Article Writing Formula
April 30th, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
One of our interns (we launched an Internship Program recently) raised a question this morning that I thought would make a great posting here.
She asked if there was a specific formula that we use with marketing articles to obtain high results.
Now, to be honest I wouldn’t actually consider our results to be high, only higher than the results or expectations from article writing and marketing that most people seem to tout on forums and blogs.
And there’s good reason for that, I and my partners have been utilizing articles to further our marketing and SEO campaigns for a lot of combined years. I personally began using articles way back in 1997 for buzz generation and branding. Add in the years my partners have invested as well and you’ve literally got decades of experience.
However, what we don’t really have is a formula, and here’s why; everything changes and every campaign is unique.
Lets say you sat down to create the perfect article writing formula for expanding your SEO campaigns, by the time you’d have the formula tweaked to perfection one or several of the major search engines would have altered their indexing and ranking systems, which would break your formula and force an ongoing cycle of tweaking and moderations that would eventually become an obstacle to the basic task of creating articles in the first place.
In a round-about way, the same holds true when using articles for pure marketing purposes. Every product or service you’re promoting is going to be unique from others, and the way you’ll want to showcase each is going to change accordingly.
So, on the question of having a formula for article writing, the answer is no.
What we do have in place however, is something that’s very effective and flexible to suit our needs and the online trends at any given time, and that is an article writing structure. I wrote about this recently on the Content Caboodle blog, so you can check that out for the outline we use.
Basically, the difference between calling it a formula and a structure/outline is that by definition a formula is hard coded and set in stone. For example, if 2+n=5 then n will always be equal to 3 because there is a specific formula that exists to generate the value for n in that problem, and by using the “set in stone” formula you will always arrive at the value of 3 for n. There’s no wiggle room.
But with a structure or outline, you have basic parameters in place, but can be free to alter or adjust them as needed to arrive at the desired outcome.
I’ve linked to my posting about the structure we’ve used above, and you’ll see there that I ended the post in jest by saying “That’s the force, Luke, use it wisely.”–I was having fun when I wrote that, but it’s also dead accurate in my mind when talking about article marketing. If there’s any single thing that I believe gives one article an edge over another, it’s in being structured just right to connect with readers and prompt them to take action.
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