How to Write Blog PostsThat Fit Your Audience

What is the point in having perfectly written content, search engine ready web pages, and sale worthy text if you are not making an impact on your customers? Obviously, you have to write with a style and manner that suits your business, but that doesn’t mean your website has to be, look and feel like every other website in your industry.

Create Different Content Take A Few Risks

Web masters know all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), from perfect spelling and grammar to inserting keywords. However, search engine friendly content isn’t customer focused. You need to take a few risks and break the rules here and there. Google doesn’t like too many spelling and grammar errors, it isn’t a fan of content in the first person (outside of blogs), and it isn’t a fan of short content. Nevertheless, taking risks and forgetting SEO is the best way to make your content customer focused.

Are You Making The DC Comics Mistake?

The Marvel movie company is powered by nerds. Proud, honest, young, middle-aged and old nerds. DC’s movie company is powered by old movie marketing experts. That is why DC movies have ads in them for their next movies. After the Batman Vs Superman flop, many of those executives were fired. Are you making a similar mistake? Is your web content being written by marketing experts instead of people who love your products? It makes a massive difference. Still not convinced? Find one or two men who bought powerful Mercedes cars in their fifties (or older). Find men whose wives were not fans of their new purchase. Now, find two veteran Mercedes sales people. The sales people will tell you facts, they will tug at your emotions, they will pander to your vanity, and they will do all they can do to make you trust them. The middle-aged men will brag about their car, they will gush over it, they will chase you with an axe if you scratch their car. The sales people sell the car, but the middle-aged men love their car. The middle-aged men have no experience selling cars, but they will make a very powerful and convincing case.

What Can We Learn From This?

Without any sales training, the middle-aged car lovers make a powerful case for their car because they love it. The fired DC executives don’t love their source materials. If you are not truly in love with your products, hire people who are.

Test Other People’s Written Content

Buy a few pieces of web content from a broad range of writers and see which content has the biggest impact on your target audience. For example, who do you think are the best writers to appeal to programmers? If you have ever visited a programming forum, you will see a community full of highly engaged users. Programmers dedicate hours and hours of their time answering questions on forums without expecting anything in return. Surly a programmer is the best person to write content for his or her app or software. After all, that programmer knows everything about his or her program and can communicate that information in the most high-impact manner…right? Wrong! Take a look at ten websites that feature open source tools. Typically, their web copy has no impact at all on their target audience AT ALL!!! Microsoft doesn’t spend billions paying marketing companies because they feel like it.

What Can We Learn From This?

The “logical” choice to write your web content may not be the right choice. Try a freelancer, try writing companies, try different members of your own staff. Test the text they produce and see which has the most impact on your customers--you may be surprised.

Work Backwards And Identify Why Your Content ISN’T Making An Impact

These days, reverse engineering it means looking at the completed product and working backwards to see what makes it work. Instead of looking for what makes your current content work, search out reasons why it doesn’t work. Become your own worst critic. For example, this article features references to popular media that some people won’t get. This article features numerous deliberate grammatical rule breaks that may make the content less search engine friendly. This article makes point with examples that rely on the type of logic that some readers may not possess. Could this article fail? You bet your chips and egg it could!!!

What Can We Learn From This?

Look for imperfections in a newly laid egg, and you will find them if you look hard enough. The truth is that some of your biggest risks may be your biggest allies. By all means, you should take risks, but if your content isn’t making an impact, then it isn’t customer focused and you need to start working backwards to find out why.

Did You Notice The Risks And SEO Rule Flaunting?

To prove the point, this article is littered with deliberate SEO rule breaks, from the capital letters to the succession of three exclamation points. It also breaks typical content writing rules, such as making reference to numerous pop media facts that some readers may be unaware of, and using a writing style that is more at home in social media. Nevertheless, it had an impact. After all, you read all the way to the last word.