Psychological Things To Remember When Writing Articles

Over 10 years of article marketing I’ve done a lot of research into what makes people tick (or click) and some of them are so simple that I think they should be considerations for any article marketer regardless of niche.
I’ve mentioned before about using the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) principle for web pages and articles so I won’t go into those again here, but here are some psychological considerations you might want to have in mind when creating articles and sales pages:
Convincer strategies.
Different people have different methods of becoming convinced about whether something is useful/valuable or not.
a – Time-based.
Sometimes people just need to hear about something for a predetermined about of time before they become convinced (maybe a few weeks, a few months, or even more). This happens a lot for new movies, some people will purposely avoid watching a new movie for an amount of time.
With article marketing – this means you need to get your articles as much long-term exposure as possible.
b – Reference-based.
Some people need to hear about it from a certain number of references first.
In some cases people need to hear about it from someone they trust, or have it recommended.
Getting your articles published in as many relevant places as possible can help with this.
Getting testimonials (examples of how it helped other people), and having your articles mentioned by people with a good reputation help with this.
c – Repeated exposure.
Some people need to be exposed to your message a certain number of times before they become convinced. This is one of the reasons that we always suggest doing at least 7 follow-up emails for people on your lists. Sometimes they literally just need a certain number of exposures before taking action.
This also means that you can usefully write several articles about the same subject coming at it from different angles and get good responses from people who read previous articles but never took any action.
So, with those things factored-in, here are some others to consider:
There are 4 main preferred ‘modalities’ (systems for representing information) which we have and tend to give more focus to one in particular.
These are:
Visual
Auditory
Gustatory
Kinesthetic
The most common are Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. These are referred to as ‘predicates’ and they indicate a persons preferred representational system.
Most people change the bias depending on their mood and the situation so treat them as variable.
For your sales pages and articles you can factor-in these preferences.
Visual people think in terms of pictures and use words and phrases that are visual. If you want to communicate effectively with these people you should use pictures, video and words such as:
see
look
bright
clear
picture
foggy
view
clear
focused
dawn
reveal
illuminate
imagine
hazy
an eyeful
short sighted
sight for sore eyes
take a peek
tunnel vision
bird’s eye view
naked eye
paint a picture
Auditory people prefer words and phrases such as:
hear
tell
sound
resonate
listen
silence
deaf
squeak
hush
roar
melody
make music
harmonize
tune in/out
rings a bell
quiet as a mouse
voiced an opinion
clear as a bell
give me your ear
loud and clear
purrs like a kitten
on another note
Kinesthetic people prefer and use words and phrases such as:
grasp
feel
hard
unfeeling
concrete
scrape
solid
touch
get hold of
catch on
tap into
heated argument
pull some strings
sharp as a tack
smooth operator
make contact
throw out
firm foundation
get a handle on
get in touch with
hand in hand
hang in there
So, while in general you might like to consider a good mix of these words and phrases so that you are effectively communicating with the largest audience, in certain niches you may want to focus on a particular method.
There’s also scope to write articles around the same subject with focuses on different representational systems and using various implementations of convincer strategy addressing formats to see what gets you the best results in different niches.
These things apply to other elements of your online promotions including press releases and paid advertisements so it’s a good idea to just learn them and have them in the back of your mind ready to use whenever you’re writing.