• By Tiva Kelly
• Published 03/24/2008
• Article Writing

The purpose of an article is to give your readers information they can use. Providing high-quality articles will bring readers to your site when they look for the information through search engines. An article between four and 700 words is ideal for the average online reader. Blogs, on the other hand, are a little trickier. Many blogs are too short to efficiently cover a topic and provide a solution for the reader. Though blogs have been around for quite a while now, blogging is often considered more of a hobby than a profession. Turn Your Blog into an Article Don’t treat your blog posts like personal journal entries. The typical blog tends to be all about a person and their perspective on a certain topic. You might read about someone’s experience with online dating, a woman’s emotions as she goes through and recovers from weight loss surgery or a writer’s journey as he works to get his first novel published. If you take some of the personal element out of the writing and do some basic research on the topic you’ve decided to write on, you can create a quality article to post for your readers. Focus your article around several keywords or keyword phrases. Research these keywords and add your own personal spin to the information. It’s okay to personalize the article to make it your own, but remain objective when adding your expertise on the topic. The Real Meat and Potatoes

Articles are more valuable than blogs because they are the meat and potatoes when it comes to creating content that brings more visitors to your site. Forget about writing th

e fluff pieces. Short pieces with more opinion than content do not work as well as articles from a marketing standpoint. A successful marketing campaign will lead readers to your website, but getting people to your website is not enough. Only those sites that provide quality content articles will gain the respect of their readers and build an audience of repeat visitors. Once they start linking to your site and passing the link through word-of-mouth, you know you’re on the right track. Reasons Why Articles Are More Valuable Than Blogs An article might take a little longer to research and write than a blog post, but the end results are worth it. Blogs are often too opinionated. Articles attract more viewers and more clicks. A blog is too short to fully develop the topic. Not all blogs are treated as professional writing. Articles provide more room for keywords, keyword phrases and links. Articles allow more room for advertisements on the page. Save the Sales Pitch While the purpose of both blogs and articles is to bring traffic to your site and make money through affiliate sites or personal website sales, neither a blog nor an article should read like a sales pitch. Writers are more likely to endorse a product in their blog than in an article. A better route, however, is to write an article about the topic and provide a link to a particular product that you would recommend.

The truth is you’ll probably get some clicks if you write sales pitch pieces. The problem is that even though people are clicking, they aren’t reading and returning. People get turned off by direct sales pitches when they are looking for information on a specific topic.