Ideally, an article writer should have some knowledge of the subject they intend to write about. If you’re writing articles for your own site, the chances are you’ve got that covered. You need to be able to do a little research and check facts. Okay so far – most people are capable of doing that. Where it gets tricky for some is when it comes to deciding what to include and exclude, structuring an article, and making it sound great.

Experienced article writers have the advantage there – many have written hundreds or thousands of articles. Our article writers have an even greater advantage – most have studied writing at a tertiary level and been required to write in and study a range of writing styles and formats. They also have excellent language skills. Article writing comes easy to them – so much so that structure becomes quite automatic and isn’t something they have to spend time working on.

Of course, for the average site owner who isn’t into article writing, writing a single article can be quite laborious – deciding what to include, mapping out a structure, creating a nice opening and closing paragraph, choosing a title, and then checking to ensure sentence structure, grammar and punctuation are correct. Even then, it may not sound right on the final read through – perhaps it’s not exciting enough, or just doesn’t seem likely to interest site visitors.

Could it be that it’s not written for the right audience? That’s yet another factor an article writer must consider every time they write an article – demographics. A good writer is able to switch between demographics – for example, between writing articles for a young adult audience and writing for retirees. The danger for a site owner who isn’t used to writing articles is that rather than write to the target demographic, they’ll write to their own demographic.

For the person who is keen to develop their writing skills, writing articles is great practice and skills are likely to improve over time. For those who abhor writing, or lack the skills or patience to prepare good quality articles, the writing is perhaps best outsourced to an article writing service. It’s not that expensive to buy article packs.

There’s no need to feel bad about using an article service – writing is a skill just like bricklaying or accounting. You won’t see too many writers doing any bricklaying and they’re notoriously bad with figures!

If you are attempting to write your own articles, here is a simple strategy that might help:

• Choose a broad article topic. Do a little research online and think about what you have to say on the topic. Jot down three to six points you’d like to make.
• Elaborate on those points, and turning each one into a paragraph. Are the paragraphs in the right order? If one point tends to lead to another, put them in the most logical sequence.
• Write a closing paragraph – sum up what you’ve said and round off your article with a good closing line, or a ‘call to action’ if that’s appropriate.
• Write an introductory paragraph, that either nicely leads into your topic and points, or tells the reader what the article is about.
• Finally, if you’d already chosen an article title, look at it again. Does it still suit the article you’ve written? If not, choose another.

If it’s all too much like hard work, or you simply don’t have time to write articles, why not hand the task over to our experienced article writers?

A free eBook filled with information your site visitors can benefit from is a great way of encouraging visitors to register with you. That can help you build a database of potential clients who may be interested in new products or special offers you have from time to time – don’t forget to choose an opt in system that allows them to agree (or not) to receiving other communications from you.

Of course, there doesn’t have to be a ‘catch’. You can simply give your eBook away and let other people give it away, and reap the benefit of your name and expertise spreading far and wide across the Internet – just remember to include your website details in your eBook!

No doubt you’ve seen plenty of websites that use these strategies but what you may not realise is that many of the eBooks you see being given away are simply a compilation of articles the site owner has written or purchased from article writers. Waste not, want not!

Are you thinking it all sounds too hard? It isn’t, really. These days, there are plenty of free eBook templates available online. Images can be purchased at low cost. And you don’t need expensive software to create a PDF.  All you need is the content and a little bit of time to put it together nicely.

Here’s how:

• Decide what your eBook will be about and which articles you could include as chapters in your eBook. Arrange them into a logical sequence.
• Fill in any gaps with fresh content. Write an introduction, contents page and a conclusion (or have one of our article writers to do it for you).
• Jazz it up with images and diagrams or boxes containing special offers. Find a great image for the cover.
• Create interesting chapter headings if your article titles aren’t already catchy enough!
• Brainstorm book titles until you come up with a good one that makes people want the knowledge that’s in your book.
• Turn your document into a PDF.
• Upload it to your website.

If you don’t have any suitable articles but you’re keen to publish an eBook, our article writers can help you out. All you need to do is compile a list of the chapter headings (article titles) you envision, make a few notes about the content you’d like to include, and order your articles. If you have existing articles of your own that don’t quite measure up, our article writers can rewrite or tidy them up for you.

Find out more about our article and content writing services.

If you’re like most of our clients you’re marketing like crazy online, but it can pay not to forget about print advertising, whether you’re a trade related business or an e-store. It’s another tool you can use to bring visitors to your website. In fact, it’s an amazing tool that can bring perfectly targeted traffic to your website and it’s a tool that article writers can help you use.

