Article Marketing Author: CA Perez

Writing articles is a rewarding profession. Website content writing and blog article writing are not only monetarily rewarding, they offer you an opportunity to provide valuable information to your readers.

More than likely you are comfortable with English grammar and style. Yet, there are subtle pitfalls that new and seasoned website content writers and blog writers overlook. This article identifies four pitfalls to avoid when writing good quality content.

You may have read or heard that content is king; well, that is true. Writing articles is not like writing a sales letter. You should not write a sales letter disguised as an article when your reader is looking for quality information.

If you plan to publish in the major article directories, your content must deliver what your title implies. If your title does not deliver, then more than likely your reader will bounce away and not read down to your call to action, to your resource box.

When writing articles there are a few things that you should avoid and that readers DO NOT want to see in your article writing:

1. Poor Research

Make sure that any fact you publish can be verified. You have promised your reader that you have the information he is searching for.

Do not let your reader down. Do your due diligence. Research your material and do not plagiarize.

2. Continuity

Have you ever tried reading an article that lacks continuity? By that, I mean an article that rambles from one topic to another with no apparent order. It does not flow.

The article may have some great ideas. However, the problem is that the ideas that are scattered throughout the article. They are loosely placed in the article and are not interconnected.

An incoherent structure will only give your readers headaches, as they try to connect your ideas on their own. Writing articles of good quality content require continuity.

3. Poorly Constructed Sentences

One of the basic skills of writing articles is, of course, sentence construction. This means that a writer must know how to create sentences, spell words and maintain parallelism.

Parallelism is best explained by an example: "John likes football, to play basketball and playing tennis" breaks the rule of parallelism because it mixes a noun with an infinitive and with a present particliple. Writing, "John likes football, basketball, and tennis" or "John likes to play football, basketball, and tennis" are correct parallel sentence structures.

Sentence construction is important. After all, it is the main tool in getting the message across to the readers. If in the first few sentences, the structure is difficult to understand, then the reader will find no use in reading the entire article.

4. Using $10 Words

It is in our nature to impress others, but using big words in an article only intimidates and alienates your reader. Samuel Johnson, British author and critic, said long ago, "Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters."

Besides that, how many readers do you think will put down your article to pick up a dictionary and look up the meaning of a word? I doubt a reader will do that. More likely, he will leave your article and find a different one.

If you must use a $10 word, explain it in your article or better use another word.

5. A Caveat

Although the tips mentioned above will improve your writing, it is not necessarily the case that it will improve your sales. I have seen poorly constructed articles that convert to sales very well without attention to the tips mentioned.

Even though it is admirable to use good grammar, it should not stop anyone from writing articles. Your high school teacher is not looking over your shoulder. As I mentioned previously even poorly constructed articles can still make sales.

This short article is about writing a well-constructed good quality content article and about a few common pitfalls that we should strive to avoid. It is not about marketing skills. That demands a different article.

These are just a few of the things that you should keep in the back of your mind when writing articles. As you may have guessed, there are many others.

Experience will teach you as you progress in article writing. Avoid the oversights mentioned here and get more readers.

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