by Martin Avis
Or … write from the heart to build relationships with the minds.
There are lots of factors that help to build that mystical thing called a relationship: honesty, reliability, trustworthiness, charm, empathy, newsworthiness, ethics, outspokenness. But if you don’t have them, you may find it hard to learn them. Without them your career as an online writer may be short lived.
Let’s concentrate here on the key factors that I believe you can learn that will set your writing apart from 99% of the rest, and give you a head start in building relationships with your readers. These are the things you can put into action from today.
The first and foremost secret is to never think about your readers as a list. ‘List’ is way too anonymous. You can’t ever build a relationship with a list - relationships are for people.
My newsletter, Kickstart Today, is read by thousands of people. But it is only ever written to one. Sometimes that one person is my daughter, who I know reads it at work. Sometimes it is my friend Barrie, who may have said something that sparked an idea for an article. Often it is to one of my readers who I’ve never met, but who emailed with a comment, question or suggestion.
Keeping the image of one person in your mind is easy. Your writing becomes more of a conversation. And the more you write the easier it gets because readers will naturally write to you with comments and you can then keep them in mind as you answer them.
Then, the funny thing is that I get emails from all kinds of other people saying ‘how did you know that that was *exactly* what I wanted to hear?’ Like astrological star signs there are only so many problems to go round. Write about one and you’ll resonate with hundreds of people.
The more you can make your writing appear to be one-to-one, the more of your readers will imagine themselves as the one you are talking to. It is like a whispered aside in a real conversation - it makes the listener feel special.
There are two often-repeated bits of advice that you’ll hear time and again:
1. People don’t want to hear about you - write about them.
2. Train your list into a buying mood by selling them something every time you communicate with them.
Both are nonsense if building relationships that are what you want to do.
People read your newsletter for the information you can give them to make their lives better/easier/more successful. If that was the only reason they read you, then the I/You ratio of 1:5 that is often quoted would make sense. But the reality is that people do business with people they like and they get to like you by knowing about what is going on in your life.
In my experience, so long as you are delivering the real information too, you can’t talk about yourself and your life enough! I get far more emails about the personal things I write than about the stuff my newsletter is really about - and I love it!
A well-written newsletter is a balance between fulfilling its task of educating and informing and entertaining. The very best are like soap operas that make you want to know what is happening next in the writers’ life.
Talking about the everyday personal things that happen in your life is how to build a relationship with your list - one person at a time, because the same things are happening in your reader’s lives. Each time your life compares with one of your reader’s experiences, resonance happens and you’ve found another soul mate.
The other advice - that you should attempt to sell something with every communication - needs a very special kind of writer to manage successfully.
I know of a few newsletters that manage it to perfection - and the readers hardly realize they’ve been sold to - but most just come across as pushy and spammy.
In my own newsletters, I’ve always stuck to the principle that I only recommend things I’ve used myself and can honestly say are worth the money. If that means I only recommend something every few weeks, so be it. At least my readers know that the recommendations, when they do come, are heartfelt. And I believe my response rates bear out my policy!
How often you publish is another thing that can affect relationship building and should be thought about carefully.
It is hard to build a close relationship with your readers if you don’t get to talk to them very often. It is tough to allow your readers to get to know you if you only ’speak’ to them once a month, for example. As everything moves so fast online, even weekly publication can be too little unless you are a powerful writer.
Once the writing bug gets to you and words begin to flow naturally, you may want to consider publishing at least twice a week. My own Kickstart Today started out life as a five times a week publication and the biggest complaints I ever got was when I reduced to ‘just’ three times a week!
When your readers complain that they haven’t received an issue, you know that you’ve made a connection.
Of course, if your newsletter is full of other people’s writing and doesn’t have a personal style, then very frequent publication may be a bad thing for you.
On that subject, a lot of publishers still use guest articles. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the best writing by far that you can publish is your own. As you build your relationship with your readers they will want to hear about you, your life and what you think. If you are going to effectively give them that, you just have to get on and learn to write. Or more accurately, learn to communicate.
And while we are talking about writing, try to unlearn most of what you’ve been taught about grammar. You are not writing for your English teacher, you should be writing like you are talking to a close friend.
Write conversationally, using conversational grammar (sentences CAN start with and, contractions are better than okay!)
All of which brings us right back to the start: write as if you are talking to one person, keep it honest and personal and remember that you are not writing to a list, you are communicating with a friend. Relationship building is best done one person at a time.
