I have a lot of people tell me they love my blogs (which I greatly appreciate :) ). I think my favourite compliment came from Michael Back last August who said “You, Carl Richards and Seth Godin are the only people whose email newsletters I read religiously. I love what you do.”
That’s some pretty esteemed company to be in.
It’s worth saying that this wasn’t always the case. I’ve been writing The Word From Pete for over 15 years. Sometimes weekly. Sometimes fortnightly. But I’ve been writing 25 – 50 blogs a year for a pretty long stretch of years. Honing my craft, so to speak.
If you also write a blog, here’s a couple of things I do that I’ve learned over the journey that might help:
Write to one person. So right now I’m writing this just to you. My language is specifically to one person. You and I both know that other people will read this too, but in this moment it's just you and me. And I don’t want to break that illusion. For example, in the first sentence of this blog I could have said “thank you to everyone who has told me they love the blog” which would have felt like I was writing to a crowd, not just to you. So instead I just told you about it.
Write for a very specific, narrow audience. I use to write for anyone who was interested, and my writing wasn’t as good. Now I write for Thought Leaders Business School students. That’s who it’s for. If you’re not in business school yet, or even if you’ll never be, you are still most welcome here, and of course, the blog is actually for you too. But when I write it, I write it for our business school students.
I write like I speak. I try to keep my language consistent with how I talk, not how I write. That means shorter sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Simple language.
One point per blog. My formula is pretty much a story and a point. Not always. Occasionally (like now) I’ll share a list or a model. But mostly I just try to make one point, and give you something you can digest in under a minute and move on.
I don’t make myself the hero. Of course, I’ve broken this rule a little bit in this one too, but mostly I try very hard not to be the hero of my stories.
Happy blogging.
