How to write articles for the web when you cannot write jack

Keep this in mind. When you write for the web, you don't have to write with superflous vocabulary (a la Alan Greenspan) or footnote a million sources to make your writing excellent. In fact, there are hundreds of articles on the web that are simply written, offer new insight, opinions and are very entertaining to read. Don't feel pressured to rewrite draft after draft until the cows come home. Remember that you are writing for a web audience with short attention spans and quick gratification. Of course, if you do spend a lot of time writing a well researched article and post it on the web it would be extremely beneficial to others, but the point is: don't let this limit your imagination block your path from your brain to your head.

You will find that the easiest thing to write about is what you are an expert at. Do you love playing video games? Then you can write about that. Do you love shopping or you have advice that can help others? That's definitely something worth writing about. Ok, I better stop before sounding like a Squidoo commercial... Anyways, you are probably wondering "why would I write about something when I don't get anything in return?" This is a valid question. If I were to guess correctly probably 80-90% of people who write are probably writing to earn money. There are many ways to earn money by writing: writing a lens on squidoo and adding pay modules, writing an article and adding affiliate links, writing an article for a pay to write site like associated content. Some people (like those who write for wikipedia) genuinely write just for the sake of providing information to others and helping others out. Some other people may write and donate your proceeds to charity (just like you can do here on squidoo).

Absolutely. If you start writing, you will earn money. If you look at ALL the different ways people make money on the internet, you will see one common thread: it almost always involves some sort of writing. Let me give you some examples. Take clickbank. This is a website that sells ebooks from people who have written some helpful advice and sell them online. Some of the authors make millions of dollars. Another example: people who write blogs can make you money.

There is a very popular blog about a person who started writing a blog about a person who was willing to exchange his red paper clip for something better. His ultimate goal was to keep exchanging his newly exchanged stuff until he got a house...and guess what, he got the house in 1 year! He now makes even more money by selling his story in a book!

If your blog is interesting and gets popular, you can put google ads or sell advertising space. You can also make a lot of money. Even in squidoo, there are people averaging over $1000/month. I can go on and on about examples of making money while writing but that would be a whole different article. For now, just know that if you want to earn money on the web, you better learn to write.

"I cant' write jack", this is what I thought 100 articles ago. If you are really stuck for ideas, maybe this can help you out. Think of yourself as an investigator and ask yourself the five 5 questions an investigator would ask. These are: what, who, when, where, why. When you start answering these questions you will be surprised at how much more you will be able to elaborate on each area once you get into it. Writing a little will lead to other questions and therefore leading to more answers and more material to write about.

What: Coupons and online coupons are used to save people money either in the grocery store or online.

Where: coupons can be obtained from your Sunday newspaper. Online coupon codes can also be used to receive discounts on online purchases. Retailers such as Ebags, expedia, travelocity all offer online coupons for consumers to save money.

Who: Everybody benefits from coupons, those people who are in a difficult financial situation will benefit the most.

How: Coupon codes can be clipped from the newspaper and stored in an album or simply in an envelope. It is best to categorize the coupons so you won't get lost when you make your purchases.

Why: Coupons are used to save money. If you like saving money in this down economy, you should take some time to really explore coupons. Millions of dollars go unclaimed each year from coupons not being utilized.

When: The best time to get coupons is on Sundays. Check your Sunday newspaper or manufacturer websites for coupons.

Really, after you pick a topic ask yourself these five questions. Once you elaborate a little on one of the questions, you will discover you can write a lot more about it.

So you answered the five basic questions above and you still only have one paragraph. Ok, so you got mental constipation. Let me help you exlax it. The best way to get material is to read about the subject you are going to write about. For this you have many resources: newspaper, magazines, books, etc. But you know what the best resource is? It's the internet itself! Yes you can use the internet to write for the internet. Once you have a topic in mind, use the internet to get more information about it. Now here is a little trick. When searching for a topic, don't just search in the regular search results, search in the news results and blog results as well. The news is great since the information is current and well written. You can even search the archives if you need even more material. If you know a different language, such as Spanish, you can also search for news and web pages for the keyword you want to write about and get a ton of information from a different cultural perspective. There is just so much scattered information on the world wide web about the same topic, so if you can gather all the information together and present your own views on it, you will have built a great resource or others to enjoy.


