Writing for That One Most Important Reader: That Curious, Clever, Intelligent Individual

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How Do You Write for Everyone?

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How easy it is to get overwhelmed when I think of how individual each reader is. How can I possibly meet what they expect, when each of them comes with a different goal, a different history, and a different mind set?

Whatever the subject I choose to write on, I can be sure that some readers will know it far better than I do and some will have never encountered it before. How do I bridge gap to write a piece that meets learners on solid ground while engaging readers with significant expertise? These writing questions are central for anyone who writes for an audience of more than two people they already know.

How do I answer these questions for myself and for others?

I give them the answer Big Roy discovered.
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While You Were Out Having a Life

Filed Under Branding, Design, Marketing, Productivity, Successful Blog, Writing | 2 Comments

Highlights for Readers

I know that most of you have a real life, and that during this holiday you actually lived it. With that in mind, I’ve collected the recent posts on the most popular topics and brought them together here for you.

Click on the titles of the ones that you want to explore.

6+1 Traits: Sentence Fluence I Got Rhythm

SOB Business Cafe 6 30 2006

Search Engines and People Care About Anchor Text in Links

6+1 1,2, 3,: Save Me from Beginners and Experts NOW!

6+1 How-to Blogging -- Stomp Out Swiss Chees Knowledge

Hope this helps make your life a little easier. I know it’s always hard this first day back to work.

Brand you and me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Liz to help with your writing, click on the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

Related articles
Checked the complete Writing Power for Everyone series on the SUCCESSFUL SERIES PAGE.

6+1: How-to Blogging — Stomp Out Swiss Cheese Knowledge

Filed Under Basics, Checklists, Marketing, Successful Blog, Writing | 12 Comments

What Have You Taught Me Lately?

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Bloggers are always teaching or learning something. Blogs are filled with ways to promote a blog, to build a brand, to install a new plugin. When we get a new program, instructions come with it. Sometimes we follow them. Sometimes they work. Sometimes big parts of them seem to be missing.

How-to blogging teaches something.

A how-to post could be as simple as how to a make a sandwich or as complicated as how to turn your computer into a host server for WordPress.

People read how-to articles because they want to be learning.

Therefore: Nothing is worse than a how-to post that skipped a step.

I hate information that has holes in it. Read more

6+1, 2, 3: Save Me from Beginners and Experts NOW!

Filed Under Branding, Customer Think, Successful Blog, Writing | 6 Comments

Folks Who Are Learning and Folks Who Know

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Most bloggers find their audience is a lot like you are — an audience of folks who learning and folks who know a whole lot. That can throw a new writer. It can seem a problem of huge proportions. It’s not hard to think that what you have is two different audiences in one. How do you know how much to say and how much to leave out? It’s easy to get twisted trying to write for an audience of people who are both beginning and experienced.

Get twisted, heck! Somebody save me NOW!. From where I sit, some days the beginners need to learn so much, and the experts already seem to know all of it. How do I possibly talk to both of them at once, without risking insulting or boring either one of them?

That writer’s problem can seem impossible to solve, but it’s not. In fact, it’s not even a problem at all. Read more

Getting Customers to Stop by to See You

Filed Under Content, Customer Think, Design, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

Walking the Trade Show Floor

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Yesterday walking the trade show floor, I felt I was in a 3-D blog world. Aisles and aisle of blogs sitting side by side with real people in and around them. They were all in the same market, different niches. Some were not easy to tell apart. I was scanning the signage to get a clue. Oh my! 60% were woefully inadequate. Here’s what I saw.

  • Company names with not a hint of what they do.
  • A list of what the company does, but no name to pull it together.
  • Taglines that said abolutely nothing, i.e. making things happen — good things? bad things? It didn’t say.
  • Taglines that said the same five buzz words that I found at most every other booth.

It seemed clear to me that the folks who designed these books — 3-D blogs — were thinking of what they thought the customer should know rather than thinking of what the customer might have come to find out. Standing outside each booth that I’m talking about I only had one question. Read more

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