Web Article Brainstorming Session

Articles for Traffic, Education and Profit

How do you get more traffic to your website? As I've pointed out in my article The Problem with Chasing Google (a great sample article, by the way), you really need to have relevant content fit for a human person on your website. How better than articles (or blog posts, which are also articles) that your target client will be looking for on the web?

Articles serve several purposes when they're done correctly:

• They're a clue-in to your personality as a service provider (they make you real)
• They help educate your potential customer on how to make a smarter purchase
• Articles can convince a customer to purchase now rather than later
• They satisfy the mental itch of clients who are information-gatherers
• Oh yeah, they also get indexed by search engines

Potential Topics

Participants will determine the agenda. However, I'm expecting that we will work together to brainstorm article topics, ideas, and perhaps even sketch out content, have a brief discussion of the "sandwich technique" of article writing (see Article Writing for the Web), and compare it with a journalist technique (top-heavy). We may also touch on the "authentic voice", giving it all away, whether to be formal or informal depending on your audience and venue, we may be able to review participants' articles or blog posts, make suggestions for how to improve titles and how to find audiences to lure in to read your articles.

Please come prepared with your biggest burning need for the session. That will be what influences our direction.

Positioning yourself and your products or services with articles can help you find more clients.

If there's time, we should also touch on ways to get the word out about your articles, but since that's not the focus, here's a few things to consider, in case we don't get around to it:

• Sharing links on social media -ask your friends & buddies to like & share the links
• Use your own article as a "boilerplate" for a shorter similar article you can distribute through an article sharing service (like e-zine articles)
• Share a version of your article on LinkedIn
• Email your article to your clients

Sessions are 2 hours each. Special Introductory price of $70/person, (regularly $97 per session), prepaid. Space in the session is limited. Due to limited space and needing to avoid having more than one person in the same industry in the room at the same time, pre-payment is required.