How to Write to Absolutely Captivate Your Readers

Struggling with the writing process can be really hard, daunting, and seriously frustrating sometimes, right? If you’re like most people, you worry about what you should write about, how you write, and about who you are writing to. So, how do you keep people reading to end of your article? How do you write to captivate? Well, keep reading, and learn my personally successful writing framework, just a few crucial elements, that you need to start incorporating into your writing right now!

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As a blogger, getting more traffic is always on our minds. And we know that “Content is King” right? So we then know that by creating better content, that should help increase our traffic, which should hopefully increase our engagement, and should ultimately increase our sales.

Therefore, your writing is absolutely essential to your success. Would you agree?

Our goal should be to improve our writing in such a way that all 3 of those objectives are being considered throughout everything that we write.

Easy peasy! Right?

Great Things Take Time

“Ha, Yeah right!”, I bet you’re saying! If you’re not used to writing regularly or haven’t done it for a long time, please be patient with yourself! Learning to write strategically requires trial and error, and lots and lots of practice. You will likely not be captivating overnight, and that’s okay!

Even the best copywriters in the world can struggle over a headline or intro paragraph for days or weeks. Seriously, it’s true. 

I bring this up because when I first started writing again, it was so overwhelming.  So, keep that in mind, and know that you will continue to get better over time, especially if you implement what we are going to discuss.

So with that said,  today I want to give you a sort of framework to help you understand why the way you write is so important- in terms of structure of your content. And how that can improve the likelihood of your content being found, and read, and acted upon.

You Are Not Important

“WHAT???”

Okay, that was a little harsh, and it’s definitely not true! Of course you are!! You’re an amazing, beautiful, and ragingly talented person!

But, do you see how I did that? If you’re still reading it’s because that headline evoked an emotional response from you- it made you want to know WHY you are not important, right?

But really, not you, your reader is the important one you should be solely considering as you create any new content. Getting traffic to your site is a lot bigger topic overall, you know.

But your cleverly written content is what will keep visitors on your site and keep them coming back.

I know this because it is one of the main reasons why I completely failed at blogging the first time around…. It was a total mess, there was no rhyme or reason to it. And I focused almost solely on my OWN importance in what I wrote, instead of my readers!

But what does that mean exactly? It means that your writing needs to reflect your life and experiences, but not be focused on your life and experiences. Do you see the difference?

The wrong way focuses on “me, me, me!” But the right way resonates with your reader and helps them to relate in a personal way. It’s reflective for them. It focuses on what you or I went through AND what we learned from that.

And it tells a story of how that information can help your reader, or make their life better somehow.

The Social Experiment

To explain more about how important it is to consider what you write, let me start with a regularly occurring incident that happens to me all the time.

In the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, the author Dale Carnegie writes, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Wow—that’s powerful, right? Do you believe it? Well I totally believe that and here’s why…we are selfish creatures!

Here’s one example of how that has affected me personally, and how quickly you can lose someone’s interest by not being careful and thoughtful to your reader.

My name has an unusual spelling and is always, always spelled wrong– by everyone. For instance, if 100 people had to send me an email, who did or didn’t know me, I would estimate that about 95-96 of them would spell it wrong.

People will just not take the time to notice my name’s unique spelling. Why? Because they care about their own names more! (Big jerks!)

Just Kidding! But it’s something that does bother me, I’ll admit. Especially if the email address that they are sending to or replying from, clearly has my name in it- come on!

| Related Content: What to Do When Sales are Down

So, sometimes I just write the person back and spell their name wrong and BAM—that does it! HA! They always notice that their name has been spelled incorrectly.

And suddenly, they seem to realize their mistake, that they have spelled my wrong too. Especially, if I’ve used their name correctly before. Just a little sociological experiment I like to perform for my own amusement!

<– That’s not me over there, but that’s what I look like when I’m doing this to Juldy or Walliam or Dravid. Get it? 

Who Cares?

So, you’re probably thinking about now, “Who cares how this chick’s name is spelled?” And that’s absolutely my point! No one cares as much about you, as they do about themselves! (Except me, I care about you!)

