Colon Cleansing is not a pleasant subject but……..
As a writer for hire, you may have some choice over your subject matter, but realistically you’ll take any work that pays what you are looking for. It’s a stark choice between paying the bills or not and like someone said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and of the two, being rich is better!”
So you have an assignment to deliver articles on a mundane or less than interesting subject and now you have to come up with content that will attract readers and promote your client’s objectives for creating the project. This is where you can start employing some generic approaches for developing articles that can be adapted for pretty much any subject. Looking through these examples, you will probably start recognising the general formulae for many of the articles and content that you come across on the web.
Here’s our subject then – colon cleansing – this is a real project I worked on recently and frankly, it’s a pretty disgusting and distasteful topic, which I knew almost absolutely nothing about when I was given the assignment. Now, how do we go about generating article ideas for flushing out your insides?
The “How to…”
The “How to..” article is extremely common and you basically write about how the reader goes about performing some action or preventing this or that. The application is virtually boundless and applying this formula to our example how about “How to Perform Colon Cleansing”, “How do you know when you need colon cleansing?”, “How to choose a colon cleansing program that’s right for you” and ad nauseum.
There is a reason why “How to..” articles are so common and it’s simply because readers like them. I’ve used them myself from building a recycled greenhouse, to working out how to set up my first WordPress blog, and the chances are you’ve used them too. The fact is that people like to be taken step-by-step through a process to achieve an objective.
The Case Study
You can always find a case study that deals with any topic from a simple internet search and there is always an agency, foundation, quango or notable organisation releasing a study of some kind every day around the world.
Using our practical example “Chinese Study Group finds Colon Cleansing Improves Longevity”, “FDA Study Claims No Benefit from Colon Cleansing Products”, “Colon Cleansing Improves Energy Levels says British Researcher.”
It becomes a simple matter to summarise the results of the study, what the findings were, how they went about conducting the research and why they did so in the first place. If you look for the headline statistics that are frequently produced, these help you with creating eye-catching headlines and something to grip the reader with in the initial paragraph, for example, “99.9% of Patients who Colon Cleanse Live to a 100!”
Scientific and government studies almost always end up asking more questions than they give answers. You can take these new questions and make your prediction for the direction “colon cleansing” or whatever topic you are involved in, is going to take in the future. You won’t be far wrong.
The List
This is easy to put together and you’ve seen them almost as often as the “How to..” variety. Whereas “How to..” articles take your reader through a step-by-step process to achieve an objective, lists tend to be used for justifying why you should do something or what you should be using.
Titles we could use with our example include “Top 10 Reasons why you should Colon Cleanse”, “Top 5 Colon Cleansing Products” or “7 Benefits of Colonic Irrigation”.
A brief paragraph or two as your introduction and straight into your list, makes these articles easy to write and easy to scan by the reader, which probably accounts for their popularity.
Click here to go to part two.