An Ultimate Guide To Writing Newsworthy Articles To Attract Links

When it comes to content marketing, building a strong link profile can play a critical role in the performance of your content. Indeed, the more backlinks you get, the better your blog posts and articles can rank in search results.

The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to get backlinks. You don’t have the same control that is present when creating internal and external links. That being said, there are still some ways to encourage backlinking. Hence, here’s the ultimate guide to writing newsworthy articles to attract links.

#1 Choose Your Topic

First, you will need to choose the topic of your article. What will you write about? Do you want to focus on something specific and examine it in great detail? Or do you want to give a general overview of a very complex subject?

Whatever it is that you decide to write about, there are two main types of topics you could choose:

Trending: Industry news, announcements about your business, product launches and updates, and any other trending topics fall into this category. What everyone is talking about is always something your audience will be interested in. This is why many marketers like to cover trending topics. When you write articles about such topics, you can attract the attention of people who are interested in these topics while also starting discussions around them. Moreover, you can weigh in with your own opinion on the matter which could help you position yourself as an expert. This, in turn, could encourage others covering the topic to link back to your article.
Evergreen: Topics that can’t be categorized as “hot” but can rather be referred to as “always relevant” fall into this category. The best thing about these topics is that they keep your content relevant much longer than trending topics. While your audience may move on from the news of the past week very quickly, they will always be interested in an evergreen topic. This means that even older evergreen articles could get many backlinks over time.

#2 Select Your Format

After choosing your topic, you will need to select the format of your article or blog post. However, it is important to consider what really makes an article link-worthy while choosing the format for it. There are several characteristics of articles that get many links:

Informational: The article informs the audience about something (e.g. news).
Educational: The article teaches the audience about the topic (e.g. tutorials).
Entertaining: The article entertains the audience and appeals to emotions.
Inspirational: The article inspires the audience to take action of some sort.

In many cases, articles can combine two or more of these characteristics (e.g. educational and entertaining). As long as your content achieves its goal to inform or educate or entertain or inspire, you can be sure that it will have an impact on your audience. If you are not certain that you have the skills to create such content, you can always hire a professional writer from the custom writing reviews site TrustMyPaper to write your articles for you instead. It’s a great alternative to hiring an entire team that would otherwise handle content creation.

So, what exactly can you do when it comes to content? Of course, you could experiment with different complex formats such as e-books, podcasts, and so on. However, because you are only writing an article, it’s best to stick to simpler formats such as guides, tutorials, explainers, lists, checklists, and expert roundups. You could also consider creating a resource center with the articles you publish, but it requires some degree of planning.

#3 Perform Research

Next, you will need to perform extensive research to learn more about your chosen subject. This is particularly important for articles where you write about trending topics. New details can appear every hour, so you need to be up to date with all the latest developments. On the other hand, when it comes to evergreen topics, you might not need any research at all. If you are an expert in the topic you chose, you could simply write about the things you know and the things you have experience with.

In some cases, you will need to gather information during your research. For instance, an expert roundup could include quotes from multiple industry experts and insiders that you have collected yourself. You can even publish full-length interviews with such experts as long as it makes sense for your overall content strategy. You can also perform your own analysis or research (e.g. perform a survey) and then publish your results in the form of an article or blog post.

Another critical aspect of this stage is keyword research. You should find out which keywords are relevant to your topic and which can help you rank higher in search results (i.e. high volume, low competition). Ranking high in search results will help you generate organic traffic and attract the attention of people who could potentially link to your article in their own content (e.g. journalists reporting on a trending topic).

#4 Make an Outline

Next, you will need to make an outline of your article. While it may seem like a trivial step, it is actually very important for organizing your thoughts and points and structuring your article in a comprehensive and logical way. In other words, an outline will help you create the skeleton of your article. Then, once you actually start writing the content itself, you will use this outline to add the meat and muscles to that skeleton.

For example, you could be writing about the importance of getting professional assistance with academic writing for struggling students. Some of your main sections in the article could include things like the reasons why students struggle academically, what the possible solutions are, tips on writing the best essays on any kind of topic, and tips on finding professional assistance. In those sections, you could also include sub-sections and talk about important points more in-depth.

Remember that your outline (and then your article) needs to have an introduction, body, and conclusion. You can add additional sections if you feel like it (e.g. FAQ section at the end of the article), but the introduction-body-conclusion format is the foundation for anything you decide to write. Likewise, keep in mind the conventions associated with the format you have chosen (e.g. numbered headings for lists).

#5 Write the Article

Now that you have an outline, you can actually write your article. Try to follow the outline closely and cover all the points you wanted to talk about. This way, you won’t miss any important ideas that you wanted to include in your article in the first place. That’s exactly what your outline is for – to help you organize your article before you start writing it. This is particularly important if you are writing a very long article and need to include many different things in a single piece of content.

That being said, don’t be too strict while writing your article. You can still deviate from your outline to an extent. For example, you can add a subsection to talk about a particular point in more detail. On the other hand, you might decide to skip a certain subtopic that doesn’t seem particularly relevant to your main topic. Just make sure that your article still makes sense when it’s finished and that you progress in a logical and natural way through the topic.

#6 Proofread and Edit

This next step is by far one of the most important ones. You will need to proofread and edit your article to eliminate any factual mistakes and linguistic errors that you might have made while writing it. Once again, if you are not certain that your writing experience is enough to produce high-quality content, you can always search for writers who could do a better job than you. Alternatively, you could hire a professional editor who could proofread and edit your writing and polish your article for you.

The best way to go about proofreading and editing is to first work on factual mistakes. Check whether the claims you make are true and add any relevant source to back them up. Even if you are completely certain that something is correct, it’s still worth checking. Then, use a grammar checker like Grammarly to find linguistic mistakes such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word choice errors. After that, you can also ask your colleague to proofread the article once more to make sure that you didn’t miss any mistakes or errors.

#7 Publish and Monitor

Finally, you can publish your article and then monitor its performance. While this may sound easy, there are still some things you need to keep in mind even at this final stage. Firstly, your scheduling. You can’t publish the article whenever you feel like it. If this is a trending topic, you should check again if there are any updates regarding it and then publish your article as soon as possible. However, if it is an evergreen topic, it’s best to publish the article when your audience is most likely to read it (time of day and day of the week).

In addition to scheduling, consider the platform where you will be publishing the article. It could be your business website or blog, your brand’s social media profiles, and so on. You can even publish it on multiple platforms at the same time. Alternatively, you can publish it on your blog and then inform your audience on other platforms about it (e.g. make a post on Instagram encouraging your followers to check out the article on your blog). Obviously, your scheduling can vary depending on the platform where you want to publish your article.

When it comes to the bigger picture, it’s also worth thinking about consistency. How frequently you publish content could impact the success of your content marketing campaigns. This is also why you need to continue monitoring your article after publishing it to see how well it performs based on the KPIs you chose. Of course, how many backlinks it gets and from whom should definitely be one of the metrics you keep an eye on.

Conclusion

All in all, getting backlinks could be challenging, but the more high-quality content you publish, the more people will start linking to you. Use the tips in this article to help you start writing newsworthy articles and blog posts that will get many links.