Because I write a lot of articles, I do quite a bit of research. I try to read as much as I can in the field of article marketing because it is how I make my living. I’m also very good about keeping records. I take notes on articles and keep records on how my articles perform. Each day, I log the page views, number of Ezines published, and URL clicks. By keeping track of these details, I can see which articles are working for me and which ones are not.

The quality of an article really has little to do with the number of page views generated. It is the title that initially draws in your readers. Your title is the advertising for your article. Always be mindful of that, you need a title that compels people to read your article. Spending time coming up with a good title is time well spent. A good title will draw in four to five times the readers as the same article with a so-so title.

Certain words or phrases tend to attract readers:

Secret – It appears that everybody likes a secret. My ‘secret’ articles get four times the readers of my ‘non-secret’ articles. Whenever possible, try to use the word ‘Secret’ in your title.

3 Steps, 3 ways to – It appears that people are looking for articles that provide step-by-step instructions. My step-by-step articles have generated twice the page views of the average article over the same periods of time.

Of course, there are many other words and phrases that attract readers, but, I’ll cover them in other articles.

There is another point that I want to make. One of the Ezines published research on article readership some time ago. They indicated that longer titles trend to attract more page views. This is the exact opposite of what I would have expected. I thought that a short and concise title would get better numbers, but apparently, this is not the case. Whenever possible, use a longer, more descriptive title.

I used this information to craft the title for this article. I wondered what kind of page views I would generate if I used a rather long title, with the words Secret, and Steps. I’ll let you know how this works out in a future article.