One word of caution!
Make sure you just don't plagiarize. The idea behind reading other articles about the subject you want to write about is so that you will formulate new thoughts and give you new avenues to branch off to. If you do end up plagiarizing, you will get penalized by google (and the other search engines) since they can easily detect identical portions of content from many different web pages. This is why I really frown upon the wikipedia module they have here in squidoo where you basically copy wikipedia's contents into your article (lens). Although you are citing wikipedia, google doesn't know that and may penalize your article so it does not display highly in the search engines. Original well written writing is a precious commodity on the internet, treat it like gold.

To make your writing stand out, you need to pay me $5000 and I'll do the work for you. Ok, just kidding, I am seeing if you are paying attention. Try not to write on saturated topics unless you got really great new insight. For example, the topic of "get rich on the internet". This topic has been written by thousands upon thousands of people. If you are going to write yet another article on this topic, then hope you REALLY REALLY make it interesting, otherwise it will end up on result 1,000,000 of google. Now through my many writings I discovered what really works is if you are writing on something where you personally had an experience with. For example, in one of my lenses I discuss about how I was able to get Broadway tickets for cheap in New York. I wrote about my own experience in trying to obtain tickets for cheap and it really did well. You see, It's best when you write about your own experiences since readers really want to imagine they were in your shoes while reading the article. By giving them a testimonial, a personal opinion, an evoked emotion, you can really captivate readers.

So you finally wrote an article, congratulations! Clap, clap, clap! Now comes the part to get users to read your article. What you need to do is to first come up with an effective title. Sometimes the title can make all the difference between a user clicking on your site or skipping over it when someone finds it in the search results. I would recommend going to digg or going to news results site in google, searching for the topic you want to write about and then seeing from the results, which link you would most likely click. For example, let's say you wrote about losing weight in your butt and now you need an effective title. If you search on google would you click on a title called "Ways to reduce adipose tissue in your gluteus maximus" or "Top 7 ways to lose that fat ass"? Unless you are a scientific scholarly nerd, I would think you would choose the latter. It is important to choose a title that captivates your reader and eggs him to click on your results over the results of others in the search engine. I would also look in the news results since the journalists always come up with the best titles. Top lists titles such as "top 7 reasons to lose weight" are also an effective method to get readers to click on your article. If you are not familiar with viral marketing guru Dean Hunt, you should subscribe to his free ebook. It's absolutely free and it will tell you how to make an effective title and marketing for your article.

Most people who search on the web don't want to spend too much time reading an article. It helps A lot if you add pictures, videos, news feeds, polls and anything else that helps the web page STAND out to your readers. Remember the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words?", well that definitely applies to web articles. A picture will not only help to illustrate a point, but it will also help break up the monotony display of text. Let me give you an example. A while back I posted two articles of similar content on two different websites. One website did not allow me to put many pictures, so there were hardly any. In the other website, I had similar content but put pictures and videos too.

At the end of one month which article do you think did better? I tell you that I received almost twice as much traffic on the article that had content + pictures + video. This means that even search engines may be putting more emphasis on sites that are just plain text. Although this was not exactly a scientific experiment and there could have been a lot of variables accounting for my results, I have read other articles on the web stating similar results. I know your normal tendency after you write an article is to want to publish it right away, but take your time adding pictures, polls, rss feeds and anything else that can make an article come alive. The extra time will be well worth it bringing a harvest of visitors to your article. When you write articles on squidoo, they offer you a great platform for inserting images, polls, debates, videos. Make the most of it. Check out the top lenses and you will see it's a collection of great information + polls + videos + images.

Look at my Travel and information about the Galapagos Islands article. Do you think it would be the same without the beautiful images and video? Without the images my article on Travel and information about the Galapagos Islands would not look so mesmerizing.