Article marketing is a necessary part of Internet marketing because of the traffic and revenue it can create. You can increase your backlinks, and your rank in search engine results. Search engines recognize most article directory sites as reliable, so a backlink from a site like AffSphere can help your search engine optimization efforts. The articles themselves can drive traffic to your site, which means there are more potential customers for you to convert. And when you work with an article directory like AffSphere that allows affiliate links in the body of the article, you can actually make a profit from an article itself!

A necessary part of article marketing is writing the articles, which can be challenging. Especially if you feel like you’ve exhausted all your topics. Here’s where this post can help – stop pulling your hair out, take a deep breath, and think about structure and form.

Get More Out of Your Efforts

Once you understand the importance and effect of structure and form, you’ll be able to turn one article into four.

Now this isn’t a matter of slapping on a new title or new headers to an old article – that won’t doesn’t meet any editorial guidelines. You need to remember each article has to be an original, unique work. No content scrambling, spamming or scraping – it’s poor form and won’t get you anywhere.

Instead this four-from-one strategy is about format and structure. You’re probably familiar with the basic structure for an online article – one or two opening paragraphs, and five to seven paragraphs supporting your argument, and then a closing paragraph. Here’s an example of an article in that structure: Consuming Organic Food.

The author has two intro paragraphs; six paragraphs make up the body of the article, and a conclusion.

Once you’ve written an article in a basic structure you can start to re-think the format, which will inspire re-creating the article. You can address the same issue and provide information in a variety of ways.

Structures to Try:

Lists, like this Three Crucial Tips to Survive as an Affiliate Marketer example, are a great way to re-format an article.

It’s easy to brainstorm a list-structured article; just consider the following questions:

• What are the top three features of your product?
• What are five situations when your product is useful?
• What are ten tips for using your product?
• How many reason can you come up with of why your product or service should be purchased?
• How can your product or service be incorporated into a list of the best advice from niche experts?

You can take your list brainstorms and turn them into a How-To, as Nikolove Lovemore did with his article on teleseminars. Here’s his list article and here’s his How-To.

You can also take your list or your How-To article and turn it into a Dos and Don’ts article. Dos and Don’ts articles follow a similar structure to the classic article format, but can be as long as needed. Just take your tip and reverse it to make it a ‘don’t.’

You can use your original basic structure article as a source for your list and instructional articles. This way when you re-format an article from a ‘Top Five Tips to’ to a ‘How-To’ you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just adjust how you’re conveying the information. Don’t cut and paste, that won’t fly with the article directory reviewers, you need to create fresh copy.

So if you’ve been writing endless reviews and are stumped about new topics, try a showing off your expertise with a list article offering tips or a How-To.