Tag Archives: Communication

Does your content writing solve your reader’s problem?

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Problem solving through content writing
Image source: arkworld

What makes your content writing effective? When it addresses exactly the issue faced by your reader. Whether you are writing a product description, a corporate profile, a blog entry, a tourist destination description, your whole agenda should be solving a problem, because once you solve a problem, you have delivered a solution, and everybody is looking for a solution.

But how does your content solve a problem if all you’re concerned about is help yourself or your client sell more? When you’re writing content for a website that needs to sell a product or a service, you need to take into consideration the following facts:

  1. Does your reader really need that product or service and is simply exploring various options by visiting multiple websites?
  2. Is your reader looking for a solution that can be provided by your product or service? (better anti-virus protection, or better search engine ranking)
  3. Is your reader there just to read some interesting trivia and has no intention of ever buying your product or service?
  4. Does your reader has no clue why or she is here and plans to go somewhere else within half a second?
  5. What sort of readers do you actually want to attract, and if possible, convert?

The first thing to do is, forget about trying to provide a solution to all the categories…it’s simply not possible through a single page and on the very first visit. Your most important readers is of the second category, and then the first category? Why second category?

Primarily we’re solution-oriented people. Even if we’re buying something just for a fad, we need to believe that that product or service actually achieves that. The reader of the second category has a problem. He or she may not be bothered about what product or service he or she is going to buy, provided his or her problem is solved. So you have a good chance of selling to that reader.

Take for instance your reader’s need to rank higher on various search engines on a long-term basis without having to spend lots of money. An SEO company can improve his or her search engine rankings, but so can a trained content writer. So how can you sell your solution (higher search engine rankings) by offering your content writing services? Explain to your reader as clearly as possible how good content helps improve search engine rankings. You can use client testimonials, you can refer to other authoritative articles, and you can use your own skill as a communicator: the basic idea is providing a solution to your reader, a solution he or she can afford, and believe in convincingly.

That is why you’re repeatedly told that don’t highlight features, highlight benefits. Of course some people do find features appealing (explaining the features of a RAID drive to a nerd) but basically we want to know eventually what a particular product or service is going to achieve for us.

Here’s another post on empowering your visitors by publishing solution-oriented content.

Is the Internet changing the way we write?

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Writing is constantly in the process of evolution, as everything else is in this world. Almost 100 new words — taken from new worldly developments and the inter-mixing of various cultures — have been added to the English dictionary in 2009. How much impact has the Internet had on the way we write? This GigaOm blog post cites many instances, for instance the way people write online articles, blog posts, comments, Facebook updates, Tweets, and even text messages. But is that writing? Some of it, yes, most, no. One thing is clear, more and more people are writing, especially with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, but that’s not writing: they simply communicate.

Writing has certainly changed over the years. You read Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and then you read Martin Amis or any other contemporary writers — you notice a big difference. There is less word-play and more communicating of ideas. Readers have less patience of intricate expressions and this is more true on the Internet. But let me not digress into literary writing.

As a content writer and a professional copywriter my primary concern is writing in such a manner that the central idea is conveyed sans obscurity and the reader is prompted to perform an action whether that action is buying something, contacting the business owner, forwarding a link or subscribing to a newsletter. My only concern is that the readers (prospective clients and customers) don’t leave the website just because the copy is too verbose, too long, or too brief.

Considering this, the Internet has definitely made us into better communicators and that’s what writing means: communicating the right ideas to cause the desired effect.