Visitors who read about your business in a printed publication and visit your website are high quality visitors. In fact, they can be the best visitors of all because they haven’t stumbled across your site by accident – they’ve read an article about your business, or an advertisement, and decided that they’re interested enough to get online and intentionally visit your website. It makes sense to reach out to these potential customers.

One way to do that is through publications like the GWP Business Resource & Lifestyle magazine. With a circulation of around 10,000 it’s a free glossy B2B magazine distributed to business parks and other locations around the Sydney metro area. Inside you’ll find all sorts of informative articles prepared by business owners (or their article writers) either about their business, or about an aspect of their industry. It’s a bit like article marketing offline!

If you’d like to try a little offline article marketing check out the cost of having your article published in a GWP publication. Contributors submit their own articles but if you’re more business person than article writer don’t despair, one of our article writers can ghost write an excellent article for you at a very affordable price.

• Green living and environmental
• Motherhood and parenting
• Fashion, clothing, accessories, costumes
• Healthy living
• Small business
• Pets
• Film and literature
• Travel
• Philosophy & parapsychology

Most of our article writers hold university degrees, have a good deal of work and life experience and have developed a range of particular interests along the way.

Many of our article writers have young children, so parenting and motherhood topics are topics they’ve not only researched but lived through! One writer has a long held and active interest in conservation and the environment, while several have more than a passing interest in the subject.  Another has a health science degree and a particular interest in healthy living.

Several of our article writers have an interest in film and literature and between them they have quite a list of short stories, feature articles and even short films to their names.

As you can imagine, in a group of such well credentialed article writers, many have read widely on philosophy and parapsychology and love nothing more than to put pen to paper on those subjects! Most article writers are women, so give them an article writing task on fashion, food, lifestyle, budgeting, household finances or relationships and they have no shortage of ideas and information at their disposal!

Another of our article writers travels extensively and has naturally developed experience in travel writing over the years. Others have been involved in small business. Being writers, many have worked in public relations related areas or written professionally for some time.

Our article writers might be vastly different individuals but they all have one thing in common – they’ve all reached a stage in life where they want to enjoy life more and earn a living doing something they are passionate about: writing! If you’d like one of our fabulous article writers writing your articles, why not find out if we have a writer who loves working on your topics?

The third question is easy to answer – article writers do it to earn money. For some it’s virtually a full time occupation and for others, it’s a ‘second job’ or a means of earning a part time income to supplement their partner’s wage. Who they are and where they come from depends on the article writing service you use, where the article writing service is based, and how cheaply they offer their services.

Who Writes Articles?

Article writers in general vary from average individuals with basic to good typing and written communication skills through to professional writers who hold university degrees. Article writing work is highly sort after as it’s an activity that can be done from the comfort of home and at any hour of the day or night that suits the writer. It’s paid per article, so writers with a fast typing speed, good general knowledge and the ability to generate ideas quickly can earn much more than others.

The types of individuals who work for any writing service depends on where the service is based, the standard of work they accept from writers and the rate they pay their writers. You’d be unlikely to find degree holding writers from Australia (or for that matter anyone here with writing skills) working for a writing service based in India and offering to them pay $1 for 500 word articles or even working for a US article writing service offering $5.

Within Australia the cost of articles varies, but with good article writers now in demand, you’re unlikely find them working for the article writing services that offer very cheap articles. However, anyone with a reasonable command of the English language can often write well enough to satisfy the standards of cheaper services.

Our own article writers are quite exceptional. Most hold professional writing or communication degrees. Many are also work from home mums and a few have taken up article writing because it allows them to earn a flexible income while they follow a creative passion or travel. Because our standards are high our writers tend to have a great deal of experience, in writing, in business or the workforce, and in life. Many have opted to relinquish well paid positions to create an improved lifestyle for themselves and their family. Yet we’re able to offer moderately priced articles because our writers are also quick on the keyboard and therefore able to earn a decent income as an article writer.

Where Are the Article Writers?

In general, you’ll find article writers working from home everywhere from India to the US to Australia and Europe and just about everywhere else. Wherever there is a need for website content, you’ll find article writers!

Our article writers are all based in Australia. That’s largely because of the high standards we require but also because there are tax implications in hiring people from overseas. For example, an article writer based in the US and working for an article writing service here may have to pay tax in both countries. Of course, companies in some countries (possibly even this one) outsource work to India to take advantage of the low rates.

