How to Turn One Article Into An Article Series

By consistently writing and submitting articles that show your expertise, you can effectively increase your search engine ranking for your keywords, build links to your website, establish yourself as an expert in your niche, build customer confidence, market your business and drive traffic to your website in multiple ways.

This is why article marketing is a classic marketing strategy with business owners of all types of websites--it's a simple marketing tool that pretty much anyone can get the hang of.

It doesn't require any knowledge of coding or HTML or any of the "under the hood" aspects of SEO.

Article marketing is accessible to anyone with an average knowledge of the internet--basically if you can write a letter to your mother you're equipped for doing article marketing.

The challenging part comes with submitting articles consistently--yes, in order to see the maximum benefits of article marketing you will need to submit articles consistently, which means writing, writing, and more writing!

I've submitted tons of articles, and along the way I've picked up some tricks for pumping out more quality articles with minimal effort. One of my favorite techniques is what I call the "6 for 1 deal". With this technique you can get 6 articles out of just one main idea.

Here's how it works:

1) Create an article that's a Top 5 list.

Each item in your list needs to be able to stand on it's own as an idea, and it has to be meaty enough of a topic that it could be substantially fleshed out if you needed to.

Now, this Top 5 list can't be a "how-to" list because each item in a how to list is dependent on the other to make sense. What we're looking for is an article that lists "Top 5 Reasons" or "Top 5 Ways" or "Top 5 Tips"--you get the idea.

Each one of your tips must be strong (no fillers!).

2) Write your article and submit it.

3) Now, go through each one of the items in your list and write an article around each item. You can start with #1 on your list and work your way down.

For example, if you had a list entitled "Top 5 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Article Marketing (And How To Fix Them)", you would take each one of your reasons and craft an entire article elaborating on each of the biggest mistakes.

In this way, one article becomes six--Article #1 is your original Top 5 article, and articles 2-6 are each devoted to elaborating on each item in your top 5.

This method is very versatile--you could of course make your list be any size. It doesn't have to be a Top 5 (I'm just partial to Top 5 lists). You could make it a Top 7 or Top 10 or whatever.

Also, even though these articles are all connected and sort of like a series, it's not a great idea to try to make the articles look like a series. Resist the urge to try to tie them together!

For example--don't put "Part 1", "Part 2" etc in the title, and don't say in your article "This is part 1 of my 6 part series".

The reason why is that it's not a given that the reader will be looking at all of your articles. Suppose the website where they find your article only has Part 5--what then?

The reader might think, "Hmm, this is Part 5--maybe it won't make sense to me since I haven't read parts 1-4. I think I'll skip this one."

You want each article to be able to stand on its own.

Why does this "6 for 1 deal" writing trick make the writing process easier?

Well, it's like you're using your original Top 5 article as an outline for your subsequent articles. You have a built in road map for your article writing--you know what each article needs to be about, and you don't have to spend time figuring out what in the world to write about.

Also, doing the "6 for 1 deal" gives great motivation--you can see where the finish line is, so it's very motivating to keep on writing the articles until you finish the last one. This is very different from just writing articles one by one--from your first Top 5 article you're building momentum that makes it easier to write the other articles.

Are you convinced yet?

Why not try this writing method the next time you want to get several articles going with minimal effort--I think you'll be amazed at how easy it is!