That’s the integral thing to remember—people are most interested in themselves. It’s just the way we are, it’s human nature. So don’t fight it.

And I know the little anecdote above was about emails and personal communication, and this article is about overall writing for your customer. But I think it’s relevant to the discussion, and it’s kind of funny. So that’s why I included it here. (Plus it’s also good manners!)

You Need to Care

So, if someone comes to your blog and actually reads your posts, you should know that they are definitely expecting a return on their time investment!

They expect to learn something, to gain knowledge, or to be amused- they expect you to “deliver”.

They want to know how YOU can help THEM with a problem in their lives.

People rarely care to read some long-arse story about yourself, and how your life is SO interesting. Nuh uh, that’s super borrrr-ing to everyone else! (Unless of course you’re a fabulous world traveler! #Goals)

The next tricky part is that you have to quickly let your reader know what problem you are going to solve for them in your article.

Which leads me to the first two key factors that you need to learn in order to write well to hook readers in:

You need to have a seriously amazing headline AND first paragraph.

The First Two Hooks

According to a famed copywriter, Joe Sugerman, he says the secret is that “You want to get the first sentence read!”, and then, “Once you get that read, they will hopefully read the second, and so on, and get to your offer or pitch at the end.”

Doesn’t that totally make sense? Isn’t that how you approach something you are going to read for yourself? I know that’s how it works for me. Even with this article- if you weren’t grabbed by the headline or the first paragraph, you would not be reading this paragraph right now– correct?

These two things are so critical, I cannot emphasize them more!!!!!

If you want people to know about you,  they’ll read your About Me page. (Ha! See what I did there?) No one read my previous blog because is was pretty much an online diary. Yuck!

The point is, you have to think about the words you are using- will they catch people’s eyeballs so much that they will want to read more? (See how entirely captivated that doggie below is?)

Some very prominent copy writers also promote the fact that they spend about half of their time on a new post, to just the headline and first paragraph.

And some even recommend writing at least 25 headlines for each post before you decide upon one. I’ve done this and it’s really not as hard as it sounds.

You just keep adding or changing words and come up with lots of variations. This helps your brain turn on it’s creativity. So, I highly recommend doing this. 

Then, you want to be sure that the hook/headline you choose is really going to be effective, so you’ll want to get it analyzed. I like to use Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer because it’s free.

It will help you to start learning how to improve your headlines right away. It gives you a score and suggestions of what you could do to improve the headline. Pretty cool!

Next, for the first paragraph, I would also recommend spending LOTS of time reviewing it, and keep revising it. Maybe stop working on it for a while then come back to it.

And just keep tweaking it until you know that it will absolutely make someone else want to keep reading. Ask yourself if you’d keep reading if was someone else’ article?

TBH, I also spend a lot of time using Thesaurus.com. It’s also free and it’s a great partner for when I’m writing.  It helps me to figure out the best words to use or to get me to the word that I want to use, but can’t think of.

The Best Solution Ever!

For the body of your text, you have to now write to explain that you have found the solution to their problem, and discuss why your solution is just what they need.

Keeping in mind that what your readers really want to hear from you, is how your experiences can help them. But they don’t just want to know about your experiences.

People want to learn something from your experience that can help them! They are trying to get some clarification and/or solve a problem in their lives.

So, you can definitely talk about yourself, and you should, but you just have to do it in a way that will put the focus back on your reader.

Your content has to provide real value to them. It needs to teach them something new, help them see a different perspective, give them ideas, motivate, inspire, or provoke some other emotional response to therefore action.

And there are so many things that you know or have experienced in your life, that people do want to know about. But specifically, they want to know how those experiences relate to them in their life.

You can be funny, personal, anecdotal, or whatever, but you’ve also gotta be significant too!

Those posts, my friend, are what the people want to read!

Of course you’ll also want to write specific to your niche, to what your particular audience wants. Hopefully you’ve developed a focus for what your blog is about, the key topics you will cover. If not, do that first or none of this will help much.

You need to make sense to people too. For instance, if I’m a chef and I try to write an article about how to be a great writer, people will be much less likely to read that article because…I’m a chef. (Not that someone couldn’t be both! I’m sure there are some!)

