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The three things basic things you need to know when writing compelling articles includes knowing you audience, finding good sources, and writing excellent content.

Know Your Audience

With so many people on the Internet, you will have better luck bringing in traffic if you narrow your audience. Not that you have to exclude readers, but by choosing material that will interest your demographic, whether it is twenty-somethings, stay-at-home moms, or those in the construction business, you can find the good sources and interesting content they are looking for.

Find Good Resources

News articles and general information sites are your best place for resources. These are sites that you will take your content from and reference in your articles so that readers can explore them for themselves. These sources may contain graphs, like the chart right here that shows the correlation between students’ GPA and the distance they travel for college, or they may be a news opinion piece you are responding to.

What you may want to avoid are technical reports and PDF files that may be hard to load or difficult to read. Another tip to finding a good source is objectivity; an article that is not geared towards a certain product will generally be more respected.

Write Compelling Content

Writing “compelling” content seems pretty straight-forward, but how do you know what your audience wants to hear about? Keeping up on current events will help keep your content interesting and relevant. Look up trending ideas on YouTube, Twitter, and Yahoo to see what people are talking about, what they are watching, and what they are searching for on Google.

Twitter allows you to see what each city or country is talking about for a more focused demographic by location. YouTube allows you to search most popular videos for a certain location, gender and age group. Once you know what people are looking at and talking about, gear your content towards these topics, adding your own spin to spark readers’ interest.

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All content should be high-quality and original, meaning few grammar errors and no “copying and pasting” from other sources. Not only is this plagiarism, but Google’s algorithm will find such posts and discard them from its searches as poor material, meaning it won’t even show up in Google’s searches.

Great content is more than just an interesting post. By finding the audience that fits your goals and catering to their interests and culture, you can create a strong following of readers.