“Writing to Attract, Retain and Engage” plus 1 more

Posted: 09 Jun 2011 01:07 PM PDT

The written word is a powerful thing.

Used responsibly, it can educate people about the possibilities that they face, inspire them to improve their circumstances, and empower them to take the necessary actions.

Used irresponsibly, it can cheat and manipulate.

And used badly, it's just dull, boring, and pedantic.

Which do you want your writing to be?

I'm going to guess that we're on the same page about wanting our writing to be educational, inspiring and empowering—is that a fair assumption?

There are three main functions of good writing in the context of blogging and copywriting, and those are to attract a reader, to retain that reader, and most importantly, to engage that reader. Let's explore all three.

Writing to attract: make it sexy

The first thing that you need to do is grab someone's attention, and you do that by making your writing sexy. I don't mean sexy in the "appealing to sex" sense of the word (though that certainly works, as in the case of Stacey Herbert's 5 Things You Should Do To Lose Your Blogging Virginity Like a Slut or Demian Farnworth's Dirty Little Secret to Seducing Your Readers).

No, I mean sexy as in excitingly appealing; something that just grabs the reader's attention. You do this by appealing to a core human drive, which is one of the following:

Drive to acquire: This is about wanting more money, more stuff, and more power. Some examples of content targeting this drive include 18 Months, 2 Blogs, Six Figures and The Skinny on Ways to Fatten Your Wallet Doing Business Online.
Drive to bond: This is about the need to feel loved and to be connected. The Core of Self-Love and How To Refresh Your Passion For Your Online Business both appeal to the drive to bond, as do the examples about sex that I mentioned above.
Drive to learn: This is about curiosity, and wanting to know how things work, and what happens next. A couple of examples of posts targeting this drive are Things You Can Learn about Marketing while Sunbathing and The Difference Between Engaged and Engaging.
Drive to defend: This is about our need to feel safe, secure, and protected from risk and misfortune. Posts that target this drive include Business Failure or Strategic Relocation?: It's Your Call and What 48 Stitches Taught Me About Change.
Drive to feel: This is about wanting exciting and fulfilling experiences. Posts targeting this drive include Live Each Day Like It Is Your Last and How To Live A Lottery Lifestyle, and sex can be found here as well.

You'll notice that the sexiest part of the post is the headline—because that is the part that draws people in. You'll also notice that it's possible to target several drives with the same headline!

Of course, the selection of which drive to target isn't random—it's a function of figuring out who your audience is, and then identifying what their most burning desires and drives are.

Writing to retain: make it useful and entertaining

Getting attention is great, but it's just the beginning. Once you've attracted readers to your content, you've got to retain it. There are two ways to do this: you can be useful, or you can be entertaining. Ideally, you should do both.

You make content useful with language, because language is basically the "packaging" that you use to deliver your ideas to the reader. Putting your ideas in a simple bulleted list is one way of doing the packaging, and imparting the information as a story is quite another. One way allows the reader to skim and skip over your content, whereas the other can get them to read, think about, and engage with your information.

Don't get me wrong—you've got to have useful information in there, too. If you've got nothing useful to offer—whether it's an insight, a strategy, a process, or a tool – then no matter how much you "dress it up", it still won't have much value. But assuming you do have some good information to share, it's often the packaging that makes it truly valuable to the reader.

Rather than speaking in generalities, here is the formula that I use to package my own information in guest posts (I try to start each section with a heading):

Start with a hook. The first thing you need to do is grab the reader's attention. Start with a short sentence that will pique curiosity, and then build it into an opening that will make people want to keep reading. You can do this by telling a story (they keep reading to see how it ends), by painting a picture of an outcome (they keep reading to learn how you got there), or by being confrontational (they keep reading because they disagree). Keep your paragraphs short, and make sure to hook their attention before the tag.
Pivot to the problem. First thing after the tag, pivot from your hook, which might only be related to your post's core concept as an illustrative example, to the problem that lies at the heart of the matter. Explain the problem—what are the symptoms, and what are the outcomes?
Explain the cause. Next, explain the underlying logic behind the problem—what is causing it, and why do people do things that way? What are the mistaken assumptions that are leading that to happen?
Share the solution. Having uncovered the mistaken assumptions, and core processes that are causing the problem, you can now share the solution. By now, people should be super-eager to read it!
Call to action. Don't end the post without pivoting back to the reader, and their own situation. Ask a question about their experience as it relates to your post. Try to make it a question that is easy to answer—my first post on Copyblogger got tons of comments (208 at last count), mostly because I asked people about their favorite business books, and everyone has one to share!

