Have you ever written a blog post, and then re-read it later and considered how uninteresting it may have been to your readers?

You might have thought, why did I write that? You may even be tempted to delete it, or at least not write similar things in the future.

Before you do that, take another read. Would a rewrite have improved it? Was there a lesson to be learned that got buried in your post?

For example, take my “Backtracking a Meme Redux” that I posted earlier today. The title doesn’t grab your attention, and the lesson gets lost.

People really don’t care about your meme. They are looking for something that’s about them. Something that helps them. Something that improves what they are doing. You are focused on you, when you need to focus on them. No doubt, when you look at a blog, you are looking for the benefit to you. You don’t care that John Chow made $25k last month; you want to know how he did it so that you can make that much a month.

That was my mistake in the aforementioned post. I should have started with the benefit to you. And, that benefit is the lesson that gets lost in the message: “…even if you get something to go viral and get spread around, you might not benefit at all if your own name or linkback gets lost in the shuffle.”

Starting out with that, and also using a better title, would have made the post more interesting. You’d know right off the bat what I wanted to show you, and you’d have known right off the bat what you could expect to learn from the post.

Are you making the same mistake with your blog posts? Peruse your own archived posts. Are there articles you wrote that didn’t get the attention you thought they deserved? Maybe you wrote it for you and not your reader. Perhaps you could rewrite the material and present it again to your readers, and see if it gets any better traction than it did the first time around.

Putting your reader first can be the difference between a memorable blog post and a boring one.

*Figuratively, not literally.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 3:07 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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