I am going to share with you three powerful ideas about how you can keep your readers interested in what you have to say. These ideas work for articles, books, web pages and blogs. In fact one particular idea is so powerful that when used properly it will guarantee that 99% of your readership will read what you have to say.

Individually each of these ideas produces results but used in combination you can create some very powerful results. By the end of this article you will have the opportunity to see how you can use these ideas singly and together in an article.

Making Benefit Statements

If you tell your readers what they can expect to gain by reading your article, chapter, book, web page etc. then they are more likely to follow through. Obviously this needs to be modified slightly for each situation. A 500 word article may only need a paragraph or three bullet points. Whilst a book might have the whole of the first chapter, the front and back cover and the whole contents pages set up to sell the benefits of your book. Then each chapter might also start with benefit statements for that particular section.

Telling the Story

We are all socialised to listening to stories. Think about early childhood and having your parents reading to you in bed. How about your favourite TV programme, films and book? Stories intrigue, fascinate and most importantly for us keep your readers interested. Any anecdote, case study or example livens up the sometimes dry world of instructional text.

The other real benefit of stories is that they “make real” the points you are trying to get across. When used skilfully you can use a story to pre-teach your process or idea before outlining it in full. The result this creates in your reader’s mind is familiarity and therefore they are likely to take the point home more readily.

Opening the Loop

Imagine what would happen to a reader if you told them of three huge benefits they will receive from reading a particular chapter. You then in quick succession outline the first two and then explain each in depth. My guess is that you will keep reading through this to find out about the third, particularly if the third is the biggest and most powerful benefit statement. This is the basic idea of opening a loop.

Here is another way of opening a loop. Perhaps the start of a chapter might be an example of a big result you got from using the techniques you will explain in the chapter. You could build the drama of the story, perhaps the stakes were high and the results were critical with you only just finding the solution to the problem in the very last seconds.

You might even add in some pre-teaching or even how much better your life has become because of you taking on board the lessons you will share in the chapter.

All of a sudden what could have been a lifeless chapter on a specific technique can take on a life of its open and draw your reader into really wanting the information you have to give.

Putting it all together

When I first came across these ideas I was overwhelmed about how I would be able to use them and put them together in a meaningful way. This was because I had not yet really seen how easily these ideas can be put together and used.

What I needed were a couple of examples that I could analyse and work out how the concepts fitted together. So to that end I deliberately wrote two articles specifically packed full of these ideas so you can see how easily these ideas are to put together.

The first is the article you are reading now. Feel free to go back through this article and notice the techniques that I have used. The second is a case study I wrote on my own blog about finding markets. You can find the article here in the NLP Techniques Section.

Final Thoughts

In an upcoming article we will talk about techniques you can use to get your readers to backtrack and re-read sections that are important as well as anticipate what is coming up in new chapters. I will see you in a future article where we will explore these concepts more fully.