Today I received a question from someone who asked, "How do you come up with ideas to actually turn into articles?"
What's funny is that question came from a web form -- a form that I send people to who are interested in using simple little articles to drive traffic to their web sites. I ask what their most important question is about article marketing and when they hit the submit button their question gets sent to my in-box.
I do that because I'm a nice guy and want to help people. Really, that's part of it.
But there's also a secret just under the surface -- I'm asking people what they want to know so I know what to write articles about! In other words, by asking the question, that person was giving the answer to their own question...
Ask your target market what kind of information they need. By asking first, you're going to be 100% on track with what you write. And even though only one person might ask a question, that are far more people out there who are wondering the same thing.
I've been working in the article marketing niche for long enough that I know what most people want to learn -- I can write articles on those topics all day long. But I still send new people on my list to that web form because I may have accidentally skipped over some aspect of it. By allowing people to ask questions -- and then responding to them with a full-blown article, I'm doing two big things:
1. Building a relationship with that person - and really any person who sees that I actually respond to questions.
2. Creating more content that I can use and reuse in different ways.
As an example of that second point, this article is going to be submitted to a few of the more important article directories, it's going to be posted on my blog, I'll record it and turn it into a podcast episode, and then I'll add slides to that audio and make a video. And that's just in the first week.
I can't tell you exactly what to write about because I don't know what niche you're in -- but your target market can tell you what they want, and they're dying to tell someone who will listen and respond.
As you're building your list make sure one of the emails in your autoresponder series is either a link to a web form where they can ask their most burning question, or even just ask in the email and tell them to hit the Reply button.
Either way, you're going to end up with a never-ending flow of topics you can use to write articles about.
Click here for a free copy of the Article Marketing Tricks special report with more great ways to use simple little articles to drive traffic to your site. Get it at the ArticleMarketingExplained.com site.