Day 4 of the 12-Day Content Creation Challenge

How To Avoid Overwhelming Your Reader With Awesome Content By WBR Content Developer Ivan Meakins

Have you ever read an amazing book that helped you solve a problem and left you eager to take further action?

That’s because that book was strategically written to deliver the perfect balance of helpful information and drive to take the next step.

On the other hand, when an author piles in all the information and experience they could possibly share they create a lose-lose scenario with two negative outcomes:

The reader is likely to disengage (and still has a problem to deal with).
The author loses out on a potential client.

Find the balance

At WBR we know that there is a balance to providing information and encouraging readers to reach out for more, but how do you know when you are harming the potential of your book (or any other content you are creating)?

Too much information will sabotage your strategy. You need to carefully leverage your valuable content to win more clients; this blog will help you to understand why that’s important, and how to do it.

The devil is in the detail

If you give away too much of your magic in your book your readers (or listeners) will become weighed down in heavy detail. They’ll end up staring cross eyed into the void wondering what the heck is going on.

They won’t reach out because they’ll be overwhelmed, and likely think they need to spend six months trying to implement what you have just shared in your book. Meanwhile, you might be at home twiddling your thumbs waiting for an influx of new business.

Your book (and whatever form of content you produce), is not designed to solve all your readers’ problems. It’s there to serve as an introduction and an appetiser to the awesome results that are possible when they invest in working one to one with you. You need to reverse engineer the process.

How to reverse engineer the process to create your intended outcome

If you’re anything like the entrepreneurs that we work with at WBR you know how to solve a lot of problems for your clients, you’re passionate, and you want to add tangible value to people’s lives (not leave them stuck in overwhelm).

You would like your reader (ideal client) to do three things:

Consume your content (helps them get to know, like and trust you).
Engage (for example, take action on their issue, book a discovery call with you).
Buy your programmes or products and/or invest in one-to-one support with you.

There are two highly effective ways to encourage them do this:

Focus (and flesh out) one or two major problems that your target audience faces.
Offer simple, practical ways to help them solve those problems.

Be helpful, but don’t fuss

If your target audience wants to know how to build enough wealth so they don’t have to worry about retirement, focus on one or two things that can help them with that; resist the urge to teach them about the intricacies of diversified investment portfolios, or lecturing them about the origins of the word “retirement”.

Look at it this way, you are reading this article because you want to learn how to deliver the right volume of high-value content that leaves your potential clients wanting more. You don’t want me to start talking about how to use stories in your business book because that’s not why you are reading this (but come back on day eight when we’ll share awesome content on how you can (and why you should) leverage stories!).

Meantime, if you’d love our expert support to write and publish a well thought out book that provides solutions your clients can implement (without getting bogged down) and encourages them to invest in one-to-one work with you, why not schedule a content and brand strategy session?