SmallBusinessNewz

Article marketing can be one of the most effective forms of Internet marketing, whether you write for established publications, have your articles syndicated across content networks, or simply maintain your own blog. The strategy is worthless however, if you can't keep the readers' attention. On the Internet, attention spans are shorter than anywhere due to the sheer amount of options for obtaining information.

Tips for Capturing Reader Interest

In other words, if you can't make your own writing stand out to some extent, you're not going have much success from it. Doug offered some good tips the other day, such as aiming for a conversational tone, using bulleted lists, and keeping the number of words per page fairly small.

People commenting on that article offered more tips like using "chunk content", short sentences, headings and links. These are all good tips, but I wouldn't use the same format with every piece of writing. Being repetitive leads to boredom, and boredom leads to losing readership. Avoid cookie-cutter article templates. Mix it up.

Including relevant images and even videos within your writing is another good way to capture interest.

You Want Readers to Share Your Content with Others

You've got to think about getting people interested enough to share your work with others. That is where the real power of article marketing is generated. It is one thing to have a regular readership, but thanks to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, readers can pass along what they like to the rest of the community with great ease. If what they like is an article by you, it can equate to a nice boost for that readership.

You may think you have a great topic for an article that could generate some amount of buzz, but if it is buried within a boring article format that doesn't grasp the reader's attention from the get-go, that reader may not even get far enough to realize that the article is in fact interesting.

Don't Forget About the Title

A good title is crucial for this reason as well. A few strategies for effective titles are:

- inspire curiosity

- ask a question

- use keywords of interest

Don't give away your whole article in the title, however. If what you have to say is completely summed up in the title, there will be no reason to read the article.

At the risk of violating the policy of keeping articles short and sweet, I'm going to wrap this up right here. For more article advice from me, read this. What ways do you use to encourage readers to share your articles?