When I was recently at one of the Affiliate Summits I was talking with a group of James Martell students when a guy approached us and immediately launched into a speech promoting his affiliate program. He rambled on about himself and then proceeded to mention that his program related to Forex and his words were something like ‘and of course I don’t need to explain what that is…’ as if we all knew what he meant. Now I should have just said there and then that I had never heard of it and at that point I hadn’t. Forex might be a common term in the US but in Australia, unless you are really into the foreign exchange market, I doubt many would have heard of it before.
When someone mentions Forex in Australia most people immediately think they are talking about the brand of beer that is brewed in Queensland which is labeled as XXXX but verbalized as ‘four X beer’. Which just reminds me of a joke – Why do Queenslanders spell their beer with four x’s? It’s because they can’t spell beer. Now I can tell that joke only because I lived in Queensland for 18 years…but now I’m getting sidetracked.
The point I am wanting to make is that we shouldn’t ever assume anything. You may know the old adage, ‘When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me’.
The guy that approached us shouldn’t have assumed we were all residents of the US or Canada or that we would know what Forex was. If he had just added a couple of sentences to explain what it was then I might have been more interested in what he was saying. Instead I lost interest really quickly because I had no idea what he was on about.
When it comes to blogging, your visitors will lose interest just as quickly if you skip the basics. If you assume that everyone has the knowledge you have, and you write blog posts according to your level of expertise then you are going to attract readers at that level of expertise but lose a whole other audience that is desperate for the basics. In the case of the gentleman that approached us, he totally missed the basics so I was missing vital information that would have clarified the rest of his conversation. Make sure your readers don’t have the same problem when reading your blog.
Providing a few basics within your posts can make the difference between keeping new readers and losing them. They may see your blog as just way too advanced and click the back button to find something a little more tailored to their needs.
Now we’re not talking about turning every blog post into a step-by-step tutorial for everything you write about. If you started doing this, you would most likely lose your more advanced audience. What we are talking about is adding a few extra lines to clarify things. For instance, just before I started writing this blog post, I was writing another post on backlinks. I was half way through the article before I realised that I hadn’t provided a definition of what a backlink actually was. It would only take a couple of sentences to explain it but I had totally missed it. I had to step back a little and look at the article as if I had no idea what a backlink was. When I did that, I was better able to explain the whole concept.
Another useful method is to write ‘What is’ type posts that you can use to refer to in later posts. For instance, I could write a post on ‘What is a backlink’ which provides all the basics about backlinks. Then in future posts whenever I referred to backlinks I can just link it to that post. This is also a great way to develop content for your site and builds up a nice resource which will keep visitors coming back.
On the flip side your blog posts shouldn’t just focus solely on basic concepts. Everyone is a beginner at some point but as they learn they require more advanced content. If keep your content written purely for beginners then you are likely to lose them at some point as they start looking for more advanced concepts.
In the end, we are not always going to get this right. It’s a fine balance between providing content that is both useful for the beginner and the more advanced reader. And some might say why should you even bother? But in my opinion, I believe that if you write content that will appeal to all your readers, you are going to get more traffic and more readers coming back.
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