How to Write a Featured Story in Article Marketing
What are some good examples of what can be called a featured story? Well there are many but I would say the most popular ones tend to be the features in Advertising Magazine, Shape, GQ, The New Republic, Town and Country, L Magazine, Dwell, Adweek, Men's Health, Shape, Redbook, CEW, Redbook. Also, I'm going to include here, since you are reading this article, an extract from an article by Jon whale, called "How to Write a Feature Story That Will Get You nominated for an Academy Award." Now I'm not sure that many people are going to take this seriously but it is interesting, if nothing else. It does bring up some issues.
A featured story is basically a piece of non-nonsense non-entertainment writing about current news. In other words, a feature article isn't supposed to be entertaining or even informative or even of any use to anybody else except the people who are writing it and to the people who are reading it. The other sub-groups are the entertainment/entertainment article and the feature article. Entertainment articles tend to be about current events, celebrities, rock stars, things that inspire people or things that are hot in the tabloids. Feature articles on the other hand are more serious pieces that tend to be about art, books, movies, music artists, business leaders, athletes, designers, musicians, actors or political figures.
If you are writing a feature article, I recommend that you make your introduction part of the piece and your body part a secondary story or a supporting one. That way you don't start rambling with the article. You can also add new information about your topic throughout your piece in quotations. For example, instead of writing "The New York Times just ran an article about..." you could add "That article discusses..." Hopefully your reader won't mind if you repeat their name several times in your featured stories but in most cases they'll appreciate you doing so.
Another thing you can do is to create new units for your featured stories. These are simply stand alone pieces that you add to your regular content. One example would be a blog post. Instead of creating a whole new post you can just insert a few sentences about your featured stories into your regular post. It's a little bit of a time commitment, but you can easily create a new post once every few days or so. You can also use these posts to get people to re-tweet your links, re-like your pages or share the articles with their social media networks.
Some people have written entire posts about how to use the content featured slider effectively. This is something you want to make sure you keep in mind when learning how to add new content to your website. Most of the time the featured stories are related to whatever it is that you're selling or promoting on your website. Therefore it only makes sense to make sure your featured posts are in line with what your customers want and need. So before you start adding these up, ask yourself whether or not the product or service you are trying to sell will really benefit from these featured stories.
It also never hurts to do a little research on who your visitors come from and what factors lead them to visit your site. For example if you see a huge spike in traffic after one particular weekend, it doesn't make much sense to post an article with the same topic the next day. This is the same principle as buying products based solely off of what other people are buying. Chances are you'll end up wasting your money.
Another thing to remember is that the featured story isn't always the best one. If there were two or three things about your product that weren't good enough to promote, then why are you posting it? Always try and post the best ones in order to get the most clicks and to earn the most revenue.
These are just a few tips to help you avoid going wrong when writing your featured story. Keep your focus and look for the best content available. Good luck!
A featured story is basically a piece of non-nonsense non-entertainment writing about current news. In other words, a feature article isn't supposed to be entertaining or even informative or even of any use to anybody else except the people who are writing it and to the people who are reading it. The other sub-groups are the entertainment/entertainment article and the feature article. Entertainment articles tend to be about current events, celebrities, rock stars, things that inspire people or things that are hot in the tabloids. Feature articles on the other hand are more serious pieces that tend to be about art, books, movies, music artists, business leaders, athletes, designers, musicians, actors or political figures.
If you are writing a feature article, I recommend that you make your introduction part of the piece and your body part a secondary story or a supporting one. That way you don't start rambling with the article. You can also add new information about your topic throughout your piece in quotations. For example, instead of writing "The New York Times just ran an article about..." you could add "That article discusses..." Hopefully your reader won't mind if you repeat their name several times in your featured stories but in most cases they'll appreciate you doing so.
Another thing you can do is to create new units for your featured stories. These are simply stand alone pieces that you add to your regular content. One example would be a blog post. Instead of creating a whole new post you can just insert a few sentences about your featured stories into your regular post. It's a little bit of a time commitment, but you can easily create a new post once every few days or so. You can also use these posts to get people to re-tweet your links, re-like your pages or share the articles with their social media networks.
Some people have written entire posts about how to use the content featured slider effectively. This is something you want to make sure you keep in mind when learning how to add new content to your website. Most of the time the featured stories are related to whatever it is that you're selling or promoting on your website. Therefore it only makes sense to make sure your featured posts are in line with what your customers want and need. So before you start adding these up, ask yourself whether or not the product or service you are trying to sell will really benefit from these featured stories.
It also never hurts to do a little research on who your visitors come from and what factors lead them to visit your site. For example if you see a huge spike in traffic after one particular weekend, it doesn't make much sense to post an article with the same topic the next day. This is the same principle as buying products based solely off of what other people are buying. Chances are you'll end up wasting your money.
Another thing to remember is that the featured story isn't always the best one. If there were two or three things about your product that weren't good enough to promote, then why are you posting it? Always try and post the best ones in order to get the most clicks and to earn the most revenue.
These are just a few tips to help you avoid going wrong when writing your featured story. Keep your focus and look for the best content available. Good luck!
Comments
Post a Comment