The Recovering Perfectionist
The Recovering Perfectionist
How to make sure your blogs are succinct and helpful
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Hello, lovely recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 72 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I'm going to outline the three things that help you make sure that your blogs are succinct and helpful. If you'd like to check out the key takeaways, you can head to clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 72, and I'll share any links over there as well. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, this is a really big one, right? We talk about this a lot in Batch It Crazy, which is my beautiful monthly membership program that helps you get consistent content created all the time for your blogs and socials and newsletters, for example. And we talk a lot about at the at the end of each quarter, we do a quarterly planning party where we plan our content for the next three months all together as a group. And one of the things that I ask everyone to do before we even get started is these three things. They also apply to when you sit down to write any blog or record a podcast or anything like that. So you can actually take these three steps and apply it to every time that you're creating content. As I said, whether you're creating a new blog, a podcast, you might be going on someone else's podcast as a guest speaker, it might be for a webinar that you're creating, an ebook, it could be for every newsletter that you send out, it could be every time you sit down to batch some social media content and that sort of thing. These are the three key steps that will help you make sure that the content that you're creating is succinct and helpful for your audience. So let's jump into it. So the first one is I want you to get really clear on who this is going to benefit. It could be slightly different from your niche or it could be a sub-niche of your regular niche for each blog or for each of these pieces of content, but you need to be really clear on who you're actually writing this for. I'm going to say writing, just make it easier. So I'm not saying writing, speaking, blah, blah, blah, but it applies to everything. So who are we actually creating this content for? If you can jot down a couple of things or even just get clear in your head, spend 30 seconds in your mind before you start tapping away in your keyboard to who you're actually writing this for and what the purpose is for them, it will make it so much easier for you because you're sitting down to speak to a specific person rather than trying to cover all bases and be all things for all people. That's when we start to get a bit waffly and we chuck a bit of this information in and we go back to the base stuff on here. If we're really clear on what level the person is who we're writing it for, we're less likely to fill up this space and fill up these words with gap fillers just for the sake of it. And we're less likely to buff it up with more information that actually ends up feeling really overwhelming or superfluous or just not helpful at all. So getting really clear on who exactly it is that you're talking to makes a massive difference with keeping things short, sharp to the point, and helpful and valuable to your audience. So that's the first one. Be clear on who it is for and who is going to benefit. The second thing is what are the points that you want them to walk away with? So often, especially when we're writing a blog, we do a couple of introductory kind of paragraphs to set the scene and introduce what it is that we're talking about, and then we might go into our bullet points and then a conclusion. What I want you to be really clear on is what do you want people, if they read the whole thing or even if they just skimmed and kind of looked at the bullet points, what do you want them to be thinking about or milling over for the next little while? Are there any changes that you want them to make? Is there just one key takeaway that you want them to uh to grasp and to really have gotten from this? And if you, for example, got uh say, let's say five people to read it, what would you want most of them to say they got out of it? All right, that helps you again be really succinct. So we're not just stuffing it with, oh, well, I thought I was going to do seven steps, but I really only need to do it in three, but I'll find other four other things, you know, that sort of thing. So be really specific about what you want them to actually walk away knowing, thinking, feeling, doing, understanding, all of that sort of thing. Be really clear on that and stick just to those things. If you find that what you want them to understand is a list of 25 things, consider breaking it down into a couple of smaller blogs or bits of content, or um pulling those things into like three subsections, perhaps with their little sub-bullet points as well, if that's really important. We really want this to be easy to digest at the right level for your person who you've established in step one. And the third thing is understanding for you and for them, what do you want them to do after they've read this content? Now, this is a bit of a double-edged sword. We want to know what you want them to do for themselves and what you want them to get out of the next step, but also what do you, what's the purpose of this blog? Why, what do you want them to do after they've read this? So it might be you want them to comment, you want them to share, you want them to give you a thumbs up, or you want them to sign up to get a freebie so they're on your email list so that you can market a new product to them, or you want them to share it with a friend so that you're spreading the word further. There's a lot of different reasons why you're putting this content out there and what you want people to do with it. The other side is that what do you want them to get out of it? Do you want them to get the freebie so that they can actually have a checklist to work through the things you've talked about in the blog so that they can have a transformation that you promise and that you know is effective is able to be affected if they follow these steps? Do you want them to feel calm? Do you want them to feel empowered? All of that sort of thing comes into it. So it having those three filters, I suppose, to working out what sort of uh content you're going to put out there with your big chunky bits of content makes it so much easier rather than sitting down and going, Oh, I've got to do a blog today, I might as well just write something. It just becomes a bit superfluous and it feels really heavy as a task. It doesn't feel fun. When you follow these steps, you're more likely to create something that's helpful, valuable, quality, and has a very specific purpose for you and also for the reader. And it brings back that joy of content creation. It's much more likely to be engaging, which means you can open a conversation and carry on that ongoing engagement with your audience as well. So just to sum up, the three things that I'd love you to get clear on before you go creating any chunky bits of content is number one, who is it for and who is going to benefit from this and writing or creating that content purely for that person. Number two is what are the key points that you want them to walk away from? My suggestion is around three to five, like in this one, there's three. What are the three to five things you want them to walk away or walk away, knowing, doing, thinking, feeling? And thirdly, is what do you want them to do once they've finished digesting this piece of content? I hope that's been helpful. I would love to know what your thoughts are. And if this is helpful, leave a comment or share or whatever you want to do. Um, and you can also grab um all of the information, all of these, um, the outlines, and also leave your comments at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 72. Until next time, I will see you on the next episode. Bye everyone.