The problem is that if you check out some of the article writing services based in India you’ll read some interesting things on their websites. My favourite is “our rates for content writing services are ducked at $4, even a beginner would be ready to pooch our cheek.” Enough said! To their credit, article writers in India are probably fabulous writers in their first language.

Personally, I think article writing is the best job in the world. It was not so very long ago that regular paid work for writers (other than screenwriters, technical writers and journalists) was rare. Now, thanks largely to the arrival of the ‘blog’ and online article directories, many more writers can earn a living working from home as article writers.

Writing services are springing up everywhere. There are article and blog writing services, tender writing services, letter and report writing and resume services. The demand for good freelance writers has never been higher and it’s likely to intensify in the coming years.

Why has there been such a turnaround? Several factors have brought about this delightful situation for freelance writers.

The Internet

With the arrival of the Internet came the company website and the need for content. Of course, not understanding the need for SEO many businesses initially wrote their own content (and many still attempt it) but it wasn’t long before specialist website content writers and content writing services began to emerge.

Then the ‘blog’ was born. Initially a format for personal online journals, blogging was quickly taken up by smart business owners as a means of adding content to their website and marketing their business. Article directories began to appear and became a marketing and SEO tool. Soon enough, there was paid work for article and blog writers as many business website owners weren’t able to write the content they needed. Article and blog writing services quickly emerged.

In order to get content the content they needed some article sites began offering a revenue share arrangement to contributing writers while others offered freelance writers a new avenue through which they could sell their articles.

As the Internet became a more competitive environment it became harder for businesses to get noticed. To compete, you had to have content and the more you had the better. The only problem was that by that stage of the game, there was no longer a plentiful supply of people who could write well.

The Decline of Writing Skills

Whether you blame it on a lax education system, the emergence of computer games, email, the Internet, text messaging or all of those things combined, there’s little doubt that the average person’s writing skills aren’t what they used to be.

The once popular pastime of reading began to lose ground to television decades ago but with advances in technology, it lost even more to computer games and the Internet. Reading tends to inspire writing, so it’s only logical that with less people interested in reading, fewer people would be inspired to write.

Written communication took a big hit with emails quickly replacing personal letters and even many business communications. Text messaging arrived on the scene and in no time at all people became used to writing short, sharp communications often containing abbreviations as they sent emails, posted comments on blogs and forums, and hammered out quick text messages.

It’s possibly no great surprise that writing skills have declined so much and so quickly. Nobody is getting much practice! And if recent reports of students outsourcing essays and assignments to India are true (and with so many essay writing services around, we have to assume they are) things aren’t going to improve any time soon.

Of course, existing freelance writers are ‘LOL’ at this point and they’ll soon be laughing even louder.

Why Writers Are Laughing

While a general decline in writing skills is really no laughing matter, skilled writers will have trouble not laughing in a society where demand for and value of their skills are rapidly increasing.

More and more individuals are setting up online businesses, taking up the opportunities the Internet offers to work from home running e-stores, Adsense websites, and other businesses that generate semi-passive income. Even businesses that are predominantly land based usually find it necessary to have a ‘web presence’ so they too require web content, along with a variety of other written material which is becoming ever more difficult to produce in-house. Site and business owners capable of writing themselves are often too busy to do it and need to hire freelance writers or outsource to writing services. More content, article and blog writing services are likely to emerge as a result.

It seem highly likely that the demand for writers will continue to rise while writing skills continue to decline – and that’s a promising equation for freelance writers and writing services!

Naturally, the worst results of all tend to occur when articles are outsourced to countries where English is not the first language. So while the freelance writers may be very adept at writing, their English isn’t perfect and they frequently confuse words that may translate to the same thing in their language but mean two different things in ours! Even the most brilliant writer’s work can look appalling if they haven’t mastered the English language – and mastering another language so completely that you can write professionally in it is not an easy thing to do!

It’s not only freelance article writers from those countries that can miss the mark. It’s surprising how much of what we write has cultural connotations. It might be deeply woven into the text or even ‘between the lines’, but it’s in there. Sometimes the difference is in the casual tone we use to address people. We’re not big on formality!

Another disadvantage that overseas freelance article writers have when it comes to writing for Australian websites is that they can’t easily add humour to their articles because they usually have a very different perspective and no knowledge of current events and attitudes in Australia.

It’s often the case too that some of the terms we’re familiar with here aren’t used much overseas. For example, the Americans say ‘auto insurance’ but we’re more likely to call it ‘car insurance’. Another example is the word ‘whilst’ which is not generally used in the US but frequently used here. It makes no difference to us – but it does to the Americans!

