Stop Explaining, Start Connecting

Sometimes lessons come from strange places…After watching the Oscars in 2015, I decided I should go and see Birdman, it had just won 8 Oscars, but everyone I knew who’d seen it didn’t really rate it very much.

What did they know!

True, it’s wasn’t action-packed and not at all what I expected, but the writing, directing and acting were superb, it proved to me that a film doesn’t need to be full of explosions and blood to be good.

There is a superb section that anyone who writes articles, emails or blog posts should take to heart.

Riggan (Birdman, a film actor) and Mike (a cool hotshot stage actor) are reading through some lines of a play which start out as follows.

“I’m the wrong person to ask. I didn’t know the man. I’ve only heard his name mentioned in passing. You’d have to know the particulars. But I think what you’re saying is that love is absolute. Yeah. The kind of love I’m talking about, you don’t try and kill people.”

Mike (stage) hates it, it’s too wordy, he points out that 4 times the script reiterates that Riggan didn’t know the guy, so he strips it back to basics while at the same time bringing out the emotion of the piece. The result is it goes from just someone talking to anger and passion being transmitted by fewer lines.

“I didn’t even know the guy. The kind of love I’m talking about is absolute. The kind of love I’m talking about, you, well, you don’t try to kill people.”

The same message but more powerful.

What I want to try to get across to you via this article is that, just like films, your writing doesn’t need to be full of explosions, they need to connect to your audience. Try to get the emotion of your message to come across so you connect to your readers.

If that means stripping it back to basics, do it. If that means talking on a more personal basis, do it.

Let me try to give you an example.

A while ago, I was documenting a test in the community that I did with one of my sites. An article I was running traffic to was barely breaking even, but after 2 days of split testing it is now running at almost 400% ROI. The $45 I spent on traffic one day earned me just short of $200.

That is interesting but nothing more than that it’s the type of thing reraders would skim over and think ohh thats nice for him….

But what if I told you what doing that could mean to your family or how it affected me? Even though it’s longer and not “stripped back,” would the following be better? Does it connect more?

I am on an absolute high today, I had an article I was running traffic to that was barely making a profit. After all my problems with Facebook recently I was hoping that this was the way forward. It looked like I was wrong.

As a last resort I decided to test a theory I had. I set up some split testing and ran some traffic to it. One of the split tests showed a lot of promise so I decided to roll the dice and send a lot more traffic to it. It was the ultimate “Hail Mary.” It worked. After 24 hours I’d made 100% profit. After a few more tweaks, 48 hours later it is running a 400% profit.

400% profit, that amazed me and I thought I’d seen it all. That means that instead of spending $100 a day to earn $100 I can earn that same $100 by spending around $30. Hell, I turned a $10 article into an income stream.

That, my friend, is a powerful reason why you should split test.

I hope you see the difference that letting readers know how you feel and just injecting a bit of emotion and passion can make.

So next time you write an article, look at how you can make it resonate on an emotional basis, I bet you’ll find it performs better.

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