That’s all there is to it. If you aim for each of those three points to run around 300 words, with another 100 or so for the introduction and conclusion, you’ll have your article.
If you wanted to write an article for a gardening blog about the right way to choose a bonsai tree, your plan might look like this:
There are lots of bonsai trees available, so here are some principles to guide your buying choices:
Climate—There’s no point in buying a tree that’s going to die in your garden.
Shape and size—What look suits your garden best?
Care—Do you want to prune and train the tree yourself, or do you want one off the shelf?
Keep these points in mind, and you’ll make the right choice.
Now, I don’t know whether those points really are important factors to consider when buying bonsai trees. But I do know that this structure is the simplest way to plan effective content on the Web: an introduction, three main points, and a conclusion.
Make the introduction hard-hitting. In RSS feeds and on blog home pages, users will see only the first few lines of the article, and they’ll use those lines to decide whether to continue reading. Your opening should be powerful and interesting enough to create the kind of curiosity that pulls readers in. And if you want to make it a little special, try to make sure that at least one of those main points is unique and original. When you’re writing on a popular topic, don’t just repeat what everyone else has said; give it a unique perspective—ideally, something drawn from your own experience.
Statistics can also help to show that what you’re saying is factual and well researched. You can find them on sites like census.gov, fedstats.gov, and the web sites of professional associations. They make your arguments look convincing and give readers solid facts that they wouldn’t have known otherwise. Saying that “according to the Nursery Sellers Association, sales of bonsai trees have grown 83 percent in the past four years” adds weight to your post.
That structure is a basic model that you can always call on when you’re planning content. You can adjust it for articles of different lengths and add or take away paragraphs depending on the topic. The structure itself isn’t important. What is important is that you use one every time you sit down to create new content.
Seven Content Types that Go KaChing
Content can come in many different forms, and all of them have their value and their uses. Here are seven of the most common types of content that you’ll come across online, together with their strengths and weaknesses, so that you can choose when and how to use them.
1. HOW-TO ARTICLES
How-to articles are the most direct way to transfer your practical skills to your readership. They’re like short manuals that teach a skill. Tim Carter’s site is packed full of them, and they don’t all have titles like “How to Grout” (although that is the name of one of his videos).
The main strength of these kinds of posts is that if you have the knowledge, they’re very easy to write. You simply want to take the readers by the hand and guide them step-by-step through the process of accomplishing the task. The format is largely the same whether you’re explaining how to lay tiles, create a layer in Photo-shop or perform a cobra in yoga. It’s all very simple: Just tell people what they need to do and, ideally, toss in a few pictures to show them. Scatter some ad units in appropriate places on the page, and KaChing, you have profitable content.
As an additional bonus, content like this tends to stay fresh for a long time. A post explaining clearly how to build a deck will be as useful six months after it was posted as the day it was written. Your site won’t degrade in time, but will grow increasingly valuable as you add new content.
The disadvantage of how-to articles is that posting a large number of them turns your site into a practical resource. Visitors might stop by when they want to know how to knit a sweater or back up their hard drive, but it’s unlikely to form part of their casual reading.
That’s not necessarily a problem. Sites like these can still make lots of money. But an online manual might not be the type of site you want to produce.
2. NEWS ARTICLES
News sites are among the most popular on the Web, but they’re not necessarily the most profitable. The big news companies like Fox and the BBC already have reporters in place who send back content, so for them, the biggest challenge has already been met and the biggest expense has already been covered. When it’s just you, you’ll struggle to bring in original content.
There are solutions, though. AppleInsider.com is a news site with no original news content at all (Figure 3.1). It simply aggregates news stories about Apple from around the Web. Anyone interested in following what’s happening at the iPhone maker can go to one place and find all the information they want. For the publisher, ads for Macs and iPods will always do well on a site this tightly niched. Alternatively, it’s always possible to throw the odd news article into any site and show that it’s dynamic and up-to-date.
There are a couple of problems with writing news articles, though. The first is that unless you’re breaking the news yourself, you’re going to be rewriting. Cutting and pasting content from a news site is illegal, wrong, and may earn you rude e-mails from lawyers. You’ll certainly hear a loud KaChing then, but it will be the sound of your
