If you want to find excellent ideas for articles, then doing the following should leave you with no shortage of things to write about:

• Figure out who your target audience is.
• Find a site on the internet where members of your target audience talk about things related to what you sell.
• Look for questions to answer, problems to address, and needs or wants to fulfill.

Of course, you should also try to be aware of the questions you answer for yourself or interesting things related to what you sell that you stumble across, as such things also make excellent topics for articles.

I recommend keeping a notebook and writing utensil handy at all times so that you can jot down interesting ideas before you forget them and create articles about them later.

Normally, people who are selling something have an audience in mind, though perhaps a rather general one.

As long as you have at least one general target audience, you can track down sites where members of that audience gather.

Of course, if you can define your intended audience better, you can find more targeted communities and focus your articles better.

It also can help to look for lateral audiences.

Perhaps you sell something that is normally considered to be one thing, but can think of other good uses for it to which most people never even consider putting it.

When you can think of these kinds of uses, you typically find a reachable market with little or no competition, at least for a while.

No matter what you sell, there is probably a place somewhere on the internet where your members of your target audience can be found.

The following sites might be quite helpful when seeking out questions related to what you are selling:

• Yahoo Groups
• Yahoo Answers
• Ask.com
• Big Boards
• MySpace Forums
• Google Groups

Additionally, entering the primary broad keywords that you are targeting along with words such as “forums”, “boards”, “groups”, and such can turn up a lot of good results.

By simply scanning subject lines you can typically find more questions than you could possibly write articles about.

When creating content in places that allow both links and images, you can place images in your textual content to break it off and lead people to products which are related to your articles.

Image Styling and Linking

The following are some useful styles you can use when placing images:

float: (left | right)

Makes the image float to the left or right of the text near it.

<img src="URL" style="float: left;" />

<img src="URL" style="float: right; padding-right: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.25em;" />

padding-left: 0.5em;

padding-right: 0.5em;

padding-bottom: 0.25em;

Padding attributes create a buffer of space around your images.

When using float: left; be sure to add padding-right: #.#; if necessary

When using float: right; be sure to add padding-left: #.#; if necessary

Padding bottom will prevent text from running right up against the edge of an image.

If you want an equal buffer around all sides of an image, use padding: #.#;

margin-left: 0.5em;

margin-right: 0.5em;

margin-bottom: 0.25em;

Margin attributes create a buffer of space around your images.

When using float: left; be sure to add margin-right: #.#; if necessary

When using float: right; be sure to add margin-left: #.#; if necessary

Margin bottom will prevent text from running right up against the edge of an image.

If you want an equal buffer around all sides of an image, use margin: #.#;

The difference between padding and margin is that padding is space considered to be within the block of an item while margin is external to it.

If you want a color around an image, give your image a background-color and a margin. If you want space between the color around your image and everything else, add a margin as well.

As you can see, this image is floating to the left of this text. Placing multiple images floating in different ways can be problematic between browsers, though the easy way to do so and have it look right is to place each section in div tags.

The problem with that is your text then may not look the way you want it to either.

This time, our image is floating to the right side of the displayed text. For longer articles, you might place an image floating one way near the front of the title and an image floating another way near the end of it.

Making your image into a link:

When you place your images, you can turn them into links.

If you place an item you sell on a page, you might make it into a link to that item on your store.

<a href="URL"><img src="URL" style="float: right;" />

<a href="URL"><img src="URL" style="float: left;" />

Since I don’t sell beer online currently (now that is a good idea!), I’ve instead decided to include an image of an old slide I have lying about which appears to be an authentic slide from the making of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back. Additionally, I have added a title tag to the link so that when someone places their mouse over the image they see what it is.

Being no expert, I couldnt say for sure…but if it is a fake, someone went through a good deal of trouble to make it.

Now that you know how to place arbitrary images into html text, I would like to point out that you can do the same thing with blocks of text.

The easiest way is to place a floating div inside of your content.

Floating Divs

<div style="float: right;">Some Text</div>

That will create a block of text and float it to the right side of the page.

You can place informational blurbs, links, lists, and just about anything else inside of it that you want.

Some good attributes to place in the style tag of your floating div:

width: 200px;

The width in pixels to make the div

border: 1px solid #000000;

Width of the border, style of the border, color of the border

padding: 1em;

How far to place internal text away from the edge of the containing div

margin: 1em;

How far away from external content ( in character widths ) to keep the div

background-color: #DEDEDE;

The color to fill the background in with

color: #000000;

The color to make the non hyperlink text within the box

If you find yourself using floating divs a lot, you might want to create a style for them in your style sheet ( or add one to your CSS Inserts if you use Atahualpa ) that defines the typical settings you want. Then you only have to set the ones that you want to be different than normal when you create them.

For example, you could set all of the above in a style called co-right.

