One of the keys to successful article marketing is of course the article itself, the article body. Crafting the perfect article body can help you see some great success with all of your marketing efforts, but there are many different tips and tricks that you’ll need to pay attention to. Use this guide to help write a perfect article body each and every time, and the results will improve greatly.

Article Length, Layout and Structure

The ideal article for article marketing purposes is going to be no more than 500 to 600 words. At the same time, it should always be at least 300 words, giving you a good deal of flexibility to choose just how long and detailed you want your article to be. You want your article to be useful and informative, but you also want people to be able to get through it quickly and easily, ensuring they don’t get bored or lose interest along the way.

It’s always a good idea to keep your paragraphs short, so that there is lots of eye friendly white space on the page. This makes it easy to break up your content, and it makes it easy for individuals to read through what you’re saying. Nobody wants to read an article that looks daunting or challenging, filled with unending paragraphs and a huge amount of text.

You can further break up your content using subtitles and subheads, as well as both bullet-ed and numbered lists. All of these tools will help to make your article enjoyable and hassle free, as opposed to appearing as one long, intimidating and boring block of black text.

Don’t forget that your resource box should be a seamless continuation of the article. You start with your article introduction, then get into the beef of what you’re saying. You can have a separate article conclusion and then the resource box, or you can move directly to the resource box and use that as your de facto conclusion. Either way, make sure it all fits together smoothly.

Article Purpose, Style and Tone

The purpose of your article when you’re using it for article marketing is to entice somebody to perform an action, whether it’s visiting your website, purchasing a product, signing up for your email list or anything else. Therefore, you have to leave your audience wanting more.

Yes, you should be providing a good deal of useful and valuable information. But don’t give people the entire story, you need to give them a reason to continue seeing what else you have to say. Inform people and draw them in, enticing them to seek out more from your.

Your article style and tone should be easy to read and conversational. Anybody that writes their articles as if they are trying to give a professional lecture, or as if they’re talking down to the audience is sure to fail. Use a light and free flowing style that makes your articles easy to read and informs without being too uptight or professorial.

SEO considerations

Of course the SEO value of your article is also extremely important. Without it, nobody will find your article and then all of the hard work you spent in crafting it will have been wasted. The main issue here is of course your usage of keywords within the article body.

Many people make the mistake of using the same keywords far too many times. Not only does this fail to provide you with real search engine optimization benefits, but your text will also be hard to read, and your articles may even be rejected from certain distribution services such as Ezine Articles.

Instead of stuffing your article body, consider using your main keyword no more than three or four times, once each in the introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and maybe once or twice more in the body depending on the length of the article.

In place of using the same keyword over and over again, use variations, synonyms and other related terms and phrases in the rest of your article. This is called LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, and it helps to provide an even greater SEO boost without stuffing your content with the same keyword repeatedly.

Also avoid using the same article body on multiple Article Directories. The reason is that even though the article might be indexed right away, over time it’s excluded from Google’s index due to multiple copies of the same block of text encountered on multiple domain names. This is called off-site duplicate content it’s a real issue that must be paid attention to.

The solution – rewrite the article at least three times keeping then meaning intact, upload it on a spinning interface of your article submission software and only then syndicate it throughout multiple article directories.

Short recap just to make sure we’ve understood each other:

• 450 – 500 words is best length. 600 is OK. If over 600, write two articles.
• Use lists! Readers and webmasters like list articles.
• Use SHORT paragraphs. Three sentences or four lines maximum.
• Keep sentences short! Try to keep them to one line or shorter.
• Use boldface. Use bold lists, bold list headings, and bold subheadlines.
• Write conversationally. An informal tone often gets more click throughs.

That’s all I had to say on this matter. What are your own marketing secrets when it comes to building the article body?