Writing Techniques to Increase Your Readership by 60%

“There’s no time to write articles every week!” is one of the regular grumbles I hear as a ghostwriter from business owners.

I get that:  it takes time and skill to write good articles regularly.  If content is King, then consistent content writing is King Kong.  Adding regular, fresh content to a website is the best way to boost search engine ratings and business owners always need more of it.  If you’re not publishing a blog or articles regularly, you’re missing out on 60% of your readership. 

Writing for your business inconsistently, though, is a waste of time.  The act of building a regular readership depends on a growing cache of informative or entertaining material – preferably both.  Once you start a blog or article writing, you have to keep going with it in order to establish a reader’s regular reading habit. 

            You need a clear idea of who you’re writing for, what you want your reader to do and why they should do it.  This is where a lot of people come unstuck – right at the start. 

Leave The Sale Out of Your Evergreen Content

While it’s natural for you to want to sell something – a product or a service - it’s a mistake to use blogs and articles as tools for sales messages.  It’s a very common mistake, too. 

            Readers don’t want to read about what your team’s been up to in the last week, how many awards you’ve won or what’s coming up on your calendar.  They don’t want to read about your latest offer, either. 

You might well ask, “What’s the point of all that hard work if there’s no direct response call to action?”

            The point is that the blog is supposed to inform or entertain.  It’s a point of strategic branding – establishing your business’s voice in the marketplace and positioning you as an expert in your field.  Endless tactical sales messages and self-indulgent news items neither inform nor entertain readers. 

Your blog or articles are not supposed to be about your business; they’re supposed to be about the reader. 

            The subject matter, then, should be about ‘life writing’ topics that your reader is interested in beyond the product or service that your business offers. 

Novel Ways to Get Your Reader’s Interest

Writers new to life writing are often surprised at how much of a role fiction plays in biography and autobiography.  After all, how dull would it be to read nothing but fact?  

Good life writing comprises a balance of fact and fiction.  Were I to ask you to write about your birth, for instance, you’d base it on fact but have to make up quite a lot to fill in the gaps in the narrative. 

It’s up to you how much you want to fictionalise fact – some writers are more elastic on this than others.  It’s true that readers can feel a bit cheated to discover later that all that they have read is not gospel truth but this question of balance comes down to you and nobody else.  If entertaining your reader is important then you need to be open to using fictional devices.

There are plenty of techniques that fiction writers use that you can try out in your factual writing for your articles or your book.  Here are just a few ideas to get you started: 

·         dramatise scenes by introducing characters and dialogue

·         use setting to create atmosphere – a spooky house, a crowded convention hall, a romantic restaurant.

·         use different forms of writing, such as diary writing or travel writing

·         choose a different point of view, for example, you can use the first person if you’re writing about someone else (biography) and the third person if you’re writing about your own experiences (autobiography).  Don’t be shy about mixing things up a bit.

·         write in the present tense to draw the reader into the action

There are many more techniques that fiction writers use that you can adopt to add some ‘zing’ to your writing – go to the Authorship Mentor Programme and Publishing Facebook Group to find out more.  It’s worth your making your evergreen content as enjoyable to read as you can, as it’s material that lasts forever out there in cyberspace. 

            Quite a thought, huh?  Who wants to be remembered throughout eternity for dull content?

Get in touch if you want some more ideas and support and keep scribbling!

Jo C