It’s an important key to monetizing your content…being persuasive. If you can’t convince anyone of anything, you simply aren’t going to sell anything. Nor will your readers sign up for your newsletter or come back to read more later.
For some, persuasive writing techqniues come easier than to others. You can learn about copywriting (we cover this in lesson 4 and 5 in our free course at Contentrix), but you have to learn how persuasiveness works without sounding like a used car salesman or just a plain old bully. It takes practice, but your practice is much better if you are conscious of what you are trying to accomplish.
I read an interesting article on FastCompany called Leading Through the Power of Persuasion and even though the article was geared toward “real-life” leadership, the advice applies to your online writing as well. After all, our business world may virtual, but the leadership qualities we convey are still very real.
The article by Charlotte Beers, lays our some persuasion tools that leaders have:
- Threats and consequences
- Passion and pathos
- Humor and wit
- Imperfection
- Surprise
- Wonder
I encourage you to read the full article, but here are a few things that stood out for me (emphasis added):
“Of course, laying out the response you want is a central part of good communication, but in the goal of leading others, you are also always after one very specific response: ‘I never thought of it that way.’
To elicit an ‘I never thought of it that way’ response, you must be prepared to express your own excitement, your keenness, the leaps you’ve made from logic to an imaginative new proposition, the size of which is yet unknown.”
And then, more importantly, she cautions people from beating people over the head with baseball bat and instead encourages this…
“You are not trying to sway people against their will but to offer them a chance to see things anew. To create change, to invent a new future, you have to be vulnerable, to show passion and belief in an unproven idea, and to risk failure by pursuing it. You, the initiator, have to find a delivery style that allows you to communicate your conviction in a compelling, inescapable way.”
No perfection is required when it comes to persausive writing techniques, but you’ve got to believe in what you say and let others discover new perspectives for themselves.
