You want more website traffic. You want more blog visitors and views. You want more opportunities to speak and present at conferences and industry trade shows. You want more credibility and desire more exposure.

By writing content that speaks directly to your audience, you can create opportunities to expand your business and increase your own credibility. Other benefits exist, but you need to be sure to develop and craft articles that can speak to a broader audience than just a small, specialized niche.

What you need to do is write more articles for a broader audience. You need to allow your content to help you expand your potential opportunities. You can simply start by writing beyond your niche or specialty, creating articles that speak to a broader audience.

Develop Articles Beyond Your Niche

Having a specialty is well and good, but your audience is narrowed by your niche. Everyone is not interested in the history of weaving across the centuries. However, you can turn that idea into something appealing by putting more focus on what types of woven items sell best on Etsy or a how-to article on taking woven art and crafts to market both online and otherwise. The broadened topic allows you to expand your audience and increase your exposure.

To go beyond your niche, you have to get out of your own comfort zone and dig a little deeper to produce articles that have a broad appeal. Consider the how-to article. In order to develop a how-to article, you have to work step by step with the end product in mind by providing a procedural concept along the way. It may require more explanation because you want to appeal to the novice as much as you want to appeal to the experienced person. With how-to articles, you can rely on your experience, hobbies, research and education to serve as your resources. The goal is to broaden your appeal thereby broadening your audience.

How to Structure Your Articles

Your articles must appeal to a broader audience and that starts with structure. Consider the layout of your article. From title to type, your article needs to have an aesthetic appeal that includes shorten paragraphs, simple sentence structure and section headings with bullet point lists. By making your structure more appealing, readers will go beyond the headline and title to skim the article before fully reading it.

Your articles should at least be:

Interesting

If you fail to capture the attention of the reader, then you have failed to attract the reader. From the very title of the article, you have to grab the reader's attention and hold the reader's interest by delivering on the topic promised via the title. Opening with an attention-grabbing first line or paragraph keeps readers glued to your article. However, you have to deliver with interesting content throughout the article.

Informative

Your articles need to provide readers with information that they did not have prior to seeing your title or reading your article. It can be either entirely new information or a totally different spin on a well-known topic. No matter how you approach your topic, you need to craft an article that remains informative on a variety of levels from novice to experienced. Allow for insights and innovative perspectives to draw readers further into your article. Include stats and facts that support your article's direction.

Inspiring

People read articles for more than just interest and information. People desire to be inspired. Allow readers to find inspiration through your articles. Stir up their interests to the point where they want more and desire to put some of your pointers into practice. Make readers feel like they can implement new ideas on their own or do something different by utilizing a step-by-step method that you have written about in your articles. You want to leave your readers feeling inspired to the point where they want to try out on their own.

Benefits of Free Online Articles

Writing free articles have their own inherent benefits. Some of these benefits include additional writing opportunities and paid speaking engagements, even information product sales.

Some other benefits of free articles include:

• Increased website traffic
• More blog visitors and views
• Heightened exposure to a broader audience of readers
• Increased credibility on topics and industries

You can gain a lot from writing free articles. You just have to be certain to make a wide range appeal and develop content that speaks to a variety of audience levels.

Bruce Jackson serves as both founder and lead consultant with Life Path Consulting Services, a division of Life Path Ministries & Services, servicing nonprofit, small business and churches with a variety of services from fund development and strategic planning to staff development and training. He is also a poetic presenter and author of books of inspirational poetry and multiple e-books on ministry, community service and other topics.