To place the div, you would use <div class="co-right">Your Text</div>

TO override a particular style, you would add a style="" section with only the overridden style set.

As you can see, the box floats to the right side of this text. As with images, be sure to use padding if your text is running right into your bordered divs.

The div box is a container which can hold other html items within it. In fact, it is used by most modern WordPress themes to display different sections of pages.

If you have a large display, resize your window a few times and see how the divs react. They can be a bit erratic and hard to get just right when you first start using them…at least on large display areas.

However, if you have a maximum width or fixed width set for your page, then this becomes a lot less problematic.

You can place images inside of divs to help position them a bit more reliably.

You can also use styled divs ( or even styled paragraph tags ) for callouts:

A Styled Paragraph Callout

The above paragraph uses the following styles:

• text-align: center;
• border: 1px solid #000;
• font-weight: bold;
• color: #D00;
• background-color: #EEE

The #XXX notation is shorthand for #RRGGBB, which each single digit being repeated so #FFF stands for #FFFFFF.

And again, you could create a class so that you only had to enter class="whatever" rather than each style attribute every time.

.whatever {

text-align: center;

border: 1px solid #000;

font-weight: bold;

color: #D00;

background-color: #EEE;

}

That is how you would add such a style to your style sheet or CSS Insert.

Keywords are typically what lets different sites and search engines know what to display to users who are searching for or browsing content.

For information marketing purposes, they have a couple of purposes:

• Getting search engines and search algorithms to display your content
• Catching the eye of your target audience, especially in results where the words searched on are highlighted

While they are a critical component of information marketing, they mean nothing if your title, summary, resource box, or content is weak.

When creating your content, the following guidelines on keyword placement will generally help to get your content displayed:

Title:

Use your primary keyword as close to the front of your title as you can.

If you can fit them in, use secondary keywords later in your title.

If you cannot create a good title with your keywords, do without them or keep working on your title.

Summary:

Use your primary keyword close to the front of your summary.

Use a couple of your secondary keywords throughout your summary.

Avoid packing your summary too full of keywords.

If you cannot fit more than one keyword into your summary and still make it sound natural, do without further keywords or keep working on your summary.

Resource Box:

If you can use your primary keyword in your resource box while keeping it tidy and sounding good, do so.

If not, don’t worry about it. The primary work of keywords should be done by your title, summary, and content.

Content:

Try to use your primary keyword as close to the start of your content as possible.

Use it a couple more times in the body of your content, but not at the expense of sounding unnatural or spam-like.

Use secondary keywords in your content where it makes sense to do so.

The main thing is to make the individual parts of your article strong, while using your primary keyword near the beginning of the most important parts if possible.

However, I am of the opinion that you should always go for strong content before keyword placement.

If you cannot manage to create strong content with decent keyword placement, I’d typically recommend continuing to work on your article until you get both.

You content will be online for a long time to come (unless you pull it), so it is worth taking a bit of extra time to get it right.

The body of your content should focus on providing exactly what the title and summary promise quickly and efficiently.

The purpose of your content is to give the one viewing it the information that they were looking for, so that they will view it and hopefully take the action you are looking for.

If you don’t deliver, then people will quickly hit their back button and see if they can find content that does deliver.

When you are creating content, there are a few simple things that you should generally try to keep in mind:

Keep the feel of the body similar to the feel of the title

If you used a secretive title, but provide content that doesn’t have a hint of secrecy to it, your viewer may decide to go elsewhere.

They chose your content based upon the title…so chances are good that they want content that has the same general feel to it.

Keep it short

Unless you promise a novel, it is best to keep your content as short as possible, especially when creating text content.

Start strong and stay strong

Your first two sentences should be as strong as you can make them. For audio and video, the first half minute should be good enough to hold peoples interest.

Most people will go look elsewhere if you haven’t caught their attenting within the first paragraph.

Providing a week introduction will prompt people to go elsewhere.

Use paragraphs liberally in textual content

Long paragraphs turn most people off. By breaking up your paragraphs, you make your writing more inviting and/or less intimidating for most people.

If you know that your target market doesn’t mind (or even enjoys) long paragraphs, then ignore this.

Use whitespace liberally

If the venue or medium allows, consider using images and boxes to break up your text and make particular pieces of information stand out better.

Use subheadings

If it makes sense to do so, be sure to create subheadings in any textual content.

This helps skimmers find the section of your content that they want to read.

Callouts:

If it is allowed, you might want to include a callout in your content.

A callout tells your viewer what they should do now. If you don’t suggest that they do something, most people won’t.

When it makes sense, I prefer to place callouts that are similar to titles, telling people the benefits of taking the action I suggest rather than just telling them something like "Click here to buy!"

For example:

• “Learn how the courts work and answer your own legal questions without a high priced lawyer!”
• "Ignore the sycophantic media.
  Learn the real reasons for our economic problems now!"

