One of the quickest ways to get stressed and burned out in life is to try and please everyone all the time.
And one of the quickest ways to see your website or blog sink into obscurity is to do the same.
It is impossible to please everyone and so you shouldn’t try. This is especially important in marketing though because it is perhaps the very fastest way to create a website that is bland and that no-one cares about. It’s also a surefire way to prevent yourself from building any kind of trust or authority.
Why You Need to Leave People Out
If you were to create a website that appealed to everyone, that would mean that the posts would have to be useful for people who were new to the topic and those that were experts. It would mean that you couldn’t make any very controversial statements and it would ultimately prevent you from gaining any sense of ownership from your visitors.
Conversely, if you have a strong point of view, a mission statement and an ideal customer, then you can create a website that will greatly appeal to the right person.
One of the fastest ways to make your content more interesting is to quickly identify who it isn’t for. This will rule out people who wouldn’t have been the right demographic for you to market to anyway but it will also help you to make your content appear that much more appealing to those that are still present.
Many brands will attempt to qualify their content in a way that is transparently fake. For example ‘If you don’t want to earn mega bucks, then leave right now!’. This doesn’t work because the visitors see through it and it just looks desperate.
However, if you say ‘this course is only for professional lawyers that are already making a lot of money’, then those professional lawyers will be much more interested than if you had said ‘this course is for beginners and experts alike’. You want your target demographic to feel that the content you have on offer is aimed directly at them.
Why You Need an Opinion
Likewise, you need to ‘take a side’ when it comes to your content. For instance, if you have a site about health then you can decide to come down on the ‘highly scientific’ side of things and only promote strategies backed heavily by science. Alternatively, you could decide to promote naturalistic products with no chemicals. It doesn’t matter which – that comes down to your personal beliefs – but you do need to pick.
Why? Because this way, people who agree with you will be able to choose your site over other sites. They will know that your site shares their principles and their beliefs and they will be able to feel confident that the advice you share and products you recommend are in keeping with their belief system.
If they can’t know that for sure, then how can they trust you enough to buy from you?
