No one cares about you. No one. People care about themselves. Ultimately, every marketer, every business, and every employee only cares about their story. They want information that will help them. They don’t care about your story. They don’t care about preaching. They care about information that will help them make more money, do their job better, live their life happier, and have more joy.
Think about that when you write blogs.
If you want people to read your blog, you need to write about them. Specifically you need to write about their fears, their risks, and their problems. You also need to give them tips, tricks and secrets to success. You should occasionally use these words in the titles of your blogs, and ALWAYS write to these themes.
Above all, the content must be useful and valuable for your readers. Think about it this way: would ‘I’ read this blog?
Fears – Your target market has fears. Our clients, for example, fear an inability to prove ROI to their clients or to their boss. They need to be able to attribute leads and customers. They need to know where their calls are coming from.
What does your target market fear?
You should write about this fear in your blogs. Maybe your clients fear going to jail (legal clients) or having dirty teeth (dental patients) or losing page rank (SEO firms) etc. etc. etc. Every target market has fears.
Write about the fears your target market has. Write about the things that keep them up at night.
For example, marketing agencies (local SEO, traditional, etc.) fear of falling behind their competitors. We, thus, wrote a blog about why agencies should include call tracking as part of their Adwords packages. We’re implying that other agencies are including call tracking in their packages, thus you should too.
Risks – Your target market hates risk. They seek to minimize risk. That’s human nature.
So, here’s the simple question, how can your expertise/product/service help them minimize risk?
Write about that.
Everyone wants to feel more secure in their job, their property, their happiness, their family, their life. They want to minimize risk. Write content that helps them minimize their risk.
An example of an article we wrote to minimize risk is this blog about email marketing. No one wants to risk being a wuss.
Problems – What problems does your target market have? Are their budgets small? Are they hot? Are they cold? Are they worried? What are they worried about?
What are their problems?
Your content should focus on solving their problems. For example, this blog is designed to solve your content marketing and blogging problems. Our target market is you: marketers. We talk to marketers every day and we routinely hear that they are concerned about creating content. They (you) don’t know what to write about.
That’s a problem for you.
This blog is designed to solve that problem for you.
Tips/Tricks/Secrets/How To –Any blog that has specific How-To tips will inspire readership. Humans want a specific action plan for the problems we face. We want to know how to do something.
If the reader believes that they can learn how to do something quickly/solve a problem quickly/minimize risk quickly, they will read your blog.
An example of a How To blog is this one we wrote last week: How To Convince Your Boss to Invest in Call Tracking.
List – Numbered lists are great. Blogs with a numbered list in the title are our most read blogs. Period.
Why?
Because numbered lists have a defined length. If I start reading a Top 5 Ways to ….. I know that the article isn’t going to be very long. It won’t take me 30 minutes to read. I know there is a finite length before I begin.
Additionally, I know that I will likely get a step-by-step procedure to solving a problem.
We like lists. For example, in the last two weeks we’ve written 5 Steps to a Really Good Mobile Click-to-Call Campaign, 5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing, 6 Ways to Make Your Phone Ring and others.
A Caveat…
At the start of this blog we said that no one cares about your business, they only care about their business. They only care about themselves.
That’s true.
BUT…you can share stories about yourself that help your readers (your target market). For example, our most well read blog was our 150 Blogs in 50 Days case study. This was about us. But, the lessons taught therein could be applied to any company. Plus it had hard data and hard research.
