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Do you ever have a hard time writing articles?

Can’t think of what to write about, and then once you’ve got a topic you can’t think of what to write?

I’ve been there, and I’ve done that. It’s not much fun.

The good news is, you’re thinking way too hard. You see, with article marketing you’re aiming for 300-350 word articles, nothing more.

How much can you really say in 300 words? You see, fundamentally your article must be shallow, because you just can’t do more than scratch the surface in 300 words. So if you’re sitting there trying to think of how you can cram a 1000 essay into 300 words, fuhgedaboutit!

Instead, treat the article as a mini landing page for your real information (your sales letter & product). Once you’re seeing it as a mini landing page, it is easier to pick topics. Anything that might be going through a person’s mind prior to wanting your product represents a valid topic idea.

Further to that, you don’t have to say a whole lot either – just 2 or 3 short points and you’re done. Give a little bit of information out, but understand that nobody reads a 300 word article to get life-changing information! No, they read short articles out of passing interest. Your job is to heighten that interest and pull them along to the next step.

It doesn’t have to be hard to write articles! Click here to learn how to write articles in 10 minutes.

When you’re thinking of what to write your articles about, don’t aim for a keyword like “digital cameras”. You might as well say you’re writing about the world.

Instead, drill down into a super small little niche and write something specific. This allows you to appear more relevant for that obscure search. Not that you need to be using obscure keywords though, just don’t use big huge ones that get millions of searches every month.

As they always say, the riches are in the niches. A lot of the benefit of article marketing is the long term value of getting placements in the search engines, so you can afford to pick a very specific topic, write an article in 10 minutes, then let it sit on the internet till the end of time.

Even if not too many people see that article, the chances that it is going to be relevant to them and that they’ll want to learn more are much higher.

The Google Keyword tool is a great place to start looking for niche keywords, also called long tail keywords.

Of course with this kind of article marketing strategy, you’re going to need to pump out quite a lot of articles, and to do that, you might as well learn how to write them in a hurry.

Learn to write articles in 10 minutes.

You’ve probably heard everyone and his dog talk about how great outsourcing articles is. And it can be. Outsourcing is an amazing way to reduce your own personal work load, while you’re simultaneously increasing your productivity.

However, just like outsourcing anything else, you need to make the decision to outsource articles from a rational perspective. In this post I’m going to show you exactly how you can make that decision, and know that the answer you arrive at is the correct one for your situation.

If you’re considering outsourcing articles, or outsourcing anything for that matter, there are three questions you need to ask yourself (and answer!) before you start.

1. What is my time worth, per hour?

2. How long would it take me to do this task?

3. How much can I outsource it for and still get a quality result?

That’s it. It’s not that complicated!

So let’s take a look at #1. How much is your time worth per hour? Well, the easy way to figure this out is to figure out how much you make in a given pay period, and divide that by the number of hours you worked. Or, you can look at it over a whole year. 2000 hours is a good average number of hours for a full time worker, so if you made $40,000 last year, then that means your time is worth $20 per hour. ($40,000 / 2000 = $20).

Remember, we’re talking about outsourcing articles, so on to question #2 – how long does it take you to write an article? When I first started writing articles, it took me a long time. However, one day I completely re-evaluated the process I was using (or lack of one!) and developed a system to write articles in 10 minutes, consistently. In fact, the system is so simple that I’ve been able to teach dozens of people how to produce the same results. So, for this question, we’re going to use 10 minutes per article – because I know it is possible for anyone to write one that fast using my system.

On to #3. If we’re outsourcing articles, how much does it cost to get a quality result? That’s a bit of a tricky question, because there are thousands of outsourcers out there that you could use. However, from personal experience, you can pay as little as $3 per article; however you get a terrible quality result. I’ve found that until I get up into the $10 per article range it simply isn’t worth my time, because I have to spend at least as much time editing their work as I would have taken to write my own article! So let’s take $10 as our answer for #3. You can easily spend a LOT more than this as well, if you want really great quality work – $10 is a middle-of-the-road decent result.

So now we get to play with the numbers.

How many articles can you write in 1 hour? At 10 minutes per article, that’s 6 per hour.

