How To Get The Top Spot On Article Sites

Writing great articles is nowhere near rocket science. However it does require attending to a few important details. The most important aspects of any good article really come down to just three basic elements:

• An eye-catching title/headline
• Interesting content
• Value to the reader

If you can adequately provide these three key ingredients you can get your articles posted and read over and over for months and even years. On many article websites there are articles that have been there for years and are still being read for the first time by many readers and as a result many authors are earning income for an article they wrote long ago. Pretty cool huh?

So just how do you go about getting the top spot on an article website like I did?

To get you on your way to a high ranking on article sites let's explore the three main elements listed above.

The Headline

The headline must be able to immediately pique a reader's interest. It may be something that the reader is not really searching for at the time but the title is so provocative that it makes them stop, click and take time to read your article.

Many of the most popular - and therefore most read - articles have a headline that starts with "How To." This can be anything from how to change the alternator in a '57 Chevy to how to bake a pineapple upside-down cake. It really doesn't matter a whole lot what your topic is, there will be someone who will find it interesting and valuable. And value is what the reader is actually searching for.

Content

One article I wrote was titled "How To Use Your Race To Get Rich." The title was so provocative that it rose to the top spot at www.ThePhantomWriters.com in less than three days and reigned there for almost a month. But the title alone was not what made it so popular. The content (value) was extremely thought-provoking and those who read it rated it so highly that it went to the top spot from Friday morning to Sunday night. Its rise was so meteoric that the owner of the site wrote me a personal email message to congratulate me.

I don't say this to impress you but to impress upon you how much traffic you can get by writing decent articles. Consider this. I use software that uploads my articles to about ten article sites with the click of a button. The Phantom Writers website is not on the list of sites that is associated with this software. My article was imported to the Phantom Writers website by the magic of Internet crawlers that endlessly search for new, pertinent and valuable content. And as icing on the cake The Phantom Writers placed my article on their Article Redistribution service and farmed it out to many more sites that my upload software "knew" nothing about. Talk about free traffic, wow.

Value

One definition of "value" is "a fair price in return for goods or services." But at bottom it can be considered as totally subjective. You've heard the old saying that one man's trash is another man's treasure. In article writing you want to provide value to the reader that will also result in something of value to you in return for writing the article. A fair exchange as it were.

If you are able to provide your readers with an adequate amount of value with the content of your articles you can actually make a ton of money using article marketing. The article I wrote that went to the number one spot created a stream of residual income for me. And most amazingly it will continue to do so into the future. Now can you really beat that?