What To Do When People Aren’t Reading Your Content

The feeling of posting something you’ve written and have it reach the deafening silence of the otherwise shouting internet is something I’ve experienced many times.

I’ve also experienced the opposite. I’ve had a piece of writing be shared by a creator with more than 300.000 of followers, and have the engagement flowing in. This was an amazing feeling, but it was only a taste.

It’s much better when the engagement you get is organic and consistent, and you can see the continous growth.

I’m going to share a strategy that I’ve started to use recently, which will make sure that you don’t waste any time writing long pieces of content that no one is interested in.

Eyes on your content is what you should aim for

With anything you create on the internet, the goal should be to get as many eyes on it as possible.

And to do it consistently takes practice. And the best way to practice is to get as many pieces of different content in front of people. Experiment and find out what people like.

And when a written piece resonates with people, they will like, share or comment, and that’s when you know you’ve written something that people want to read.

Step 1: Write more shortform

One strategy that will save you tons of time is to present your writing in shortform.

You can do this by publishing the outline for the piece of content you want to write. This way you test if people are interested in the topic and your perspective. And you won’t have to write the entire article without knowing if anyone will be interested.

It’s like having your writing presented to a focus group, and social media is the most honest focus group there is.

Step 2: Use your analytics

Post your ideas for a week or more and see what resonates most with people.

You can decide for yourself what metric you’re going for. I usually see comments and bookmarks as the positive metric I aim for. This data will tell you what your audience is interested in and what parts of your writing you need to pursue.

And then you just have to expand on that content.

Step 3: Expand, Expand, Expand

You content has been tested in front of people, and you now know people are interested in reading it.

Now you can take the points of your outline and use them as the headings of your longer piece. In the optimal scenario, you would go from a short-post to an atomic essay or a longform post, and then further to an article or newsletter issue. If people are really interested in it, you can expand it further to a free or paid product.

Remember data is the language of the internet.

Weekly Resource

This weekly resource is a video by Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole from Ship30for30.

They discuss what they call the Lean Writing Method, which builds on the same idea that I mentioned in this edition of the newsletter.

Start small and double down on the stuff that resonates.

Weekly Highlight

Free Resources

• My Ultimate Guide for Building an Email Newsletter

• The Content Creation List (Template)

• The Newsletter Template

• Medium Article (Template)

Until next time…

Hope you enjoyded this weeks edition of the newsletter.

Talk to you again next week.