Don’t Write To Interest People… Write To Involve Them!

By Posted on 3 min read 882 views

There are loads of blog posts out there filled with the same information. The thing is that nowadays anybody can be a writer.

I know a number of journalists who lament this fact almost weekly because why should a newspaper hire a journalist and send them to a country to report when they can just hire someone who lives there for a fraction of the price and pay an editor to tidy up what they write.

But it’s just because anybody can be a writer that you need to differentiate yourself. You need to make your content stand out from the crowd.

For me that means doing two things.

  1. Writing a good story
  2. Involving your audience

Of course, these are both connected. If you write a good story then you’re going to involve your audience. But in terms of marketing and business involvement means more than just reading to the end.

Involvement means taking action.

You want your readers to take action based on your content.

It’s a very simple sum:

Get readers to take action = Action produces benefits = Readers become fans

And every business wants to have fans. Fans are the people who are going to spread the word for you, they’re the best form of marketing and the best customers.

However if you look around various blogs today you’ll find that only a small percentage of them fulfill these criteria. And unsurprisingly the ones that do are usually the biggest.

So let’s look at it in a bit more detail so that you can start to turn more of your readers into fans.

It’s common knowledge that everybody enjoys a good story. It’s built into our DNA. Storytelling has been part of every culture for centuries, and it will continue to be an important part probably until the end of time.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about internet marketing or fish tanks. Everything can be written in a story based format.

That doesn’t mean you need to invent some kind of fiction around your subject. What it means is that your writing should have a clearly defined path of how it gets from A to B.

This path is the journey that you’re reader is going to take. This is a journey they can relate to. If you’re post is about solving writers block then you’re roadmap for the post may be:

  • What is writers block
  • How you know when you’re getting it
  • What to do when you get it
  • How to start generating ideas again
  • How to prevent it ever happening again

If you wrote your post following these stages then you are taking your reader on a journey that they can understand.

When you explain what writers block is they’ll be thinking when they last had it. Sharing how they can become aware when it’s happening again will prepare them for what to do when it actually happens.

Then you follow this with the journey they need to take to solve it and prevent it from happening again.

There’s a path from A to B and that makes the writing interesting for the reader because they’re being taken on a journey.

And by the end of this journey you want to get them to take action.

Too many articles have no actionable content. And that means as soon as your readers finish reading so does their involvement. Give them something to take action on and their involvement continues way past the reading of the article.

They’re still involved when implementing what you shared, they’re still involved whilst following up on their action and they’re still involved when the results are coming in.

And even though it may be days later that the results come in, if they’re positive then that will be attributed to the content you wrote. If it’s attributed to the content you wrote then the trust level for what you’re writing has just shot through the roof.

You have just bagged yourself a long-term reader!

So always make sure that your content takes your reader on a journey that they can relate to and during or at the end of the journey keeps them involved by giving them something actionable that they can do.

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