How much would it cost to outsource that work? 6 articles x $10 each is $60.

How much is your time worth? We’re using $20 per hour… so by using simple math, we’ve just proven that it is definitely not worth your time to be outsourcing articles! In fact, if you write them yourself, you’re essentially paying yourself 3 times what you normally make, or $60 per hour! That is the value of your output!

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself “but I can’t write an article in 10 minutes!”

Yes, you can. I’ve created a step by step system that teaches anyone to write articles in 10 minutes or less – it’s called 10 Minute Articles. It’s step by step, and shows you exactly how to come up with not only an article, but a catchy, traffic pulling title, excerpt, keywords and resource box as well – all in 10 minutes.

Remember, if you’re trying to decide whether or not your should be outsourcing articles, you need to consider those three important questions. Everyone’s situation is different, but those questions will lead you to the answer that is best for your situation!

Article writing can be a very powerful marketing strategy for any business; however on the internet, everything revolves around search engines. That means that if you’re going to be writing articles for use online, you need to be optimizing them for search engines. To help you do this, I’m going to give you 5 quick keys for SEO article writing.

1. Determine the Keyword

The whole point of search engine optimization is that you optimize your content for good placement by the search engines for one keyword. Seldom can you rank a single piece of content well for multiple keywords, and quite frankly, if you’re trying to achieve this you’re likely wasting a lot of time. Instead, pick a single search term and write your article around that keyword, using it as a topic.

Whole courses have been written on keyword research, but to simplify it a bit, go to the Google Keyword tool, and type in your broad topic; we’ll use “dog training” as an example. The results that come up are all individual searches related to dog training. As you can see, “dog training” is a very broad term, and actually has over a million searches per month. For SEO article writing, we want to focus on the long tail keywords – keywords with more than three words in them. Pick a long tail keyword with decent traffic (at least 500 searches per month) to use for your article.

Keep in mind, if you pick a keyword with tons of traffic, you’re also likely going to have tons of competition.

2. Keyword Density

For good SEO article writing, your articles should be between 300 and 500 words. Any shorter, and it’s not enough to really get noticed by the search engines, and any longer is unnecessary effort. The key is to use your keyword with the proper density. Now the exact density to use has been a hotly debated topic amongs SEO experts, nevertheless, most agree that 1 to 2% density is ideal.

In English, that means that for every 100 words in your article, you need to use your keyword 1 or two times. In a 300 word article, you’re probably going to mention your keyword four or five times. If you don’t use it enough, the search engines don’t think it is relevant to that keyword. Use it too much, and they consider it spammy.

Most importantly, use it in a way that makes sense to your reader, so that the overall flow of the article still works. Writing SEO articles is the art of creating content that is not only relevant for search engines, but highly useful for humans as well.

3. Title

Search engines put special emphasis on the title of your content, so you need to make sure you include your keyword somehow in the title. I’ve titled this post “5 Keys to SEO Article Writing”- that is a trick you can use on your articles too: simply add “3 Steps to…” or “7 Keys to…” and then tag on your keyword.

Whatever you do, make sure the keyword gets into the title. It really is important.

4. Keywords

Every article you submit has keywords or tags along with it. You need to make sure that the keywords you use here are relevant to your article. Don’t put a keyword in there unless you’ve actually used it in the article. SEO article writing must be relevant (Google’s favorite word), and throwing in phrases you haven’t used isn’t usually very relevant.

A quick trick you can do is type in your targeted long tail keyword in the Google keyword tool, and see what the top related keywords are. Pick two or three, use them once or twice in your article, then include them in the keywords or tags section of your article.

5. Links

Linking is probably the most overlooked aspect of SEO article writing, but the simple fact is that everything Google does functions off links. Therefore, if you really want to have a highly search optimized article, you need to get some links to it, preferably with your keyword as the anchor text.

You can do this by linking from other articles, from blogs, social bookmarks, or any of the other link building tactics. As soon as Google starts seeing links going to your article, they start seeing it as being more important, and thus start to rank it a little better.

For more information on how to write SEO articles, and how to write an article in 10 minutes, check out 10MinuteArticles.com.