The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

Ask some people to write an article for their website and they’ll look at you like you just asked them to get a tooth pulled with anesthesia.

Most people understand that unique content like articles (or blog posts) are very important for getting good search engine rankings and free traffic from the search engines.

But for some people, it is an incredibly time consuming and difficult task despite being knowledgeable on the subject.

However, writing articles doesn’t need to be difficult – even if you hate writing.

Writing articles, even a lot of them, is actually really easy especially once I explain my system to you.

I call it the OTTR system. (pronounced “otter” - like the animal)

You simply Outline, Talk, Transcribe, and Revise.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Let me explain it in a little more detail.

Step 1 - Outline

First, start with a topic that you’re knowledgeable about – hobbies usually make great choices. Just about everyone could talk for hours about their hobbies. If it’s cars, then choose a car topic. If it’s golf, then choose a golf topic.

Next, jot down a few ideas that you’d like to cover in your article. This is the outline phase.

For example, when I did the outline for this article, here’s what I started with:
• 4 Step System To Writing Articles
• Writing Articles is Easy
• OTTR
• Pick Subject You Know
• Outline
• Talk
• Transcribe
• Revise

Piece of cake, right? At that point I’ve written a grand total of 18 words. Even if you can’t type to save your life, you can probably handle 18 words.

Step 2 – Talk

On to step two – Talk. This is where the magic happens. Instead of taking that outline and writing an article from it (which you could do if you prefer), you get out a microphone and load up a program like Audacity (a free piece of software) on your computer and you start talking.

Just talk about all of the subjects in your outline until you feel you’ve gotten your point across. When you’re done, stop the recording and save the file.

Step 3 - Transcribe

Now onto step 3 – Transcribe. Now if you really hate to type or just don’t have the time for this step, give this job to someone else. This is a very easy task to delegate or outsource. In this step, you simply play back the recording and type out everything you said in the recording. Don’t try to edit it at this point – just get it all down.

Step 4 - Revise

Once you’ve got that done, you’re ready for step 4 – Revise. Now all you need to do is take out any phrases that don’t’ belong, for instance, “umm”, “like”, “you know”, etc – basically all of those filler words you use when your mind is coming up with what to say next. If you hire a transcriber, you can have them take care of this step for you.

And that’s it. You’ve got you entire article written.

And if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can use this method to write an entire book. Just use the same process, and you could write an entire book just by outlining the key ideas and talking about them.

Also, for those of you who do teleseminars or live training, be sure to record those sessions, and you’ll have a ton of valuable content right at your fingertips.

Want to learn more strategies for using article marketing? Get my entire link building course at MissionUnlinkable.com and you’ll never run out of strategies for getting more links and traffic to your website.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Link Building, SEO Lessons, Traffic Generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.