Providing Value Comes Down to Answering One Simple Question…

I recently got this tweet from a new friend of mine:

She had just finished reading my Who Is Jackie Lee page over at Internet Marketing for Mommies. She’s not kidding, that piece is 2205 words long. I am long winded… I’d say most of my posts on that site are between 1 to 2 thousand words long.

It’s interesting because I KNOW I’m long winded over there, and have been kind of proud of that fact… and I purposely try not to be over here.

I think it comes down to a skewed sense of providing value.

Fact: people will only keep coming back to my site if I provide something valuable for them. There are millions of blogs online, especially in the internet marketing niche, and if I want people to give me a piece of their day I am going to need to give them something in return aka provide value. So I went with the “more is better” mentality, and managed to puke everything I know about a given internet marketing topic (and many of its related topics) onto the page so people will feel as though they’ve received something valuable.

While I may have provided something valuable the problem is… it’s long winded. 🙂 And most people will not read through an entire 2000 word post, and yet I keep churning them out.

Funny thing is, on It’s a Wahm Life… I don’t do that.

I know work at home moms don’t have 30 minutes to sit and read one post, so I make sure I pack as much value into a post as I can in less than 750 words. This takes a lot more discipline as a writer, and it also takes a lot more clarity as a blogger.

I recently finished reading The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith. A really down to Earth book about how to write a memoir (or a blog). One of the most important lessons I took from the book was this:

What’s it about?

I’ve been thinking about it for days, and have come to realize that providing value to your readers really does come down to answering that ONE question ~ for a lot of different things.

1. What is your blog about?

Then make sure you’re writing to answer that question in each and every post.

2. What’s your sidebar about?

Then only add things that make that clear.

3. What is your blog post about?

Then make sure you’re writing to answer that question (and only that question) in your post.

Marion talks about the fact that when you’re a memoir writer you have your WHOLE life in your head… but only certain things are relevant to the story at hand. You have to be able to cut out the pieces that aren’t relevant, and only write the things that are.

It is exactly the same as a blogger… we have all this information in our head, all this value and we want to share it, but to really provide value to our readers we can only include (in any particular blog post) that which answers the question… what is this about? (Write down the tidbits that come up that don’t particularly fit ~ those can always be other blog posts!).

Here’s the point in time I would generally go off on a tangent that just came to mind… but today I’m going to write the tangent on a notecard and save it for another day.

What about you? When you read your blog posts, or look at your blog can you see the value in answering the one simple question… What is it about?