You must give a strong reason to motivate a stranger to want to read on. Keep giving reasons why your information gives answers to their problems. PAIN. Feel the reader's pain and offer solutions. Your title should open the way for this with something like: "Change Your Credit and Buy Your First Home." STORIES. Use stories to illustrate the pain felt by your target audience. For instance, tell a story about a family who fixed their credit and bought a home. c. Headlines and subheadings: Use other keywords to break up your article with subheadings. This makes your article easier to read online. Tip: before you start writing your article, check for keywords and make a list for reference to cover in your article. d. Conclusion: Even when you write a list, such as "Top 10 Ways to Save Money," you should end with a summary inspiration. You want to leave the reader wanting more so they follow your link to your website. 5. About the Author, Author’s Resource box, Bio, Biography I've seen so many articles on this one topic, there's most likely a book on it. Examine the way experienced writers create motivating calls to action. Your purpose is to show that you're the expert with the solution to the reader's problems. Your goal is to get the reader to follow your link for help. Refuse to list your articles where you won't receive a live link to your website or to your book page on Amazon. 6. Article Submit You can submit your articles through article distribution services for a charge, by email to article announcement groups for free, or directly to hundreds of websites online. One way to find websites matching your niche market is to do a Google search, such as: "real estate investing" + "submit article." I use Bill Platt’s thephantomwriters.com service and EzineArticles.com. From these two services, my articles appeared on over 11,000 websites. I simply don't have the time to submit to all the other places. If you write a compelling article in the proper format, your message will be picked up by ezine publishers, web masters, and maybe newspapers. And, like me, you will sell your books. (c) Copyright 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.
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