How to talk to your audience without boring them to death
Getting people to sign up for your newsletter is easy. Keeping them reading is more complex and requires a different approach to publishing than you might be doing now.
Before I get into that nuance, indulge me while I share a story from my past.
Before my life as a creative business pundit, I worked for over a decade as a magazine art director with one of the largest enthusiast publishers in the country. Over that time, I witnessed the beginning of the end for most magazines in the genre.
I remember sitting in an editorial meeting once, talking to the editors, publishers, and salespeople. We were discussing a redesign of the magazine to freshen it up. I advised that we needed more bite-sized content to keep readers' attention and that we should use our longer stories to pull people into the website to track the data and maybe even get them to join the email list.
Because our editorial team had nothing to do with what happened on the digital side (big mistake) and the two teams were often at odds, nobody in the meeting appreciated my view.
Today, all of the company magazines are gone, aside from a small handful of one-offs and a couple of legacy magazines reduced to quarterly pieces of cage lining, and those probably won’t last more than a year.
All the dead mags have been turned into internet fodder, cobbled together under a single banner of generalities, and the soul of the publications completely stripped away.
During my last visit to the newsstand at Barnes & Noble, I saw a new magazine on the stand that looked familiar. I opened it to the masthead and noticed it was run by a handful of my former colleagues in a desperate attempt to Don Quixote their way back to glory. Still, nothing about the magazine was new or original, and nobody had learned their lessons from the past.
I predict the magazine will die in 18 months because the content is boring, the company operates from an old media mindset, and frankly, the older fanbase is dying.
These people do not want to learn new lessons. They'd rather die on that hill, tilting at windmills.
If I Were to Start a Magazine Today…
I wouldn’t!
Instead, I’d start a newsletter and blog around the same content, spend all my time driving people to sign up for the newsletter, and maybe even have a paywall over some of the extended content.
Before I get anyone in the door, though, I need to write and share high-quality content that caters to a new audience that reads on the Internet and has enough discretionary income to indulge my sponsors.
Starting a newsletter and getting your first few dozen subscribers is easy. Keeping them is another story. Our friends and family want to support us, but they may not read what we’ve shared after they join. Also, everyone who writes a newsletter will lose subscribers over time for one of many reasons, and if we aren’t replacing them with new readers, we will find ourselves in decline.
I felt this for years when I wrote content about my interests and pursuits. Because some guru said documenting my journey was a good idea, I started sharing stories about everything I was doing. People found it interesting for a while, but soon, I started losing subscribers.
After scratching my head over it for so long, I etched a groove in my skull.
I realized that people only pay attention to your journey if it benefits them in some way.
I made the critical mistake of thinking I was interesting enough for people to pay attention to for extended periods. In reality, I didn’t have the level of experience or clout for people to care, and my life wasn’t that interesting.
However, after I pulled my head out of my butt long enough to realize my story wasn’t as interesting as I assumed, I started writing with the audience in mind, and I began by asking myself one simple question.
“Why should anyone care about this?”
This self-evaluation applies to anything I want to share on the Internet, whether that’s an in-depth newsletter or blog post like this or some pithy post on Instagram or Threads. If my thoughts are not on my audience first, why am I sharing other than to stroke my ego?
Asking the question removes me from the equation. Then, once I have the answer, I can indulge my creativity and share it in my style.
Style Makes the Writer
Writing style and voice are the most essential tools when creating content for the Internet, whether it’s short or long form. However, finding your style and voice is tricky at first. It takes practice and thousands of words written before you will begin to feel comfortable, but here are a few tips to help anyone get started.
Write Like You Talk
This advice gets tossed around a lot, and that’s because it’s the most genuine advice I could ever share. If you met me in person, you’d know me instantly because I’ve had people tell me numerous times that I am exactly as I appear online. That took a LOT of practice.
If you don’t know how to write like you talk, find some quiet space and record yourself. Pull together a couple of questions on topics you could discuss at length. Open your voice recorder app or device. Set it on the table in front of you while you answer those questions as if your best friend asked them.
When you’re done recording, open a blank document, playback the recording, and transcribe it word for word, skipping the umms, ahhs, and pregnant pauses. Then, read it back to yourself out loud. If what you read sounds like you, then you’ve nailed it, but repeat this process as often as necessary until you find that voice.
You’re Not Writing a Book
Readers do not like to scan through long paragraphs when reading online. It tires the eyes and causes them to drift. Before you know it, they’ve left your article and are off to read something else, or more likely, watch dozens of short videos of animals and kids getting hurt.
If you scroll back up, you’ll see that none of my paragraphs are lengthy, and I’ve done a decent job of breaking up the story with subheads, images, and pull quotes. That goes back to my print editorial days when I recognized that our magazines were no longer binge-worthy.
Unfortunately, society has shorter attention spans, but it’s not my job to fix that. Instead, I’m writing with that in mind, making my articles easier to consume by giving them plenty of air and visual stimuli to hold the audience’s attention.
Find the Funny
The more you can make someone smile or laugh at your content, the more likely they will stick around.
Maybe you laughed at that. I laughed at the idea when it hit me, but it took me a long time to recognize when funny moments presented themselves.
Ernest Hemmingway said, “Write drunk. Edit sober.” This means writing without filters or rules and editing with the dictatorial red pen of death.
However, I’d like to amend Hemmingway and say, “Write drunk, edit with nitrous oxide because they don’t call it laughing gas for nothing.”
When I finish writing this post, I’ll do three things:
Run it through Grammarly to check all my errors.
Go back and find opportunities to make people smile.
Rerun Grammarly.
I’m terrible about checking my work for errors, but I love going back to find places that make people chuckle—or, better yet, ROFLMAO.
Humor binds people to us because we’ve shared a joyful moment. The more I do that, the more likely they will stick around to read whatever I share next.
Note: It’s much easier for me to do this in written form and very hard for me to pop jokes while sharing short videos online. That’s a practice I need to get into, but my Instagram videos are often impulsive and I’ve forgotten to find the funny.
Telling good jokes, writing easy-to-read paragraphs, and sharing as I speak will all help me keep people’s attention. Still, the most important takeaway here is to cater to your audience and ask yourself why they should care about anything you’ve written.
As much as what you post might be your story, the audience wants to know what’s in it for them. Take the time to find the parts that will matter to them.
Once you have them in the door, then you can hit them with a rubber chicken.
