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Before there was Internet and networks and so on
There was a man that we all did dote on
His name was Seuss, and his tongue was loose
Rhyming and twisting words about life and battles and political faddle
To teach us all about the things that matter
As you all know after reading my last post on Doctor Who, I really like my doctors. So, this time, I thought we’d talk about another very important Doctor in our history-Dr. Seuss. His books have taught many children how to read and many adults how to live as well as sparked the making of many cartoons as well as major motion pictures. What you may not know is that in his writing, he implemented some of the best strategies possible relevant to content marketing today, even though there was no such thing as Internet marketing in his time. Though, I bet a lot of SEO and marketing companies would love to get their hands on him now.
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
This well known verse from one of his more famous books is the most important thing that we need to think about when writing for a blog or website. Oftentimes, we get stuck on what everyone else would write about a subject, and we just follow in their footsteps. This used to be acceptable, but now readers from a new generation are much more difficult to keep on page. They need more than just ordinary information. They need creativity and imagination
Once many of us get into the groove of writing content we forget all those things that made us a good writer in the first place. We fall into habits of cookie cutter content instead of exercising our creative muscles and really thinking outside the box. So, before you begin writing, brainstorm about how you can say something different, or restate previous knowledge in a more eye catching way.
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
This quote comes from the man himself, and isn’t this so true when we’re writing content today? Gone are the days of long pages of chunky paragraphs. Today we should be writing short and to the point with headers and bullet points friendly for the modern reader to just skim. A reader will often give up and leave a site if there seems to be an overwhelming amount of information. This will:
- Help keep the reader on the page
- Help the reader skim to find the information they are looking for
- Provide relevancy to the page
- Make it more likely that the reader will call you for service or share the page on social media which will in turn lead to higher rankings on search engines.
“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.”
The Lorax is perhaps the most beloved of the stories that Dr. Seuss has produced and was recently made into a film. We can learn a lot from the Lorax since, like him, we speak for things that cannot speak for themselves. In this case it is a brand name, business, service or product. It is our ultimate job to protect the reputation of what we are writing about and to speak for it in a sense. This is what truly sells it to the customer.
So remember, the next time you are writing for a website, a blog or just anything:
- Always dig deep and be creative; who knows what kind of unique ways to write something you can think of!?
- Get to the point. No one wants to read an essay.
- You are speaking for what the website is trying to sell, so be deserving of the honor to ‘speak for the trees’.
Great post Raven. I really enjoyed this.