All About Publication

Please read the title again. After all, it did get you to check out the article, didn’t it?

Notice it didn’t say How To, or 7 Tips To, or 10 Ways To. It said Write Articles, an affirmative action. Here’s How, an offer for free information.

As a website promoter or affiliate marketer, your primary goal is to grab and retain your reader’s attention. You grab their attention with a title that packs a punch. You retain their attention by providing them with relevant content. In this case, perhaps giving them a new perspective in the way they approach creating a title for their next article. 

Your secondary goal is to drive traffic for your online business from said articles publication. The best way to accomplish that goal is to catch the reader’s interest immediately. You have about a second and a half, and they’ve already passed your article by and are down to the next one. And there went your chance to drive traffic and turn a profit off your efforts to promote your work at home business.

I’m sure you’ve heard of acai berry based products. This is the latest craze in the food supplement world and has blossomed into a multi-million dollar industry. Imagine for a moment that you own an MLM based acai berry website. You have decided to focus on the health benefits of acai berry rather than its potential for weight loss.

Additionally, as the marketer for this website, you are hoping not just to get people to try your product. You want to convince them that they want in on a piece of the action. Which of these titles do you think will grab your prospects attention the most?

The 7 Benefits of Acai Berry. Feel Better And Make Money At The Same Time.

 How Acai Berry Can Change Your Life. Make money while improving your health.

 Acai Berry Will Make You Healthier, Happier, and Build a Residual Income For Life.

This is a no brainer. Health, Happiness and a chance to stop worrying about if you’re going to end up in your kid’s guestroom when you grow old and grey.

Let’s try one with a weight loss twist instead.

Acai Berry Secrets Revealed! Lose Weight and Build a Residual Income While Helping Improve Lives.

Notice I didn’t say, Acai Berry Secrets Revealed! Lose Weight and Get Rich While Helping Improve Lives.

There are two legitimate reasons for this;

Get rich is definitely designed to grab your attention. But that promise is made by virtually every other work at home website on the internet. It is entirely too over hyped and under delivered. And you’re not trying to sale hype. You’re trying to sale a business opportunity. In article submission, you will be asked to submit key words to make it easier for your potential reader to find your article. In the case of the first title, your key word terms are acai berry, which is rapidly becoming a very competitive search phrase and residual income. Why residual income? Good question. In using the word residual income you are now marketing to people who are looking to make money on line in addition to those hoping to lose weight. Residual income is not only a less competitive term, but it may also grab you that one marketing genius as a part of your downline. This should be making perfect sense to you as an MLM marketer.

Say you are promoting the weight loss aspect of acai berry. And your website is based on direct rather than MLM sales. Consider these titles;

Lose Weight With Acai Berry.

 How I Lost Weight Using Acai Berry.

 Acai Berry’s Amazing Health Benefits. Lose Weight Fast and Keep It Off.

In the third title, you’ve lost weight. You feel better. And the weight is gone for good. Who could ask for more?

What if you’re attempting to market to someone who is already convince they want to give acai berry a try. Which of these two titles would grab your attention?

Where To Buy Acai Berry Weight Loss Products. The Best Place To Buy Online.

OR

Save Money On Acai Berry Weight Loss Products. Place Your Order Online Now.

Here’s something to keep in mind if you are new to article writing as a way to promote your work at home business. The longer the title and the more relevant it keywords are, the better your chances of getting ranked high and increasing your article’s longevity in the search engines.

Final note:

In structuring your article’s title, you want to include at least two keyword phrases in a non-obtrusive way. For instance acai berry, lose weight or acai berry, residual income. If at all possible, you want your primary keyword to be at the front of your title. This gives the internet spiders something to munch on immediately. You’ll be amazed at how well this will help your article’s ranking. But above all, you want to create a title that packs a big enough punch for the reader to want to click on the title to continue reading. 

Okay, the headline is a bit misleading. The five-step writing process Ayn Rand followed isn’t exactly a secret. Let’s remember that in addition to her legendary, mammoth novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she wrote the non-fiction how-to books The Art of Fiction and The Art of Non-Fiction, which gave detailed accounts of her writing tactics and viewpoints. She was not a woman to keep her thinking to herself.

Rand obviously had something going for her. She didn’t lack for productive firepower. Her two best-known works, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” weighed in at 750 pages and 1,200 pages, respectively. In total, she authored more than 15 books and many more were written by other authors about her enduring career. There is even an Irvine, Calif.-based Ayn Rand Institute founded in her honor.

But here we boil down Rand’s best practices to her five-step writing process. A short treatment to the hundreds of pages she produced in her books about fiction and non-fiction writing.

Step one: Limit your subject. This might sound elementary but it’s a common mistake writers make. Rand advised writers to ask three questions at the start of any project.

1. What will I write about? Define the topic and stick with that focus. And be sure that you can cover it adequately within the parameters of the project.
2. What do I want to say about this subject? Determine the theme of your project – the point of view that you want to communicate. There’s a lot of writing that takes up space and time but doesn’t really have a lucid point or destination.
3. Is what I have to say new? Am I adding something to the sum total of human thinking and creativity? If not, then don’t put pen to paper at all.

Step two: Judge the audience. Understand who that audience is. Most of us, and certainly all business writers, are writing to an audience. So, to write persuasively we need to identify the characteristics of our intended audience.

Step three: Create a plan of action. Like many experienced writers, Rand was a firm believer in the power of the outline and suggested two tests to measure an outline’s completeness. The first is the essence test. An outline is complete only when you can understand it as a unified whole. The second is the test of final causality. This test, which Rand adapted from Aristotelian philosophy, says that when your outline establishes and details a logical chain of cause-and-effect steps that lead to the established conclusion, it is complete. Many writers still refuse to do the upfront work involved in drafting the outline. Yet, a well-conceived outline can speed the writing process and make it sure-handed.

Step four: Draft from the subconscious mind. Rand suggests that you write without stopping and, to the greatest extent possible, without consciously thinking out each sentence. This technique sidelines the internal editor and allows the mind to roam freely and fully express its creativity.

Step five: Edit objectively. Rand proposed a three-level approach to editing.

1. Focus on the structure of the work. At this level, you need to ensure that it progresses logically – that scenes and ideas build on one another – and that it respects the reader’s intelligence.
2. Focus on clarity. Make sure the writing is communicating exactly what you intend it to. Rand said writing’s purpose is to communicate exactly what you intend it say. She warns writers to beware of “over-condensing” (cramming too much into a sentence or paragraph). Clarity is fundamental to writing but it’s often sacrificed for stylistic considerations.
3. Consider style. Her style tips include:

* Don’t complicate a simple thought
* The simpler the words the better
* Don’t use sarcasm, pejorative adjectives or inappropriate humor
* Don’t use bromides (i.e., trite sayings)
* Don’t use unnecessary synonyms

This approach certainly worked miracles for Ayn Rand. Though the Russian-American novelist, playwright and screenwriter passed from this world in 1982, her most popular books remain mainstays in bookstores across America. No bookstore of any size or seriousness would be without The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her books, almost 30 years after her death, are expected to sell 2 million copies this year, up from an average of about 300,000 per year.

We would certainly do well to follow Ayn Rand’s writing techniques.

About the Author: Mike Consol is president of MikeConsol.com, which provides business writing seminars, Web 2.0 strategies and media training to midsize and large companies. Consol spent 17 years with American City Business Journals, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business journals with 40 weekly newspapers across the United States.