Are your Medium articles not working? Try doing this.
You use articles that just convey information. You live the ones that tell a story.
Who are you? An academic, a technician who has to write technical-scientific articles? Or a copywriter who has to offer a unique experience to the reader?
If you belong to the first two categories, then you can continue to use the detached tone of the abstract or maintain the icy firmness that freezes the technical specifications of industrial refrigeration systems.
But if you’re a web writer, then you need to start telling your reader.
If you’re writing for someone who, as a habit, starts thinking about abandoning a title online and landing on another content while reading it, then simply stating things, exposing them simply in deference to the mythical usefulness of quality content, won’t get you very far.
Instead, it will take you far away from your reader.
Stop telling them things.
Tell them a story. As if you had them in front of you, sitting at a table in a bar overlooking the town square.
Touch their shoulder once, no more. Never be invasive.
Make him understand that you’re only speaking to him and not to those others who are walking outside.
Most likely, you won’t have anything really explosive and new to tell. Many will have already gone through it before you. But no one will be able to do it like only you can.
Your uniqueness is your digital fingerprint, your stylistic effigy. The brand that you imprint in every word. Don’t nullify it in useless content that simply reports facts and data.
Use words to tell a story, not just to convey information.
What are contents that simply convey information?
Contents that simply convey information are deadly boring.
Sometimes, however, you seek them out and use them because you want to understand how to solve a problem and make something work. So you close your eyes, hold your nose, and read until you have learned what you need.
If that’s not enough, you fly to another content, and then another, until your pizza dough rises properly, or you have learned the basics of cold selling technique.
Stop.
Contents that simply convey information are this. Nothing more than a succession of words that illustrate concepts and techniques said and repeated.
They say flat things. They are two-dimensional. They renounce depth. They don’t want to lift the veil of words and discover what lies beneath.
Perhaps precisely because there is nothing to hide, beyond what they say.
They avoid the emotional involvement of the reader. They carefully guard the margins of words and provide a reading experience limited to the mere transfer of information.
Contents that simply convey information are limited to transferring information from one physical point to another, without adding any other levels of reading.
Contents that simply convey information are written for three simple reasons:
- When the emotional involvement of the reader is detrimental, as in an academic article where an adequate objective distance is a primary condition for understanding the text.
- When the involvement is unnecessary, as in a product or service specification sheet where the sole objective of the reader is to simply know an instruction.
- When the author fails to involve the reader, even though they should. They leave them navigating through empty words, incapable of retaining their attention.
You can find them everywhere. With assorted quality, the web is full of articles, posts, and multimedia content ready to explain how life works, without being able to tell you anything about life.
If you have decided to sell products or services, or even yourself, through your writing, pay attention to this aspect.
Writing texts that emotionally engage the reader, as well as intellectually, is essential to succeed in retaining them and making them return to your content.
What are the contents that tell a story?
It’s not a matter of writing a treatise on genetics. Nor boring your readers with the story of your life, which objectively interests very little.
It’s about finding a middle ground between the two extremes. A unique and unforgettable point is your style, through which you can emotionally engage your followers.
If you have to deal with a recipe, fly fishing, or how to find the motivation to change your life and job, don’t just talk about these topics.
Tell them.
Use your personal experience to create multiple levels of reading.
Create more dimensions to your content by using your own emotions and experiences, weaving them into what you’re telling.
Offer multiple levels of reading to those who will soon become your followers.
Every reading is an experience, but it’s the depth to which this experience goes that makes your content truly memorable.
If you write about SEO and explain how Google indexes content, positions it, and suggests how to get the best positions in SERP, someone interested in these topics will find you for sure, sooner or later.
They will read you and then look for further information, without even taking a look at who you are.
But if you illustrate the details of SEO techniques along with the story of how you arrived at being found in SERP, by the very person who is reading you now, and thanks to those details you mention, the circle closes and your spontaneous reader, perhaps, will become a follower.
And then a subscriber to your newsletter, your client, or the purchaser of your service or product.
Emotion is the key that transforms content said into content told.
Writing is chemistry
Everything is played out in delicate neurochemical balances.
If you manage to envelop your reader with your words, reassuring them like a winter coat, lazily enthralling them like the summer sun, convincing them that what they are reading they have never read before, written in that way, perhaps you will have gained a loyal reader.
Those who read you do not need you. Accept it.
They do not need to hear about your holidays or know what courses you have completed, let alone the struggles you have overcome and how you have always risen up on your own.
Your reader has an exaggerated need for themselves and to find themselves in what they read.
And if you provide them with authentic emotions, ready for consumption, they will grasp them in a heartbeat through your words.
They will read about your experiences and remember them as long as they can see themselves in them. Imagining themselves living them.
It’s like you’re telling their story through your experiences and emotions, in an infinite game of mirrors.
Similar people cross paths and are attracted to each other. It’s inevitable.
This is the great limitation of the blogger: they can only surround themselves with those who contain similar parts to their own. Those who find resonance and affinity in the words they read are very likely to return. And then return again.
They will become a regular reader, then a devoted one, a follower, and a disciple.
It’s a smaller audience compared to the oceanic followings of an influencer. But here, the underlying mechanism is reversed.
It’s social proof that determines whether an influencer is worth following. It’s what the public says about them that makes them valid subjects to follow and identify with.
As a blogger, however, you do it all on your own.
You have only your own emotions, and if you know how to use them well, along with a bit of writing technique and SEO, you’ll be able to cross paths with those who are truly similar to you. Not because others say so.
This is your greatest advantage. The famous niche to which we must turn.
How to recognize content that tells a story
The contents that state, you use them.
The contents that tell a story, you experience them.
This distinction can already be a good discriminating factor.
When you read a post, an article, or anything else, and you realize that
- the words, for you, have a meaning beyond what you read, and you believe you can imagine what led the author to tell those things,
- that you too are adopting his approach or could adopt it without difficulty,
- that you are amazed at how skilled he is at telling things that you have experienced and are experiencing yourself,
- that you realize he’s not talking about you, but telling about himself, because it’s the topic he knows best, without making you feel it, but it seems he’s actually talking about you.
When all these things happen, most likely, you are in front of content that tells a story.
But there is still a much more empirical way to recognize this type of content.
After reading the post, go in search of the page “Who am I?”
If you find yourself in the About section of the blog because you needed to know something more about the author, then probably just before you read content that was telling you something.
Thank you for being with me in this content. I hope I have told you something useful.
Thank you very much!
Riccardo