The Agony of Article Writing

Most people hate article writing, but love writing!  How can this be?  Article writing is viewed as work and nobody wants to be working.  There is also the problem of what to write about.  Do these questions sound familiar?
Where on earth do you start?
How do you start?
What do you write about?

As these questions flood your mind you are sized with terror and simply give up.  In this short report I will set out a method of article writing which will get you over these hurdles.  Before I present my report I have to be honest and say I attempted to write this report three times before settling on the method I have outlined below.
After posting the decision to write on how to gather information and write an article I was stumped.  I set about working straight away the same day.  I thought I would use my experience of Yahoo Answers to show how to locate hot topics people wanted information on.  So I got stuck in and started taking screen shots, but I soon came to a grinding halt.

The next day I tried a different tack.  I decided to use Google and Amazon to gather information and write another article.  Same thing happened.  I took screen shots, gathered information and came to a grinding halt.  Clearly what I was doing was wrong.  I was now into the weekend and this was family time, so I did not do any more work.  However, my subconscious mind got to work on the problem without my even realising it.

I woke up Monday morning with just a day before my deadline.  I immediately went downstairs and started brainstorming on “Article Marketing”.  Within minutes I had a completed brainstorm and I had an idea of how and what I was going to write about. I spent the rest of the day thinking and organising my thoughts.  I knew it could not be rushed and I knew I would not meet my deadline for Tuesday.  However I now had a plan to follow.

The moral of this story is to have a plan.  Yes of course we all know this, but until you attempt to accomplish a task without one you do not truly understand why you have to have a plan.

Below is how I approached this article on “Article Writing”

As you can see I started with a brainstorm using an A4 sheet of paper and a pen.  Nothing fancy, no technology, just my thoughts on a piece of paper.

The brain storming session took about 7 minutes, I had most things written down within two minutes, and really I should have stopped there.
I have itemised my brainstorm below

• Research
• Blogs
• Keywords
• FAQ’s
• Mind maps
• Word length
• Customer/consumer comments/reviews
• Relevancy
• Authority
• Article spinning
• Social Network sites
• Generate Traffic
• Yahoo Answers
• Generate Income
• Linked series of articles
• Clickbank
• Affiliates
• Amazon
• Article directories
• Forums

I entered by brainstorm onto FreeMind, an opensource mind mapping software

This allowed me to add new items and to categorise what I had.

I made a few additions and changes to my mind map the next day, having slept on what I had done

The next step was to organise the order in which the article would be presented.  This simply involved rearranging the mind map into a coherent list as shown below.

I then exported the mind map as an HTML file which created my structure for my article.

Article Writing

1. Why write articles?
   1. Generate Income
   2. Generate Traffic

1. i.      Linked series of Articles
2. ii.      Article Spinning

1. 1. Authority
2. Types of Article
   1. Tips
   2. Story
   3. Personal
   4. Facts
   5. Recommendation
3. Relevancy
4. Word length
5. Mind Maps
   1. Pen and Paper
   2. FreeMind
   3. Mindmeister
6. Research
   1. Forums
   2. Keywords
   3. Blogs
7. Customer/consumer comments/reviews
   1. Epinions
   2. Yahoo Answers
   3. Amazon reviews
   4. Forums
8. Social Network Sites
   1. Facebook
   2. MySpace
   3. Squidoo
9. Article Directories
   1. E-zine
   2. Go Articles
   3. Articlesbase
   4. Suite101
   5. Buzzle
10. Affiliates
    1. Amazon
    2. ClickBank
    3. Commission Junction
    4. TradeDoubler
    5. ClickXchange

I now have a complete outline of the contents for my article.  More than this I know what research I have to undertake in order to actually write the article.  The added bonus is that I can actually write an ebook and offer it as part of my opt-in list.

If anyone would like to suggest an actual niche they would like to apply this process to, let me know and I will post a brainstorm and mind map for you on this blog.  Then it’s up to you to write it up!

I hope you have found this information useful.  Please leave a comment below either way.

Tagged with: Article Writing

Filed under: Driving Traffic

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!