Directed towards the proper audience, both callouts could be quite effective…even though neither one notes what, exactly, will happen if the reader clicks either link.

For comparison sake, here are the callouts they might replace:

• "Buy Jurisdictionary Now!"
• "Get your copy of The Revolution, a Manifesto now!"

When creating content on other peoples sites, resource boxes are often the only way you have of getting people to visit your site or store.

On your own site, they can serve to help break up the text on a page while providing key pieces of information or links to your products.

From an information marketing standpoint, the primary purpose of resource boxes on other sites is to get people to do what you want them to.

For that reason, a resource box is typically the third most important piece of your content.

When creating your resource box, you should take care to comply with any policies concerning them which the site you want to place your content on has.

From there, a good resource box should attempt to:

• Be clean and uncluttered
• Give people a way to get where you want them to go

If a particular site does not allow offsite links in the resource box ( and you still want to write on it ), then you might consider a callout to check your profile, particularly if the site allows a link to be placed there.

Most web sites use summaries when displaying your content alongside other content.

Your summary serves two primary purposes:

• Getting sites and search engines to display your content to people
• Getting people to choose your content rather than someone else’s

In doing these things, your summary supports your title. Failing to have a strong summary will result in your content either not being displayed in the first place or not being viewed even if it is listed.

For these reasons, you should be sure to take the time to come up with a strong summary.

Ideally, your summary will be much like a short piece of sales copy writing.

Getting pages and search engines to list your content

For the purposes of getting your content displayed when people are searching for something to view, you should typically try to include the following:

• Your primary targeted keyword or phrase
• One or more secondary keywords or phrases

Of course, it is generally better to have no keywords in your summary than to use them in a manner that is disjointed.

As with your title, it is better to have your primary keyword close to the start of your summary and any secondary keywords later on.

Getting people to choose your content

For the purposes of getting people to choose your content, your summary should attempt to:

• Work with your title rather than duplicating it
• Tell potential readers what benefit your content will bring them (or what pain they will suffer if they fail to…if that is the way you write)

Normally, you will want to avoid the following in your summaries:

• Talking about yourself
• Talking about your business
• Including snippets of your content

Keep in mind that your summaries purpose is to pitch your article, not your business.

People typically select content because they want to solve a problem, learn something, or entertain themselves. Your summary should (in most cases) work to tell them how they will do one or more of these.

Consider the following two summaries:

• The Whowazit Magic Mind Meld Marketing Method
  
  This article is about getting more sales by increasing the traffic to your online store. It is written by Johnny Artifice, an experienced on-line seller that has used the method within to make a lot of money over the years. It includes information that can help you increase your on-line sales.
• The Whowazit Magic Mind Meld Marketing Method
  
  Say goodbye to discounting your inventory for good. Get more traffic and sales by learning to peek inside the minds of your target audience, find out exactly what they want, and then provide it to them. With these methods, you will quickly increase traffic from people who want to buy exactly what you are offering.

If you were to see these next to each other, which would you be more likely to choose?

Your title, whether it be for an article, a web page, a video, a podcast, or anything else which might show up alongside a variety of similar content, serves two primary purposes:

• Getting search engine traffic
• Getting potential readers to choose your content rather than someone else’s.

Getting Search Engine Traffic

When search engines scan web pages for content, they typically give a lot of weight to the title of the page.

On most sites, your title will be used in the pages title and enclosed in H1 tags on the page itself. Both of these things are used to tell a search engine what the primary content of the page is.

It is for this reason that you should attempt to use the primary keyword that you are targeting as close to the front of your title as you can.

Getting potential readers to choose your article

From a reader perspective, the title of your content is generally what causes them to choose your content over someone else’s.

If you have a weak title, it doesn’t matter how great the body is, few people are likely to select your content when it is displayed next to content with stronger titles.

Strong article titles will typically be reasonably long and do one or more of the following:

• Appeal to a readers emotions
• Address one of the "Seven deadly sins"
• Sound as if they are sharing a secret
• Strongly state that they will solve a perceived problem

If you can create a title which does more than one of these, includes your targeted keyword or phrase early in it, is relevant to your article, and still sounds good, you probably have a title which will perform well.

For example, consider the following two titles:

• Information marketing for online selling
• Stop trying to increase sales by slashing prices and learn a proven method of increasing traffic to your online store immediately

Looking at them next to each other, which one do you think would be more likely to get someone to click on it?

The first tells exactly what is being offered, but is rather mundane and unlikely to catch the eye of anyone when it is listed among other information.

The second, while long, includes multiple strong keywords, speaks directly to online sellers, addresses the common emotional distaste for lowering prices to try and make more sales, addresses the want for more traffic ( strongly associated with more sales ), and promises to provide a solution to the sellers problem (lack of customers and/or sales).

While I, personally, would be more prone to choose the first title because it is simple and plain, most people would choose the second because it is a bit more exciting.