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Writing Articles| Article #172 : ARTICLE WRITING – PART 5

Okay, you’re finally ready to actually start writing your article. What is about to come next may disappoint a lot of people because I know you want to be creative when writing your article, but like I said earlier, throw your creativity out the window for now, at least if you want to write an article that will get picked up by the top directories.

Let’s start with the length of the article itself.

Each article directory has different criteria for article length. So what’s best to do is make sure that your article is long enough to be accepted by anybody online, especially if you are writing an article for the purpose of getting paid. Remember, we have 2 options here.

Submit for pay

Submit for exposure

When submitting for pay, companies paying for your services are going to want articles of considerable length. The low end is somewhere around 500 words. The high end could be 1500 words or more.

When submitting for exposure, the article directories usually have lower standards because they aren’t paying you for your work. Some directories only require a couple hundred words.

I suggest that you make all your articles a minimum of 500 words. Most likely, at least when you’re first starting, you’re going to have a hard time getting the higher paying companies to accept your work anyway. So 500 words should be fine to start with.

Okay, we have our goal of 500 words. Now, while this may sound like a lot, if we break it down, it’s not a lot at all.

Remember up top about what I said about this part disappointing you? Well, here it comes. If you’re going to write articles, primarily for article directories and getting people to read them in order to ultimately make it to your web site, there is a “formula” for doing this.

I know I just dashed all your ideas of how grand writing is. Well, suck it up for now. As you become a more experienced writer, you can begin to take some liberties. But you can’t break the “rules” of the “formula” until you know what the formula is.

So what is this writer’s formula?

Simple.

Topic (1 sentence)
Summary (2 -5 sentences)
Introduction (1 paragraph)
Meat Of Article (3 or 4 paragraphs)
Conclusion (1 paragrpah)
Resource Box (2 – 3 sentences)

That’s it my friend. Write it in stone onto your brain, because if you go online and look at every top article at Ezine Articles, you will find that they pretty much follow that formula.

How does this translate into 500 words?

Easy.

The topic and summary don’t count towards the word count of the article.

Your introduction paragraph should be about 100 words. Trust me, 100 words is not a lot.

The meat of your article should be about 300 words. That’s 100 words per paragraph if you write 3 paragraphs. If you write 4 paragraphs, it’s even less.

Your conclusion is another 100 words.

There you have it. 500 words.

In our next article, we’ll pick up with actually writing articles in real time.

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