No joke—I follow this formula 80% of the time when I write, and it works like a charm; my guest posts are consistently commented and shared, and I've had repeat appearances on many of the larger blogs that I post for (this is my fourth appearance on ProBlogger).

I want this to be super-concrete, so here are five examples of guest posts that I've written following this formula. If you really want to get a sense of how it works, try printing them out and then noting the sections:

Desperate Housewives on Writing, Storytelling, and Selling on Big Girl Branding
Steak or Peanut Butter—How to Land Authority Blogs on E-Junkie
Write From The Heart: Does Authenticity Really Work? on Write Speak Sell
The Viral Content Formula That Could Double Your Readership on Think Traffic
How to Chain an Elephant: Breaking the Shackles We've Placed on Ourselves on Steve Scott's site.

Writing to engage: make it resonate

If you've attracted and retained an audience, then you're definitely on the right track. But let's face it: the real sign of a successful blog isn't just traffic—it's comments and subscribers. Both of these things require that your audience not just like what you're doing, but engage with it.

So how do you get people to engage?

This is where the science becomes more of an art, and sometimes the best art is created by breaking the rules. I was recently berated about a grammatical error by a commenter who argued that "grammatical accuracy is a prime need when we claim to be authentic writers".

I disagreed—the line in question, while technically grammatically incorrect, mirrored normal conversational speech patterns, and I don't think there would have been any confusion in the mind of my readers.

And that is my advice to you: to engage your readers, write as though you were talking.

Here's how to do it. When you sit down to write, imagine your target reader sitting across the table from you, in rapt attention. Then write exactly what you would say to them. Edit out the "ums" and "aahs", and make yourself just a little more eloquent than you might otherwise be, but other than that your writing should read like a conversation.

Since I'm a big fan of examples, let's start with some of my favorite authors: pick up books by Malcolm Gladwell, A.J. Jacobs, and Patrick Lencioni—these are authors whose writing carries you through, even if it's a whole book about reading the encyclopedia!

Read and enjoy their books, but pay attention to their styles.

Another great place to look for inspiration and lessons is the dialogue of your favorite TV shows. I particularly like the West Wing and Gilmore Girls for this – the dialogue is witty and clever, and does a great job of simplifying and communicating complex ideas. Watch the shows, pick your favorite characters, and try to imagine how they would explain whatever it is that you want to write about.

Attract, retain, and engage

Okay, I think that about covers it—we've talked about how to attract the attention of your audience, how to retain them as loyal readers, and how to engage them in a conversation that will grow your audience in size and profitability.

So, what do you think? What part of the attraction, retention, and engagement triad do you find most challenging? Do you have a favorite trick for doing them?

Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the definitive marketing training program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-marketers. Visit his site today for a free cheat sheet about Why Guru Strategies for Blog Growth DON'T WORK… and What Does!, or follow him on Twitter @DannyIny.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Writing to Attract, Retain and Engage

How Having A Blogging Coach Changed My Life

Posted: 09 Jun 2011 07:09 AM PDT

This guest post is by Peter Sinclair of http://www.motivationalmemo.com.

I have been in business for well over 25 years. I in fact owned my first business at the age of 18. Though for many of those years I never, ever thought about the importance of having a mentor or a coach.

My dad was not a businessman. My granddad was not a businessman. So I simply had to learn everything from scratch in the wonderful University of Success, otherwise known as the Academy of Failure.

So it was a couple of years into owning a web design business that I thought about franchising. I suddenly realized that I needed up-skilling fast, and so I hired a business coach.

I hired him for twelve months. We had a sort of love/hate relationship. I hated the fact that he would ask me tough questions that only a coach could ever dare to ask—questions that I had for many years avoided asking myself. But I loved the results, because the very next year we doubled our income.

But after seven years and three months of running that successful business, I decided that my passions lay elsewhere, and that I needed to explore them with a greater level of concentrated effort and focus.

So I sold my web design clients, and as of December last year I started on my exciting journey of turning an existing blog, that I had been writing just for the fun of it for a number of years, into a business—once and for all turning my passion into profit and becoming pre-eminent in my “personal development” niche.

