Why do you create content?
What is the point of it all?
If you are going through all this trouble in an effort to further your career or create one, then the answer is that you write to explain something to the world. You write to change lives. As simple as this concept might seem, the first major hump that young writers need to work their way over is learning the difference between writing for an audience and writing for themselves.
What are the major differences between an audience and ourselves? Here are a few to get you started.
Through The Looking Glass
An audience doesn’t understand your wit.
An audience doesn’t care about what you had for lunch today (unless you write a food blog).
An audience doesn’t have time to unravel your unnecessarily dense prose.
An audience is reading your work to gain something.
An audience has ten thousand other writers vying for their attention.
This last point is particularly important. Where you might rate yourself as one of the top writers of our day, your audience has no such defect of judgment. You are just one product in an increasingly flooded market, and they have no reason to stick with you other than value that you provide them with. The moment you stop giving them a reason to come back to you, they will find someone else who can.
How do you write with value in mind?
The first step is to get a hold of that most elusive of authorial tools, “the point.” When you start a post, you should ask yourself why anyone would want to read it. Does this particular piece give your audience something new? What about it makes it unique from every other post out there about the same subject? What is your unique spin?
If you can not come up with a reason why your audience might be interested in the topic that you are about to put ink to, it’s not worth writing. You wouldn’t design and build a product that you didn’t think there was a market for, why then would you write something that you didn’t believe there was an audience for?
And Back Again
Think back to the last truly great thing that you read.
There is a very good chance that whatever it was, the topic that it was written about was not entirely new. Sadly, there just aren’t that many truly new things to write about in this day and age.
How then can you provide value, if value is providing your readers with something unique? What can you write about if everything has already been written?
Anything you want.
Unless you are writing an encyclopedia you have to recognize that people don’t read for facts, people don’t even read for truth.
People read for spin.
Betamax and VHS were both similar video recording formats. They both came out at around the same time and neither format was clearly and significantly better than the other (in fact, Betamax had somewhat better video quality).
The reason why VHS took off and Betamax languished had nothing at all to do with quality, it had everything to do with spin. VHS was simply marketed better, and when major retailers were making the choice between the two formats, VHS seemed like the obvious choice.
Don’t try to find a topic that no one has ever written about. Instead, try to write the best possible treatment on that topic. Best in the world of blogging doesn’t always mean longest, it doesn’t even always mean the most information dense.
Best, for our purposes, can be defined in terms of engagement. Are you able to take whatever message that you are trying to convey and package it so that it is palatable to your audience?
Are you able to say it in a way that your readers can relate to? If the answer is “yes” then you just might have something worth publishing.
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