Advertising
Does Your Content Resonate with Your Audience?
I would be extremely surprised if you don’t produce some type of content. Why?
Content can be almost anything you see online.
- The written word as in articles, blog posts, forum posts, ebooks, newsletters, email messages, reviews, etc
- Videos that you host on your own site, YouTube, Vimeo, or many other places
- Audio content that can be found in podcasts, music, and other types of audio files
- Images that appear as memes, infographics, and photos and images sold for re-use
- Software and other products used as templates, plug-ins, apps, and on and on
My point is . . . content takes many, many different forms but all of it requires that the creator make choices about how to structure and “voice” the content to appeal to his/her desired audience.
Marketing success typically depends upon how well the creator “targets” his message so that it resonates or “rings true” to his intended prospects. As a result, it means that the creator should have a good idea about his prospects’ level of education, gender (may not be important in some cases), age, ethnicity, and possibly preferred “style.”
Did you know that, according to USA Today, 43.6% of American adults read at an elementary school level (6th grade or below)? Fully half of all high school graduates can’t effectively fill out a job application. Sad, but true.
In your publishing, it often pays to speak in a common English conversational style – not trying to impress your audience with your “college doctorate” vocabulary and grammar. Of course, the intended audience should drive your decisions about the specifics of your approach. If you have a general or average audience, however, be careful that you don’t seem condescending or that you’re “speaking down” to your prospects.
The same type of caution applies regarding using “tech speak”, industry jargon, and often used online word abbreviations like LOL, IMO, BTW, and similar shortcuts.
Be sure to always keep your content easily understood, to the point without a lot of unnecessary verbiage, and of good value to those who are taking the time to review your content.
Larry Winget, noted author and “the Pitbull of Personal Development,” tells the following enlightening story:
“A few years ago I did a press run of 10,000 copies of my self-published book, The Simple Way to Success. After selling over 9,000 copies, we received a phone call from a man saying he had discovered . . . that pages 158, 159, and 160 were blank. I did not believe him. I checked, and sure enough those pages in every copy were blank. I had already sold 9,000 copies of that press run and apparently not one person ever made it to page 158. That realization did a lot for my ego.”
How many of us purchase a published product thinking how much we really need the information in this thing . . . only to get part way through it and stop . . . or worse, never even crack it open in the first place?
If you self-publish any type of content and want to have your writing actually read, keep it elementary and brief. If you publish a course or a comprehensive training of some kind, think about dividing it into user-friendly bite-sized chunks that are very easily digested. It goes without saying that you should gear your publishing to the audience for which it is written.
Most anyone can self-publish and sell a few copies of almost anything with some good marketing. But those who are earning a full-time living producing content mostly rely on satisfied customers as repeat buyers. It’s the back end of their business that really enables their publishing to sustain their income.
So make it a point to publish content that is targeted to the audience and of great value to the customer.
To your online business success,
Steve Browne
www.SteveBrowneDirect.com