If you remember from the last episode, the goal of your article is to evoke an EMOTION in your readers. You want people to be affected and changed by what you read – intrigued, excited, curious, angry, envious, hopeful,

Why? Because it is EMOTION that stirs up ACTION – and isn’t that what you are looking for from your prospects?

So, as we discussed in the last episode, your first task, before starting ANY article, is to answer 3 questions:

1. WHO is your intended audience?
2. What EMOTIONS do you want to evoke in your reader?
3. What ACTION do you want him or her to take?

Once you have done that, the next step is to choose the right TOPIC for your article. The answers to those three questions will guide you in this.

For example, if you are a charity looking for donations, you may want to excite compassion, pity, and guilt in your readers, motivating them to donate to your cause. In that case the best topic will probably be a human interest story full of pathos, suffering, and hope.

It would probably NOT serve your interests to write a dry, factual, account of the logistics of transporting grain to Africa. Though interesting, it probably would not evoke enough emotion to prompt the reader into ACTION.

If your target audience is fashion conscious young women, you may want to tie your article in with some celebrity gossip. Your goal here would be to evoke a desire, and hope, that your brand of clothing could make them feel and look as glamorous as the celebrities.

On the other hand, an article for an video editor, or an engineer, needs to be much more factual and less touchy-feely. They know the problem they are trying to solve, know the frustration, and cost, of not having the right tools to solve it, and want ANSWERS.

Tell them what they need to know – the exact method or tool they need to solve their problem - in a clear, unbiased and factual way, and you will be halfway to your sales.

Ok, so, what types of articles could you write?

Now, bear in mind that your article needs to be short – 300 to 500 words – so you cannot go for a long, complicated structure. If you need more words than that to fully get your message across – write a white paper, special report, or even an ebook – and use your article as the teaser to drive people to your site to get the free report.

As I said, keep your article short and focused. Most likely you will want to use one of these six types of articles:

• The Tips/List Article- all you need for this is to come up with a list of some sort, that you can then arrange as bullet points. For example:

• “Photography: The 5 Simplest Ways to Instantly Improve your Photographs”, or
• “Job Hunting: The 3 Deadliest Mistakes Made by Job Applicants”, or
• “The 7 Sexiest Celebrity Tattoos”

• The How-To Article – This is a great way to introduce your product without any sales pitch or to position yourself as an expert in your field – just give them step-by-step instructions on how to solve a problem, for example an article on “Video Production: How to Correctly Set Up Lighting for Your Video Filming” might describe how to use cheap lighting from WalMart – or professional lighting from your online store (or affiliate link). Or might position you as an expert so that you can sell your “Expert’s Guide to Video Filming and Production”

• The Story Article- It is used to tell a story that does not have to be a personal experience. It can be true or fictional as long as it pertains to the subject. The trick is to do whatever it takes to keep the reader reading.

• The Personal Experience Article-This article will be about you and a personal experience you’ve gone through. It must deal with your niche and be informative, such as “How I Quit Smoking.”

• The Facts Article-This is simply an informative article that uses proven facts for content. This is perhaps the hardest one to make engaging and motivational.

• The Review Article- Reviews are a great way to market a product. This probably works best if you are able to do a series of reviews on different competing products that you retail. Be unbiased and factual, describe the pros and cons, and relative benefits of your different products. Send your readers to your website to read more reviews about other products.

You will help the prospect find the right product for themselves, and establish yourself as a trustworthy and reliable source of advice. When they are ready to buy, they are more likely to come to you.

Remember, an article is an article NOT a sales pitch. Be informative and engaging, but do NOT try to push or sell a product in your article. Remember your most wanted response, the action you want people to take in response to your article.

So, to recap:

First, figure out who you are targeting, what you want them to feel and what you would like them to do.

Secondly, decide what kind of article you feel will be most effective at keeping the reader interested. Whether it is an emotional story, real or fictional, a carefully researched factual approach or a balanced review, be sure to consider your choice carefully to elicit the emotions and actions you are looking for.

Thirdly, don’t try to sell your product through your article. This is the number one reason for article failure, and worse, the creation and spreading of a bad reputation.

And Lastly, Stay tuned for episode 3 of The Wizard’s Guide To Powerful Article Marketing, where we will teach you how to choose a killer title.

Welcome to the Wizard’s guide to powerful article marketing! You already know that good article marketing can have a powerful impact on your bottom line and in this series of videos we will show you how to write killer articles that can literally explode your profits – how about, for example, over $15,000 profit from just ONE article?

Done correctly, a good article can turn readers into customers and customers into lifetime clients. A good article can get you multiple high rankings in the search engines for many of your keywords. and will drive traffic to your site by the bucket load.

Not only that, a good article will establish and enhance your credibility. You become the authority, the expert, in your niche. When people have a question, it will be you to whom they turn. And when they are ready to buy, it will be to you that they come.