But if your blog is food focused, then your peeps would probably rather read your article about a delicious lasagna recipe, than trust that you’re a writing expert. (Mmm lasagna)

And while that may take a while to figure out your focus, the important thing to remember is that what will help you grow, is to write about what you know. Write about what will help someone else and what you know that can help solve their problems.

If you’re blogging to potentially make money, you’ll need to remember to think of your blog as a business too, and that you are providing your “customers” with a service. Is your service good enough to pay for?

I’m mot going into depth about this here and now, but this article would be incomplete without mentioning SEO and keyword research. Making sure your content is also SEO friendly, that is very important.

This will help people find your articles to begin with, through Google, Pinterest, or whatever tool they’re searching for their answer. (Then your fascinating and awesome words will hook them and make them stay!)

There are many options for keyword tools online. Most seem to cost about $50 per month to use. So if you’re just starting out I’d recommend going with the free Google Keyword Planning tool at least at first. Okay, I discussed SEO, so there you go!

Key Questions Every Time

Now we are here, to those KEY questions to ask yourself whenever you start writing a new post. This will help you with the “engaging” element we discussed earlier. Your readers will be more likely to engage with you if you answer these questions in your writing:

• Who are you writing to? Who is your customer or reader?
  • They say you should write as if you’re writing to ONE specific person, your ideal customer. Have you figured out who that is yet? If not, do that first- create the profile of your perfect customer. This will help you determine your tone also.

• How will this topic help my reader?
  • Now you need to consider if what you are writing will be beneficial and useful to that person. What problem of theirs does it solve? Put that word or sentence at the top of your page as you are writing to keep the focus.

• How or can I make the information compelling?
  • You want them to think YES- this article is for me! Think about articles, books, and blogs that you have read that you absolutely love. What is it about it them that grabs you? That makes you want to read more? There are many writing styles to use for the body of your topic and make sure to include “Power Words.”

• Will this make my reader feel a certain way?
  • Do you want them to feel happy, inspired? Beware that things you write can have an influence on people’s emotions. You need to at least make them feel that you understand them and their needs.

• What will make this post Pin worthy?
  • If you read this post on someone else’s page, would you share it? Would you Pin it? Would you bookmark it? If not, you’ve got some work to do. Plus, you always want to add some gorgeous images into your post that people can pin.

The Big Pitch 

And lastly, the end of your article should clearly focus on what you want your customer or reader to do next. This is where you put your Call To Action or your big pitch!

If you’re leading up to a sales pitch, your article should provide all the justification for why your reader should become your buyer.

The ending should be a bold request for them to either A) purchase something B) give you something you need (Like comments, likes, shares, or their information), or C) to do something specific, like download your lead magnet, or sign up for your newsletter.

So the last question you should ask yourself is:

• What do I want my customer to do now and why?
  • This is where you will again tell them why what you have to offer them is awesome, unique, or desirable and that’s why they should take the next step.
  • Then you tell them how to do that. Whether that’s click here and purchase, or download, or something else. Ask them to take action!

Conclusion

Yay, you made it through to the end! I know I’ve shared a lot of information today. So, let’s sum up what the “framework” to write to captivate that we’ve learned today shall we?

1. It’s going to take time to put these steps into practice and get really good at them! So practice a lot.
2. People only care about what you are saying, if it helps them in some way, so write directly to them, not yourself. And be authentic.
3. Your headline and first paragraph are the MOST important parts to get right, to intrigue your reader to stay and continue reading.
4. Actually “solve” a problem for them. Provide them with specific, authoritative, valuable information to benefit from in reading your content. Practice using the questions above when writing to make sure you are providing the solution to the problem. 
5. Tell them what you want them to do next, and ask them to do it!

Now that you know all of my secrets, here’s what I want you to do next!

Give me your email address! That way you’ll be able to continue to get spectacular information, like I’ve provided here today, that will help grow your blog through increased visits, engagement, and hopefully your Sales!

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Lastly, I hope this post has been helpful for you! I’d love for you to drop me a comment and let me know what you thought about it? Or let me know if you have any questions?

And please Like, Share, and Pin- thank you much!