This lesson will get more into the meat of writing your marketing articles for success.

If you noticed the structure of my last post, you saw that the paragraphs were short and there were bulleted points.

Humans rarely read every word the first time through an article. They skim it then return IF their interest is captured.

The eyes quickly tire too so you need to divide your message into bite sized chunks that can be separated by headers that are bold, one or two sentence introductions or simply white space.

Bulleted points are eye grabbers so they are great for listing the benefits you are covering in your article. Please make sure you list benefits instead of features.

Feature:
2 gigs of DDR-2 RAM.

Benefit:
2 gigs of super fast DDR-2 memory is enough memory to play online multi-player games, edit videos or handle other multimedia tasks you enjoy.

As you can see from the above example, the benefit tells the reader WHY the fast memory is good rather than just stating it’s there.

The easier it is for your reader to picture themselves using your product or service the easier it is to get the action you desire from them.

Your headline had one benefit and including your other benefits in bulleted form in the article body lets the reader quickly choose the benefit that interests them most.

I suggest you visit the ArticlesBin article directory or another article directory where you can read some of the top articles to see what they have done right and what could be improved to make it even better.

There are many ways you can format your marketing articles but be sure you leave plenty of white space and use bulleted points where possible to ease eye strain and highlight important information to your reader.

The article body is where you start building on the interest you created with your first paragraph. The goal now is to create desire.

Many article directories like ArticlesBin require your articles be anywhere from 250 to 1,500 words. This gives you a lot of leeway to:

• Your headline is your attention grabber.

• Build interest with your first paragraph and briefly outline the benefits gained by reading more.

• Create a desire in the main part of the article body.

• Summarize the benefits you’ve covered in the article to remind the reader of the value they received by reading and

• Gently slide in a call to action in your resource box.

I’ve found the sweet spot for articles in this fast paced world to be articles that are 350-650 words.

Your article body should be focused as completely as possible on the reader and the problem they are trying to solve.

If you insert ANYTHING about you in this article, it immediately raises the defensive shields in your prospect’s mind.

Give them usable information AND a way they can put that information to immediate use when possible. Nothing will sell them on you looking out for their benefit better than something that can be used immediately.

The TRICK is to give them enough to satisfy their immediate hunger by giving them a sampling then slide into the resource box that you have even more valuable information IF they take the simple action you ask of them.

Notice the structure of this post and I’ll discuss WHY it was written this way next time. May all of your marketing articles be successful.

I hate having to put this marketing article writing course on hold but I’m currently fighting a stubborn infection and fever that is making it very difficult for me sit without being light headed.

This course will resume just as soon as I can shake the bug and regain my strength.

I truly regret any inconvenience this may cause you.

This article discusses the next step which is creating an interest or desire to continue reading your article.

We have discussed keyword research which helps you choose a phrase to focus your article on so that it doesn’t get lost in a crowd of thousands if not millions of pages on the same topic.

Your headline is the attention grabber that stops the person long enough for them to read your first paragraph. The headline is an ad for your article and the first paragraph should summarize what the article will cover and how the reader will benefit.

Some search engines and social sites may use the first 160 characters of your first paragraph as your description. For this reason, I recommend keeping the first paragraph to no more than 160 characters including spaces.

Note: The first paragraph of this article is 110 characters including spaces.

If you’ve noticed, some of my articles have certain phrases in bold in the first paragraph, they are also in the title and in the URL. Those are ways to tell the reader and the search engines the phrase I am targeting. I strongly suggest you adopt this tactic and then follow up by having a keyword density that doesn’t exceed 5% in your article but we’ll discuss that in another lesson.

Your task for today is to visit ArticlesBin and look at some of the articles in that article directory to see how many articles fail to build your interest in the first paragraph. You might also consider looking at articles you’ve written to see if you can revise them to flow from the headline into the first paragraph which starts creating an interest in your reader to continue reading your marketing article.

Think of your headline as an ad for your article. It MUST display a MAJOR benefit to your reader to stop them in less than 8 seconds.

As I mentioned in my last article, search engines don’t like headlines over 60 characters with spaces and search engine spiders and some RSS feeds have trouble with punctuation and special characters in the title so avoid them. Learn to use words to quickly paint a picture of the benefit you are highlighting.

The best way to learn how to do this is by copying headlines that grab your attention and paste them into a swipe file that you can study and emulate. Do NOT copy them directly but read them multiple times to see WHY they got your attention. You can bet that any headline that stopped you also stopped others.

Some of the words used in VERY successful headlines are:

you
your
how
new
who
money
now
people
want
why

Can you see how the majority of these words put the focus squarely on the prospect and their desires? When you use you and your in the headline, the prospect knows you are thinking of them and their needs, desires and wants.

You will quickly turn off your prospects using the words I and my unless it is within a personal testimonial for the product or service. IF you feel they are necessary to the article, get the focus back on the reader as fast as you can.

Some of the most powerful phrases that have been used in headlines are:

Grab Your Free Report
Free Trial on
Free Sample
Risk Free
How To
New
Amazing
At Last
Finally
Award Winning
10 Tips
And more

Any time you can associate one or more of the above with your chosen keyword phrase and match the body of your article to it, you WILL get your reader’s attention.

I recommend you visit ArticlesBin or other article directories and check out the most popular articles to see if you can spot headlines that grab your attention.

A successful headline requires practice, testing and experience.