3. Ask Yourself the Right Questions
Once you’ve answered those umbrella questions, it’s time to face the nitty-gritty questions.
Who am I writing this for? Take it from writers who have gotten their share of negative feedback from editors. You cannot write an article effectively until you completely understand who your target audience is, and then you have to commit to it. If you’re an integrator writing to corporate tech decision makers, stay true to that.
How will it benefit them to consume this? Having committed to your audience, it’s time to decide if what you’re writing matters to them. Then write in a way that reinforces what will be important to that audience. Don’t waste words. Use words to benefit your readers.
Be Honest with Yourself When Choosing Topics
Don’t choose to write about something because it’s an area in which your organization needs to drive business. Choose to write about something because it will help your prospective readers improve their organizations.
If you can marry those two objectives, more power to you.
5. Do Do These Things When Writing
- ✔ Identify clients’ common pain points and use your unique perspective to guide them toward resolutions.
- ✔ Recognize projects that you just know that other customers would learn valuable lessons from and highlight those lessons.
- ✔ Assume minimal technical knowledge and take the opportunity to educate (but not patronize) readers.
- ✔ Write or speak in a way that you feel comfortable.
6. Don’t Do These Things When Writing
- ✔ Decide for your readers what ought to be important to them (or let manufacturers or others decide).
- ✔ Push product categories or projects, since your customers aren’t likely to care much about SKUs.
- ✔ Show off your technical knowledge, because you may turn off your readers or, even worse, lose them.
- ✔ Try to embody some other writer, speaker or presenter that you deem excellent. Writing and speaking eloquently is overrated! (We ought to know.) It’s much better, more effective and more authentic to communicate clearly and comfortably, just as you would when meeting with a prospective client.
“Customers don’t care what boxes we sell. They don’t care about model numbers or specific specs. They want a solution to their problem, their pain point.”—Dawn Meade, Net-AV
7. Have a To-Do List for After You’re Done Writing
The list should include the following:
- ✔ EDIT: You should reread and edit yourself. Then you should enlist a second set of eyes to catch the errors, awkward phrasing, superfluous content and other improvements that you aren’t capable of catching because you’re too close to it.
- ✔ AVOID OVER-EDITING: That was one second set of eyes. (At the most, two.) Too many chefs will ruin the stew.
- ✔ CREATE AN EXPERIENCE: Assuming your article will be online, consider what the reader will experience when he looks at it. Link to more resources. Show related content. Use good and appropriate photos. Try to add video.
- ✔ THINK SEO: There’s no point in creating content if nobody is going to consume it. Be smart about search engine optimization so people interested in your topic have a fighting chance of finding it.
- ✔ CONSIDER A NEWSLETTER: It’s not annoying if it’s valuable to the recipients.
- ✔ NURTURE YOUR CONTENT: Execute a strategy for pushing out content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. Even email it directly to people that you really hope will read it forwhatever reason.
- ✔ PERSONALIZE IT: Use bylines. Put an author biography at the end of the article. In the article, reference personal challenges and accentuate your personality. Thought-leadership works better when it’s associated with a person.
