The 1 thing that could absolutely make or break your writing career

Neglect it at your peril.

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Bad experiences can kill a company overnight.

Take the recent (and now-infamous) Willy Wonka-themed event in Glasgow, for instance.

“Families looking forward to an immersive event billed as “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” were met with what they described as an empty warehouse filled with lacklustre decorations and few, if any, of the promised treats. Instead, parents and kids were given a half cup of lemonade and two jelly beans each, hardly the “world of pure imagination” they signed up for.” (Vox)

The event was pushed through paid ads on Facebook using AI-generated images that didn’t come close to matching the real-life experience.

One of the event actors even went so far as to accuse the company who organised it of “using AI to write the script for the experience, which is said to have featured nonsensical phrases and odd new characters that don’t exist in the books or related movies.”

Just another example of how over-reliance on AI can severely damage a brand’s reputation.

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Win the long game

Experience is everything, especially in terms of content creation.

As a writer, you have to ensure your reader’s experience matches what your headline promises. If it doesn’t, you risk leaving them deflated, disillusioned, or even annoyed.

And an annoyed reader won’t return to your stories in future.

In his most recent newsletter edition, Kyle Adams explains:

“Creators who take time to think about the experience their readers will have are the ones who win in the long run.”

He was referring to the use (or over-use) of links, but the same principle applies to the actual content of your online writing.

When you take the time to consider exactly what your reader will experience when consuming your content, you’re far more likely to hit the target.

And when you do hit that target, you’ll create another satisfied customer who’ll return to your writing again and again.

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash

The Clarity Key

Next time you’re planning a piece of writing, ask yourself:

• What’s my ideal reader struggling with right now?

• What solution can I offer to help them overcome those struggles?

• How can I present that solution as an accessible, top-quality experience?

For me, experience is vital in how I ingest and process another writer’s content.

If their message is clear and I come to the end of their article with a better understanding of the subject than when I began, it was a good experience.

But if I finish the piece and don’t have a clue what the writer was trying to say (or the way in which they said it muddled my understanding), I’ll chalk it up as a poor experience and probably won’t read as much of that writer’s work in future.

That’s not me being vindictive, either. I just have limited reading time to spare and have to prioritise the best writing possible.

I’m always looking out for the Clarity Key that unlocks my understanding.

I imagine it’s the same for you, too.

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Deliver, and win true fans

Always aim to give your readers the best experience possible when crafting content.

The more effort you put in, the faster you’ll draw “true fans” to your work. And it only takes a handful of true fans to turn a writing hobby into a life-changing income stream.

I’ll finish with another quote from Vox about the Willy Wonka experience:

“This saga was, realistically, small stakes. It’s a reminder, however, of how AI and other marketing can promise something to people, and really, really fail to deliver.”

Deliver for your readers, every time.

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