What is the difference between a shopping channel and a schoolteacher? If you don’t know, then perhaps you don’t watch enough shopping channels, which is entirely understandable. Personally I find any more than five minutes of viewing and my brain starts trying to crawl out of my ears.
However, the difference between the way that presenters work on the shopping channels and your teachers attempted to impart essential knowledge about oxbow lakes and differential equations is of great relevance when thinking about article marketing. The reason is that an astonishing number of articles seem to have been written by teachers, rather than by people who could work on the shopping channel and who are attempting to sell something.
Teachers teach, shopping channel presenters sell. What are your articles for if not for selling? But the tough aspect of article writing is that of course the more successful articles teach something at the same time, otherwise they’re not articles, they’re adverts.
When it comes to article writing it’s worth stopping for a moment and thinking about how to learn from each of these fairly contrasting types of people, applying aspects of each to your writing in order to improve both the standard and the effectiveness of your marketing articles.
If you think back to your school-days, and in particular to your teachers you might remember one, or if you’re lucky two, who really made a difference. But why was this? What was it that they did that made such a difference to both your enjoyment of learning and of their lessons?
One of the factors was probably humour. We all get a bit fed up of the dull and rather beige quality of writing on the web. Articles seem often to be devoid of much humour, and yet we all seem to pay more attention to things if there’s a little humour involved. Teachers who cracked the odd joke (even if they made you groan) probably had more of your attention that those who wouldn’t know a joke if it blew up in a chemistry lab.
But successful teachers would also often include a way of learning that maximised the chance of a ‘learning moment’. The ‘Eureka’ moment when a light bulb seems to switch on in your head and you realise that you’ve just understood something, or learned something new, can be tremendously powerful. Providing both humour and the occasional learning moment in your articles can be very powerful, but on their own they may well still restrict you to being categorised as a teacher.
One of the striking features about many of the best shopping channel presenters is not that they’re trying to lecture you or teach you, but are learning with you, discovering things at the same time, being surprised, and of course highly enthusiastic about it all. Appearing highly knowledgeable is certainly valuable and beneficial, but sometimes as article writers we need to be a little less didactic and rather more human. After all, it’s humans we’re trying to reach, not teach.