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Writing Articles| Article #171 : ARTICLE WRITING – PART 4

I hate to have to break this to you, but no amount of instruction in the world is going to turn you into a writer if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

So let me get this part out of the way RIGHT NOW!

You can’t take somebody else’s article and put it in your own words. That is still plagiarism and will get you in more trouble than you can possibly know. You need to research at least 3, count ‘em, 3 different sources and then write your article from the knowledge you’ve gained from those 3 sources. Is it a lot of work? You better believe it. But if you DON’T do this, you are opening yourself up for a world of hurt that will make your trip to the dentist seem like a walk in the park.

Don’t worry. Later in this book, we are going to do not 1, but 3 examples of researching topics and writing articles from that research. I will personally take you by the hand, just like I do in my Honest Income Program so that you will feel comfortable in doing this.

First, I will just give you the basics of doing research. Keep in mind, if you are writing about a topic that you already have knowledge of, you don’t have to do this research. What’s already in your head is there and nobody can take that away from you. But if you’ve decided that you want to sell acne cure books online and don’t know the first thing about what causes acne, then you better do a little research. Otherwise, you will not be seen as a credible source.

The First Thing you need to do is go to a search engine. It doesn’t really matter which one but I prefer Google because it’s the most popular.

So let’s go to www.google.com and take a look at the page.

You’ll notice there’s not much to the page. Pretty much just a pretty graphic and a long box to put your search term into in order to find whatever it is you’re looking for.

So, what do we type in?

At this point, it doesn’t matter but I want to get you into the habit of doing what I call quality searches.

What do I mean by “quality searches?”

I mean, I don’t want you wasting time entering in things that aren’t going to bring you the results that you’re looking for.

For example, let’s say you want to write an article on “Pop Music Of The 60s”

Guess what many people type on who are starting out?

“Pop Music”

What kind of results do you think you’re going to get typing in “pop music?” You may find some articles on pop music of the 60s, but you’re going to be searching for a long time to get one.

Think I’m kidding?

Let’s type in “pop music” and see how many results we get.

4,680,000 results. Wow!

Now, let’s type in “pop music of the 60s”

445 results.

Well, we certainly narrowed that down quite a bit. We just killed off almost all our results from pop music and left us with just about 20 pages of results to go through.

But you won’t need to go that far.

Why?

Because of the way search engines work. See, the most relevant results will appear at the top of the search, or the first page. Quite honestly, if you don’t find what you’re looking for in these results then you’re not going to find it.

Okay, remember what I said about how many resources you need? That’s right. We need to find 3 resources.

In my search, I found these 3 sites at the top that had articles on pop music of the 60s.

http://www.spectropop.com/go2/brill.html

http://musicstore.connect.com/lists/listdetail/22448126_Detail.html
http://www.napster.com/view/artist/index.html?id=11513494

What you need to do, is read the articles at each site, absorb the information and take some notes if you have to (nobody expects you to have a steal trap memory) and then go write your article.

Now, in this particular case, there just wasn’t enough relevant information at these sites to write a decent article on the subject.

At this stage, you have 2 choices. Either keep going through the search results or pick another topic.

Sometimes, there just isn’t enough to write on if you need to do research.

Okay, now that we know what we’re talking about and have our information gathered, it’s time to start putting our article together.

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