What is the purpose of writing articles?

What is the purpose of writing articles?

The purpose of writing articles is first and foremost to educate people, to give something of value to the reader, to pass your knowledge or expertise of a particular subject onto others.

Within the internet marketing industry and in fact many other industries, it can be a lucrative way of driving traffic to your website and the other real beauty is it is FREE.  What I love about Ezine Articles is that writing just one article can mean a Google position on many different pages within your niche.  The added bonus is that once you have had your article published, it is out there sending traffic to you for many, many years to come.

Before writing – what is the purpose of your specific article?

Any good article author will tell you that you should always sit down before you write any article and determine what the purpose of that particular article is.  For example, if your intention is to rate in the Search Engines then you will need to use long tail keywords so your article will appear when people type that keyword into the Search Engine.

If you are writing an article to submit to a blog post or a niche related forum where your target  market hangs out, then you don’t even need to bother too much about keywords at all.  Your purpose on this occasion is not to appear on the Search Engine Results page but to offer something of value to your hungry audience.

Search Engine Ratings or Value to the Reader?

I have never written any article yet that has started with me aiming solely to get ratings in the search engines.  Instead what I have tried to do is to answer the questions that I sought answers to when I first came into internet marketing.  If during my many visits to the forums that are out there, I see a reoccurring question then I will do some research if necessary and attempt to write an article on that also.  Again this is about providing value rather than ratings.

Now this doesn’t mean that I totally ignore the Search Engines but just that I do not dwell on it so much.  The day I made the decision to no longer focus on keywords, keywords, and more keywords was the day I felt a huge burden lift from me.

There is also a lot of software out there that promises to take the ‘arduous’ task of writing articles away from you.  Some claim that you only need write one article and their software will spin it to make several more articles out of that one.

My question to you then is “what is your purpose of writing articles?”  “What are you attempting to achieve?”  I ask this because in my opinion, the fact that you have opted for an easy way out suggests that this is all about ‘you’ and ‘taking’ rather than ‘giving’ value to your readers first and foremost.