Writing Articles for a Human Audience

February 28^th 2012 Sally Ormond Article Marketing, content generation, content marketing, copywriting tips

Content marketing - it’s what makes the internet go round.

Everyone knows that, as an online marketer, you have to ‘own’ as much of the web as possible to make sure your customers find you online. And that generally means a lot of blogging and article marketing. But because you are reliant on your SEO to get found, an alarming number of people out there are still writing for the search engines rather than their living and breathing human audience.

To illustrate my point, here’s a short question and answer exercise:

So there you have it - you dabble in article marketing and content generation to get more people to visit your website.

If it’s people you’re after, why are you still writing for the search engines?

Stuffing your article with keywords may (you would think) get you good rankings, but what happens when a real person stumbles on it and tries to read it?

They aren’t going to care how far up the search results it comes, if they can’t read it because it’s badly written, they’re not going to visit your website. Why should they? You’ve obviously only churned out that article for the search engines and therefore haven’t thought about what your customers want at all. They won’t want to deal with a company like that.

Make sure you write for your reader first

When writing an article, forget the search engines and think about why you’re writing and who you’re writing for.

Think about:

Who your audience is
What is important to them?
What do they know about the subject you’re writing about?
What do they need to know?

Only once you have answered those questions can you really create an article that is packed with relevant information, written in a way that is acessible and enjoyable to read.

What about the keywords?

If you were beginning to think that you can forget about your keywords all together, you can’t.

They still have their part to play, but in a subtle way.

Use them in your…

Headlines
Sub headings that you’ll use to break up your article into manageable chunks
Anchor text links (but don’t over do it)
Alt tags for your images

As for the body of your text, if you write in a natural style your keywords will appear automatically.

After writing your article, read it out loud to check for repitition, rhythm, and errors.

The main think to remember is that you are always writing for your reader. Have them firmly in your mind and you won’t go too far wrong.

Tags: Article Marketing, content generation, content marketing, copywriting tips

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