Sunday Shares #13: Writing Addictive Articles

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Welcome to another Sunday Shares where I curate some of the best articles I’ve read during the week.

I hope for you to enjoy reading them and that you learn something that you can apply to your business.

I also like sharing stuff that I’d like to revisit for the lessons I learn from them. So if I can keep them for me then I think they might be valuable to others as well.

This week, I have two articles about writing and instead of a third article, I share my process for curating these articles.

If you want to improve your writing so that you can keep your visitors highly engaged then these are a must read.

(1) How To Write Absolutely Addictive Articles

In this article on Hubspot, Eddie Shleyner shows you how to write addictive articles using techniques borrowed from Joe Sugarman.

Joe Sugarman, a direct response copywriter, wrote articles or print ads that sold millions of dollars of products because they were just addictive to read and he got people to say yes (to buying) through his writing.

Much of these techniques can be applied to your article writing to help convert visitors into doing whatever you want them to do – optin to your lead funnel, buy your affiliate product or some other action.

In a handful of steps which include crafting a great first sentence (article shows you how) and writing conversationally (article includes tips), you too can write articles people cant stop reading.

Check out the article on Hubspot.

(2) How To Use Transitional Phrases to Keep Your Readers Sliding Down the Page

This SmartBlogger article written by Rob Powell goes well with the article above as it’s packed with examples of transitional phrases to keep your reader hooked on the article and sliding down the page with ease as they read.

The phrases are grouped into 13 different types of transitions you can use to achieve this. Transitions include:

• The “Mind Reader” Transition
• The “Can’t Miss This” Transition
• The “Important Insight” Transition
• The “There’s a Catch” Transition
• The “Big Answer” Transition
• and 8 more

I especially loved how examples are shown of the phrases being used in an article and different variations of the same transition. It’s a great read that is very practical and can be applied to your writing to boost engagement.

(3) How I Put Together Sunday Shares Articles

I’m sharing this here because I’ve always kinda struggled to put these together. I’ve always wanted a feature where I could publish one type of content consistently on one particle day in the week.

I would publish a Sunday Shares article on a Sunday and then end up skipping weeks upon weeks before I published another one. I think this Sunday would probably be the first consecutive Sunday I’ve posted.

I’ve finally found a way to post new articles every Sunday and it seems to work. It’s a 4-step process that works this way.

1. Find articles – This isn’t very hard as I’m subscribed to some blogs that I like reading so I get emails all the time with articles that interest me. I also get Twitter digests and find stuff outside of email.
2. Pocket them for later – Depending on the title of the article (this is why headlines are important), I would decide if it’s something I want to read or not and then I would put them in Pocket. The Firefox browser has a neat icon that lets you put articles into Pocket so you can read them later. I also have the Pocket app on my phone so I can read the articles there while I’m out.
3. Pick three – While everything I pocket gets read some of them just aren’t always useful enough that I would want to go back to it again or share. Of the ones that I like though, I would pick three and draft the Sunday Shares article with these.
4. Hit schedule – Whether I’m done writing the article or not with the three shares, I set the article publication date for the upcoming Sunday and hit schedule. This means I would have to finish the article before Sunday so that it can get published. This little trick can boost your productivity if you apply it to other articles too.

That’s the process and I hope you like this little behind the scenes of how Sunday Shares gets published every Sunday consistently.

These articles should hopefully help you in some way. If you’d like to talk about them, you’re welcomed to do that in the comment section below.