What’s in there for the readers?
Don’t trick the reader; give them a reason to read.
Imagine I share my whole life story in bits and pieces with you, every day, in every blog what would you say?
You will most likely say, “That’s fine Nikhil but what do I do with this information?” If I create a course on writing and try to sell you your first question would be “What’s in it for me? What will I get out of it?”
What if I tell you this simple question that you asked will make you a better writer?
The difference between a good writer and a bad one is often the purpose of writing. Every writing trick in the world is designed for the reader. Everything that you have learned or will learn about writing is to ensure the reader reads your work. Or your work becomes easy to consume for the reader.
Gone are the days of mindless blogging and too many personal stories. No one cares. No one did and no one will.
It’s not that the people are heartless.
On the contrary, if you become a well-known personality they’d want to know everything about your life. From how you think to what you eat. What made you a good writer? But not today. Not until you become someone worth caring for. So, you will have to make do with valuable content.
That is what this essay is about. If you write daily on social media you should add this one line after every writeup — “What’s in it for the reader?” You will notice a paradigm shift in your writing. You will immediately edit out the parts that don’t make sense and structure your work that add some value to the reader’s life.
Let’s say you are sharing a deeply personal story from your life, you have no audience, the readers don’t give a damn about your existence, what do you do?
Ask “What’s in it for the reader?”
Now you are forced to add another angle to that deeply personal story, you will have to show how that personal story affected you as an individual. How you became a better person, how the journey transformed you. There’s a lesson for everyone when you add that part.
This will invoke empathy from users and they will start showing you love. I read a lot of blogs every day and the writers often share that the most number of love they get is when they share personal stories. That doesn’t mean the value content is not working. It means that because of the value of content people have started caring about the writer behind the content as well.
How do I know this? Because nobody cared about my stories either.