One of the most important marketing tools for any business is the creation of high-quality content. We know this and both big business and small business alike are pulling out all stops to create mountains of content to feed to ever increasing demand. However, not all content is created equal.
There is high quality, problem-solving, stimulating content that really engages the reader or viewer, and then there is the content that is simply churned out to tick a box (write an article today, shoot a video today etc).
I strongly believe that your content has to reflect your passion for your topic. If you’re bored with the content you are creating – expect your audience to be bored with reading and watching it. That’s not really the best way to create engagement. In fact, if your boredom comes through in your content, you’ll probably be scaring potential customers away.
Just like a professional speaker needs to get themselves into a peak state before they go on stage, I think as writers we need to get ourselves into a positive and peak writing state. We need to think about our audience, put ourselves in their shoes, make sure our energy is good, we are sharp and we are ready to provide the best possible advice that we can. Our passion for our topic needs to shine through.
Look at the content you read or watch all of the time. What is it about this content that engages you? More often than not it will be related to the energy of the content creator as much as the quality of the advice they offer. But if you think about the professional speaker analogy, great advice and ideas delivered by a deadly boring presenter will fail to cut through with the audience. And that’s my point exactly.
If you aren’t excited about the content you create, don’t expect your audience to be excited about it. Simple as that. The same applies to any kind of writing, including writing a book.