Our freelance article writers often write for US sites and we have to be very language conscious. And of course, we could inject our version of humour into some of the US articles, but they probably wouldn’t appreciate it!

At the end of the day you might pay a little more to use local writers but you’re much less likely to have to repair the articles you receive from Australian freelance article writers.

Content really is king and if you hope to grow your online business you need to have quality content on your site to help bring in the site visitors and ideally, keep feeding the content mill by posting regularly to your blog as this can increase your visitor volume over time. There’s quite a bit of work involved and if creating written content isn’t something you enjoy, then finding a good content provider will be a relief.

How much website content do you really need? As much as you can get without compromising on quality! You don’t need it all at once, although it can pay to have your web pages spot on from the beginning. As far as your blog goes, adding two highly relevant articles per week, every week, will slowly build your content. Adding one a day is even better, but you have to maintain a realistic budget for your site content too. If you’re just starting up, paying a content provider for 10 posts a week doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you have plenty of cash at your disposal. Why not purchase 10 posts a month instead, or have a go at writing your own posts? Of course, if you have got plenty of cash, call us right now – there are worse things to spend it on than content!

Seriously, if you’re looking for a content provider who will supply quality content every time, whether it’s a small order or a large one, speak to me today.

• Keep a notebook handy and write down ideas when they occur to you – because if you’re like most of us, you won’t be able to remember that great idea you had for an article when you need it! Coming up with a constant flow of ideas can be the hardest part of article writing.
• Set an article writing schedule. Whether you want to write one article or blog post a day or spend two hours a week writing your articles or posts, deciding to devote special time to it will help to keep you motivated.
• Plan your article structure. If you don’t have a lot of writing experience you might be taking much longer to write an article than need be. Learning how to structure an article can save you endlessly rewriting and rearranging your words because they don’t flow well. A simple article should contain an introductory paragraph that announces your topic and let’s the reader know what to expect in your article. The following paragraphs should deliver on that promise. Round off or summarise what you have to say with a concluding paragraph.  
• To plan your article structure, write down your title, and then list three or more points you want to make about the subject – you’ll be writing a paragraph about each of your points. Some writers find it easier to write these middle paragraphs first then write suitable opening and closing paragraphs.
• Think of any article you write as being a bit like a newspaper story. You have to grab the readers’ attention with your title. Your opening paragraph should make them want to read on.
• Proofread and spell check before posting or submitting. If you have the time, put the article aside for a day or two and read it again before you submit it. Why? Because while you’re writing everything you write makes sense to you. The information is in your head – but it’s not always on the page. Putting it aside for a while lets you read it with fresh eyes and pick up gaps or errors you may not have noticed earlier. Getting a friend or colleague to read it is another option.

Article writing is a skill. Some master it with ease and others get there with sheer determination and a lot of practice. Many don’t get there at all. If our article writing tips don’t help you, why not try our article writing service instead?

• Be native English speakers
• Submit grammar perfect articles
• Write unique articles
• Produce well researched articles
• Not submit articles that are actually rewrites of other articles
• Not use article spinning software
• Maintain a fast turnaround time

Okay, fair enough so far I say. I expect exactly that from my article writers.

These advertisers usually go on to threaten that if they suspect writers of breaching any of these requirements they won’t pay for the articles. Still fair enough, although personally I’d want to have proof before making that accusation and declining to pay.

But here comes the bit that’s both funny and annoying – the payment offering. The last one I saw said:

I pay $1 for 500 words.

Oh leap for joy! They want to hire a top quality writer and they’re offering the equivalent of $2 an hour! Yes, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of quality writers lining up for $2 an hour. Of course, really fast typists might make $3 or even $4 an hour. Wow. Let me see, if a fast writer works 10 hours a day, that’ll be $30-40 for the equivalent of a normal working day plus a couple of hours overtime. That anyone would offer such pitiful recompense to quality writers makes me angry.

What makes me laugh is that these advertisers actually think that quality writers are going to work for them – without using an article spinner, plagiarising content from somewhere, or rewriting other articles. Are these people completely stupid? Who in the native English speaking world is going to work for $2 an hour?

The writers these advertisers are likely to end up with will surely be angry writers who will do whatever they can to ensure they can turn out at least 10 ‘high quality well researched’ articles an hour to make it at all worthwhile. Now, I wonder just how they’ll be doing that.   

Anyone with even the most basic grasp of math can put two and two together. For those that can’t – anyone who pays article writers a pittance is very likely to get pitifully poor or possibly plagiarised articles.