I immediately started looking for a blogging coach online. I also listened to my colleagues who were familiar with people in the industry with that title.

Why did I look for a blogging coach?

Well if a coach had helped me transform my web design business, it made complete common sense to me that the same would happen in the blogging industry.

What is a blogging coach?

It's simply someone who has made a lot of money through blogging.

Generally they have courses that run concurrently with their main blog, and are designed to help other bloggers make money (no matter what niche you're in) by teaching the same principles that brought them their success.

My concept of a coach in any field is simple. Do what they say. Be what they are. And make what they make.

No matter how successful one has been in another field, he must become a student in the field of blogging if he wants to become a successful blogger.

Where can you find a blogging coach?

Google is a great place to start. I ended up finding three that caught my attention: Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse, and Yaro Starak.

Now each was commendable with what they had to offer. But as an Australian I decided I wanted to be trained by an Australian (no offence to the Americans—many of your countrymen have taught me a lot about internet marketing and real estate). Now I knew that Darren was probably more experienced than Yaro, but Yaro's writing style and video presentations really connected with me.

And what topped it when I was making my final decision, was an email I received from Yaro offering his course, which was normally anything up to $97 per month, for one payment of less than $300.

I snapped it up and found out that from that one email Yaro sold 100 subscriptions before New Year’s Day. That was a whopping $30,000 from one email. And that was just about what I had spent on a year's coaching when I owned my web design business.

How does blog coaching work?

Well it was vastly different to my coaching sessions for my web design business, where we had met weekly for an hour in a coffee shop for an entire year.

Once I paid my money, Yaro simply sent me an email by autoresponder containing my username and password, and I now had complete access to all the videos, audios, written PDF tutorials, and action sheets that made up the course. This course contained six training modules with four lessons per module.

In addition to that, I was invited to attend monthly Skype sessions where I, along with people from all around the world, could ask Yaro questions directly. I really enjoy these. Yaro can look at our individual blogs and give immediate feedback and suggestions to improve them.

What does my blogging coach do?

Well, he obviously put an online course together. The one I was taking had been created a couple of years before I ever saw it.

That’s enough to inspire a future blogger. Do the work once, do it well, and then put it on auto-kerchink-pilot.

But the great thing is that Yaro has responded personally to my emails whenever I needed some one-on-one advice.

What's changed as a result of having a blogging coach?

After five months I have developed a substantial separate database in addition to my regular RSS feed from my main blog. I publish three articles a week on Monday Wednesday and Friday on my blog which frees me to do other writing, like this article, on other days for other blogs.
I am now preparing to send out a survey containing five questions that will give me all the vital information that I need to create my new mentoring program. If all goes according to the plan that Yaro has presented to me, I will launch my paid program within a short period of time and start making monthly income.
I have been published by many major blogs in my niche and was even picked up by The New York Times because of this. I am gaining pre-eminence in my niche little by little.
I have opened an AWeber account and use it regularly to send out my weekly newsletter. Clickbank is soon to follow.
I interview people in my industry and associated industries via Skype or email, and by being associated with people even more successful than myself I am gaining further pre-eminence.
I have continued to develop relationships with other bloggers in my niche—and many of these will be my main affiliates once I launch my mentoring program. I am firmly convinced that I have laid strong foundations, built upon the experience of my blogging coach, that will ensure financial success through blogging.
Every post that I write gets posted on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and my team and I are constantly testing and measuring other social media outlets in order to get the word out to an ever-increasing audience.
I have always had a team around me in business. Even though I owned a web design company I still don't know how to create a website. So my main web designer has become my right-hand man for all things design and technical. But the cool thing is that although he is still my employee, we have entered into a joint venture with another blog project that he has created while he has been working on mine. Now that's cool. My plan for him is that he earns more money in the very near future from this blog than I currently pay him.

Oh and by the way, now that I am pursuing my passion through blogging, I'm having a ball. Life is fun. So in that sense alone, my blogging coach has changed my life. Thanks Yaro!

To become a leader, follow in the footsteps of another leader. Have you found this to be good advice in your blogging journey?

Peter G. James Sinclair is in the ‘heart to heart’ resuscitation business and inspires, motivates and equips others to be all that they've been created to become. Receive your free copy of his latest ebook Discovering The You In Unique at http://www.motivationalmemo.com and add him on Twitter @PeterGJSinclair today!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How Having A Blogging Coach Changed My Life