If Content is King; Here's How to Be a King Maker

Great content can truly be an asset for your online marketing efforts; the quality of writing determines your profits. It seals the fate of user experience on your website, brings in an avalanche of traffic, affects conversions directly, and pumps up the sales.

However, writing articles that work for you isn't that easy -- it calls for experience, attention to detail, perseverance, ability to do research, creativity to think and bring out unique angles on several topics, etc. Here are some of the things you need to look out for to bring out an awesome, profit-pulling article:

Secret to writing well -- Write often and read well

Engineering basics talk about the "Input-output" concept where what goes in comes out. To write a great article, read a lot of good books where you see great writing already working on your sub-consciousness.

Next, write as often as possible. Your writing will evolve, grow, mature and reach a stage where your work begins to be noticed. That's when the magic begins: your content will be shared, bookmarked, linked to, and can even go viral.

The article has a job to do

When you know that your article has a responsibility and a purpose, writing well becomes a matter of pride. While taking a bearing on the foundation of best practices in writing, a good article does plenty of jobs all at once (depending on why and for whom it's written): it can inform and educate; it can motivate and inspire; it can push you around and make you do things; it can make you smile or drop your head down in gloom.

If the article doesn't excite, it's not worth writing it

Bland content doesn't sell. If you want to be in business, you have to be bold and you should risk nudging some people about. If you want to write bland articles, jump right in because it's easy.

The tough part comes when you want to write an article that reads like an action block-buster but still does its job. Step a little towards the 'hype' side. Modest articles without a punch can earn fetch you so much. Like Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org, likes to say "Be the news and host the controversy".

Include references, always

Exemplary writing leads you to be an expert -- a part of that expertise comes from giving due credit to sources of information you use to construct the article (or any writing piece like a blog, report or a whitepaper).

Non-fiction writing -- the bread and butter of most of our Internet Marketing efforts -- requires you to pour information from many other sources and for that reason alone, it's a good habit to cite references at the end of the article. Further, it gives a huge boost to the credibility of the information you present to your readers.

Does your article blend into the design?

Writing content isn't easy - it takes a herculean effort to produce great articles or blog posts that are based on impeccable research, perfect writing with appropriate grammar and spellings.

Writing for the web calls for all of that mentioned above and a little more: According to "Don't Make me Think" By Steve Krug, your content has to blend into a larger concept of a website's usability design. Quality content poured into a website designed the right way leads to success online, provided everything else is done right.

Web users don't read much; they scan and scan some more. They are notoriously impatient and that calls for a different genre of writing where you need to produce articles that avoid fluff, get to the point, leave a lot of white space in between paragraphs, use shorter sentences and write like you speak.