Article Marketing with No
Pizzazz:
Three Mistakes Everybody Makes
by MaryJo Wagner, Ph.D.
Doesn't matter what
your niche is, you've got a lot of competition. How
do you get your articles read and then syndicated?
How do you your readers to click? How are you
standing out in the crowd?
After all, just one
article directory, EzineArticles, has more than
150,000 authors and more than 15 million page views
per month.
It goes without
saying that you must have good content. Content
that's timely, accurate, and informative. But with
so much competition, content isn't enough.
And, of course,
your article needs to be grammatically correct.
Demonstrate good sentence and paragraph structure.
No misspelled words. And proper punctuation in
place.
You've probably
read a lot of articles, and you'll probably agree
with me that some of them just weren't that
great-even the articles that have good content and
no grammatical errors. Why did you think, "Not such
a good article"? Maybe you didn't even finish it.
The answer lies with three of the most common errors
leading to ho-hum writing.
These authors
probably did at least one of the following:
1. Started
sentences with "There is" and "There are"
2. Used the passive
voice
3. Wrote too many
words
These three
mistakes aren't grammatically incorrect. No
misspelled words or poor sentence structure. They
simply put readers to sleep. Boring. Oh, so boring.
Delete just these three mistakes from your writing,
and your articles can beat the competition.
So let's take a
look at what these mistakes look like and how you
can easily correct them.
Get number one and
number two mastered, and number three usually takes
care of itself.
"You need to write
ten articles to reach Platinum Level at Ezine
Articles" replaces "There are ten articles you need
to write to reach Platinum Level at Ezine
Articles." Got rid of "There are" and reduced the
number of words.
"One good strategy
will drive traffic to your website" replaces "There
is one good strategy which will drive traffic to
your website." In this example, we took out "there
is" and "which," resulting in a clearer, more direct
sentence and fewer words.
Unless a specific
word needs emphasis, you want to avoid using the
passive voice in favor of more direct writing.
For example, "Hundreds of customers bought the ebook"
replaces "The ebook was bought by hundreds of
customers." "Hundreds of customers" is more
important than "ebook." And once more the correct
version has fewer words.
Another example:
"Brandon jammed up the printer" replaces "The
printer had been jammed up." In this case, the
person responsible is named versus leaving questions
about how the printer had been damaged.
So go back to the
article you're working on. Using the find function
in your word processing program, look for "there is"
and "there are." Fix those sentences.
Correcting the passive voice takes a bit more work
since you can't use the find function but hardly a
big deal so go ahead and take care of that task.
Now your article
has Pizzazz. No more yawning readers.
By the way, don't
bother reading your article for wordiness. You took
care of that by deleting 'there is' and "there are,"
and rewriting passive voice sentences.
More about how
to write articles that your readers want to read in
the FREE Article Marketing Quick Tips. Subscribe
today at
http://www.articlemarketingwithpizzazz.com/quicktipssignup.htm
