My Article Writing Method Revealed

When all is said and done, the key to your blog’s success or failure is its content. You can drive traffic to your site, but if your content is not engaging with your audience and converting them from traffic into leads, then there is no point in going to all that effort to get the traffic in the first place.

Copywriting and content marketing are two huge areas of expertise that I am only just starting to scratch the surface of myself. But I have set up a system that I’ve been using recently to write my own articles – a ‘cheat sheet’ if you will. It has, in my opinion, served me well so far.

Headline First

Before I reveal my cheat sheet, the first thing I would recommend you do is compile a list of template headlines. The headline is the most important part of any article. The fact is, if you don’t have an engaging headline, the vast majority of people will not read your content. I will be going into this subject in detail at a later date.

So when you are ready to write an article, the bare minimum you should have is:

1. A list of template headlines from which you can draw inspiration, and
2. Your article writing cheat sheet.

The cheat sheet should serve to remind you of exactly why you are writing the article, and what goal you are looking to achieve in writing it.

My Cheat Sheet

Fortunately, it is not as complicated as the one in the photo! I will probably add to and refine it in the future, but it serves me well for the time being.

First of all, when I have come up with an idea, I answer three questions before I start work on the article’s content:

1. What is the core message of the article?
2. What problem am I addressing?
3. Is it relevant to my audience?

The next thing I do is come up with a title. I will likely conjure up 3-5 different titles from my template list, then pick the one I like most. I then go back to the three questions I answered and check that my title is still relevant to the article.

Following that, I draft a rough version of the article. I will usually leave it for a few hours, or overnight, and come back to it cold. I find this extremely helpful in producing more focused and coherent content, as often when I come back to an article, I will want to make some pretty large alterations and/or additions.

Once I am finished with the article and have read it aloud to myself to make sure that there are no glaring spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors, I then ask myself the following questions:

1. Is my writing entertaining?
2. Is it engaging?
3. Does it tackle the problem addressed?
4. Does it fulfill its promise (that is usually laid out in the headline)?

And that is it! Once I am happy that the answers to the above four questions are all ‘yes’, I am ready to publish!

What Works For You?

As I have already said, this is the method I am using at the moment, and it has in my opinion been working pretty well (you may think otherwise ;)).

But how about you? How do you write your content? Are your methods similar to mine, or do they differ?

Photo courtesy of Jan Kaláb