Article marketing

Hi all,
I wanted to talk a little about article marketing today. We all know everything there is to know about affiliate links, getting them, how they work, what you need to know, etc etc. Right?
So now all we need is a good way to get those links out there and get a few clicks on them. But how are we gonna do that? Well, we could pay for it. Adwords is a great tool for driving traffic to any site, and Bidvertisers (check out the button at the bottom of the page) is even offering $20 of free advertising. But if you read any of the literature on affiliate marketing (like Project X, or The Rich Jerk) you'll see that most people respond a whole lot better to a pre-sell than just being sent cold to the vendors sales page. What that means for you is that you can either create a squeeze page and pay for adwords traffic, create a website where you give reviews of the products you're selling, or you can just write articles.
With article marketing you have the chance to generate a whole bunch of free traffic to your links, and if you do it right all that traffic will already have a positive image of your product. Simple as pie right? more or less. All you need to do is learn how to write a good article.
Both Project X and The Rich Jerk go over writing sales letters and article marketing, but neither of them really reveals anything new. They talk about getting ideas from successful affiliates, playing on peoples fears, failures, and frustrations, but they don't really go beyond that. They say to play on peoples fear of being scammed, create a sense of urgency, and offer incentives (like discounts or bonuses). These are all good ideas and you shouldn't disregard them, but I want to go further.
So for the next few days here I'll be going over what I know about persuasion techniques and how to apply them to article marketing. I could be selling this information for a lot of money (and if anyone reading this wants to try and take these ideas and make an ebook out of them go ahead, just let me know how much you make from it) but I'd rather just give it away and watch my friends get wealthy.

So my next post will be about using a person's fear of regret in article marketing.