A great article can even go viral – getting passed from person to person and extending your influence far more effectively than any advertising campaign can hope to achieve.

But it has to be done right, as there are many pitfalls to be avoided.

A mediocre article, for example, will just die in obscurity. Never read, or even noticed, it will do nothing for your site whatsoever. But it gets worse. A bad article can totally destroy your business. Like a letter bomb exploding in your face it can destroy your reputation, and even ignite a chain reaction of hostility towards your company, getting you labeled as a scam or worse.

And THAT, I am sure, is something you definitely don’t want.

So, through this series of videos we are going to teach you some KILLER strategies for article marketing. We will cover:

• How to target and position your article so that readers get stirred up to take ACTION
• How to choose a topic that will tickle your reader where he wants to be scratched – leaving him, or her, desperate to get more help, advice, or solutions from you.
• How to build a title that will reach out and pull in your reader by the lapels so that he actually reads your article.
• How to structure your article so the reader stays to read, even lap up, every last word you write.
• How to use the resource box to its greatest effect – getting this right can double your traffic.
• How to avoid the duplicate content filters that can make your articles all but invisible to your intended audience.
• And how to distribute and syndicate your article so that your message gets seen everywhere your prospects go.

If you are looking for more website traffic, more customers and/or you want to establish yourself as the pre-eminent authority in your niche. Article marketing, done right, can do that for you. And, in addition, it can also get you GREAT search engine rankings.

Over the coming weeks, we will show you how. We will teach you, step by step, no holds barred, the secrets to turning your articles into mighty money machines. It will be an exciting journey. In fact, I recommend that you subscribe to our video or audio podcast so that you don’t miss a single episode in the series.

Great. So, without further ado, let’s dive in and get started.

In this first installment we will tackle the biggest problem that every article has to overcome: reader indifference.

Let’s face it, there are literally billions of articles out there. We see them in magazines, on newspapers, and all over the web. And what do we do with them?

Nothing. That’s it. Nothing. We ignore them. We don’t read them.

Why? Cos they don’t grab us. And even if we do read them, at the end we still do, and feel, nothing. In effect we say, “So what?” and we shuffle right by.

But a good article, a great article, changes us. It excites some emotion and maybe motivates some action. We feel excited, curious, angry, envious. It excites greed or fear. Changes our perspective on an issue. Teaches us the solution to a problem. And it motivates us – maybe to give to a charity, to join a cause, to petition a politician, to seek more information, or even to buy a product.

If your article doesn’t affect your reader emotionally, if it doesn’t change your reader in some way, then it is missing the mark.

So, every time you write an article, before you even choose a topic, or type the first character, this is what you need to do:

1. Write down who you your intended audience is.
2. Write down what emotions you want to evoke in your reader
3. write down what action you want him or her to take.

The fact is, you are NOT writing for the whole world. You are writing for a specific sub-set of people. These are the people that might reasonably become your prospects and customers. It might be a broad group – for example if you are writing about a weight loss product then your target audience might well be “middle aged fat men who hate doing exercise”, or it might be “mothers worried about their child’s obesity”.

On the other hand, if you are writing a review of an $8,000 video editing suite your audience is much smaller – perhaps freelance professional video editors.

Yes, this takes some thought, but I am sure you can see that you would want to write your article in a very different way for each of these three groups.

So, for example, with the fat middle aged men you might want to evoke fear of impending diabetes and heart attacks, hope that there might be an easy solution that doesn’t involve working up a sweat, and motivating them to visit your website to get a free information pack.

On the other hand, the professional video editors probably require a more intellectual, factual approach. But, even so, they still have a problem they want to solve. They want a tool that will give them greater productivity at higher quality for less work. And they want to find the best solution as quickly as possible.

So what emotions would you want to evoke in them? Probably chief would be trust – you want them to feel that finally they have found someone who knows what they are talking about and who can impartially and expertly guide them to the right software for their needs. And the action? Again, probably you want them to visit your site for more in-depth information.

Can you see how identifying the desired outcome guides you in the type of article that you are going to write?

Remember, people do what they do, people make the choices they make, based not on intellectual concerns, but on what makes them FEEL good. Some kind of pain or problem to be solved - or some kind of benefit to be gained.

If you can identify the right emotion to stir up, you are well on your way to a great article. Yes, this step takes some thought and effort. But look what it can do for you:

A great article gets passed around from person to person, reprinted on hundreds or thousands of sites. Sometimes it even goes offline and gets reprinted in magazines and newspapers. And, as a result more people hear about you. More people trust you. The public become prospects, prospects become customers and customers may even become evangelists, telling yet more people about you and your service.

Then, because they like it so much, people link to it in their blogs and on their websites, resulting in higher search engine rankings, which leads, yes, you guessed it, to more traffic, more customers, more money.

Isn’t that worth a few extra moments of thought before you begin your next article?

The first video will be out in the next day or two. Watch this space - and subscribe to our RSS Feed - so you don’t miss a single episode!