22 Ways to Keep Your Reader Interested in the Content of Your Online Article Submission
Catching a reader's attention with your title and short description is a major achievement, but what happens when the reader finally starts to read your article? In a heartbeat a reader can lose interest and move on to the next article. How can you keep your reader's attention for the whole duration of your article?
Here are 22 tips for keeping your readers interested in the content of your online article submission:
1 - Ensure that your article is grammatically correct and has proper spelling. There is no bigger turn-off than looking at a free reprint article and seeing that it's been carelessly written.
2 - Be sure that your thoughts are original and applicable to the lives of your target readers--don't just recycle ideas that you hear floating around.
3 - If you have a list article, be sure that you also have an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph. Even if your article is mainly a list, it should have a beginning, middle and end.
4 - Concentrate on writing sentences in the active voice. With the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action specified by the verb.
For example:
Active: The woman walked a dog.
Passive: A dog was walked by the woman.
5 - Be very tight, clean and light with your article structure. Keeping the structure simple makes your article easier to follow.
6 - If your article contains a list of tips, place your strongest tip at the top and your second strongest tip as the last tip.
7 - Get to the point quickly. Have a brief intro, and then launch directly into the main information you want to teach.
8 - Thorough research and convincing information will help keep your reader interested.
9 - Avoid writing articles that sound like encyclopedia entries. Instead, write like you speak, keeping your writing style conversational (of course with proper grammar).
10 - Be sure that your articles are written from the heart and express your own ideas and personality. If you reveal a bit of your own personality in your articles, it helps readers to connect with the piece and stick with it.
11 - Choose article topics that present solutions for specific problems.
12 - Keep your sentence structures simple and relatively short.
13 - Write exactly what you want to say in as few words possible. Shorter articles are easier to stay with and offer fewer opportunities for "losing" your reader (provided the article still provides helpful information).
14 - In your title, opening paragraph, and throughout your article, be sure that the benefit of the article is clearly stated. Stay focused on the benefit.
15 - The introductory paragraph is crucial--hit the ground running and hook the reader in.
16 - Avoid long paragraphs, as they are harder to read for online readers. Keep paragraphs short and snappy.
17 - Employ sub-headings to separate the article into sections that the reader can easily follow.
18 - If you're writing a how-to article or teaching any sort of process, use a numbered list. This helps the reader stay on track.
19 - Use bullet points to identify key ideas.
20 - Experiment with beginning your article with a question, or placing questions at the beginning of a paragraph or two in your article. Questions help engage readers.
21 - Explain exactly what you're going to be talking about in your article in the first two sentences.
22 - Avoid fancy jargon that your readers (or beginners) might be intimidated by. Just use plain English that everyone can understand.
It's not as easy as you might think to keep a reader's interest from the start of your article to the finish. Employing some of these tips can help--which will you try?
About the Author
Steve Shaw has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites, and he wants to help you do the same - grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website ... including yours! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report - some people have used the same information to boost their traffic by up to 600%!
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