Writing effective articles: 2. You can't get what you want, till you know what you want

How to write effective articles? We can’t possibly answer that question if we don’t specify what we want to achieve. As mentioned in my previous post,  if you simply write an article because you feel the urge to do so, you will at best amuse your audience with an intriguing story. But to be effective, you need to know what you want to achieve.

A goal-driven approach to writing

Writing articles is – or at least should be - a goal-driven activity. You are trying to achieve ‘something’ with your audience and that something is not passive reading. An effective article is in my opinion an article that persuades the reader:
• to perform an action
• to change his or her opinion
• to share your ideas with others
If you look back upon the articles that you have read, which ones would you still consider to be worth reading? Exactly: the ones that changed your opinion on a topic, that helped you in your work or that motivated you to discuss the topic with others. So simply providing information in an article is not enough: you need to have a goal and pursue that goal with your article.

Get your audience to perform an action

One of the most interesting goals for an article is to get your audience to perform a certain action. This action could be registering for an event or newsletter, requesting information about a certain product or even buying a product or registering for a service.
In 2013 I wrote an extensive article (and a series of blog posts) about improving product and brand engagement through smart documentation. At that time I was working for Be Informed and responsible for building up a global community of users. So my goal with this article was to persuade a pre-defined target group to register on the Be Informed website and start using the software to make smarter documentation. With 70 useful registrations within two weeks, the article proved to be fairly successful.

Another example is the article you are reading right now. With this article – in a series of blog posts – I pursue a number of goals, which I will reveal one at the time in this post. The most important goal of this article is to motivate you to start writing more effective articles by following the approach I am sketching in this article. Which means that my goal is reached once you have published your first article using the suggested method as your guideline.

Indoctrination is a strange thing

Another goal of this article is to change the way people think about writing. It’s not very often that I meet people that consider writing articles a goal-driven activity. The verbs writers use to describe the goal of their article is often “to inform” or “to instruct”, while these are just the means to reach the real goal. So my goal here is to convince you – my audience – that you need to take one step back and look at the real goal of your article; to focus on what is beyond the horizon of the writing task.
So next to articles that are focused on making a targeted audience do things, there are articles that want people to change their way of thinking about a certain topic. Of course it is not indoctrination that we are pursuing, we are merely guiding our audience in the direction we want them to go. Using provocative titles can help in such a case to get their attention.

Get famous or die trying

What would be stronger then you telling your audience to change their way of thinking or perform a certain action? Right: your readers starting discussions on the internet – or in real life – about how your article changed their view on the topic. Even with a successful publication channel an author can only reach a limited number of readers from his or her target group. By using the social network of your readers and making them share or discuss the article, the impact of an article can increase dramatically. So the third goal of this article is to motivate you – my readers – to share and discuss my thoughts with others. 

Know your goals, then start thinking about your audience

To summarize, an effective article focusses on one or more of these goals:
1. Motivating the audience to do something;
2. Changing the way people think about a topic;
3. Making the audience share your thoughts with others.
Once you have defined these goals for yourself, it is time to take the next step and start thinking about your target audience. But that’s something for my next post.