photo credit: Waldo Jaquith

Content writing does not have to be put off until you have sixteen doctorates and three Nobel prizes. Whatever level of edumacation you’re at with your subject, you can still write about it NOW.

Level Zero: Newbie

Your audience: other complete beginners

How you write it: You’re brand-new to the subject and starting to feel it out; this is where you document your experience of learning the basics. What resources help? What confused you totally? What did you wake up at 2:37am with a sudden brainwave about? You’re not an expert at this stage, you’re three tiny steps ahead of the complete novice.

Include lots of reviews, explanations, and dissections of jargon. Interview more experienced people and ask all the obvious questions, because when you’re starting out the obvious questions often have really non-obvious answers. You can provide lots of value if you’re mature enough to admit how little you know; there are bajillions of people who aren’t brave enough to ask the dumb-ass questions you ask, and those people will read your content and love it.

Level One: Competent

Your audience: complete beginners and other basically proficient readers

How you write it: You know the basics now. Not only can you talk confidently about all the fundamentals, you’re starting to get into the more advanced topics, and forming your own opinions about common wisdom. You have a few options here:

1. Write your content like a higher-level version of the Level Zero (your journey into the more abstract and obscure topics). The tone stops being “Argh, what does that mean?” and becomes, “I know what I’m doing, now it’s time to learn more skills.”
2. Write an authoritative resource for complete beginners, from the view of a more experienced practitioner. You’re helping people learn stuff you didn’t know a year or two ago, and if you’re lucky (or good) you’ll remember the pain and confusion and write something that’s better for newbies than was available for you.

Level Two: Authority

Your audience: advanced beginners, the basically proficient, other authorities and experts

How you write it: You’re getting damn knowledgeable in your subject and people ask your advice. Even the experts talk about your new and groundbreaking thoughts. When you’re this confident and learnéd you have lots of options on how you can write:
1. Be a generalist: You know a bit about everything. You’re provide great content for filling in the gaps in other people’s knowledge.
2. Be a specialist: You know everything about one thing. When people want a definitive answer on a question in your area, they come to you.
3. Be multi-disciplinary: You know a heck of a lot about two (or more) different fields, and the way you bring them together makes you damn near unique.
4. For beginners: Why yes you can still be writing the entry-level stuff, if you want. You can aim for high-level beginners or go right back to the basics, if you are very very careful about not assuming too much knowledge.
5. For the competent: You can write for those who want to be more competent and have already mastered the fundamentals.
6. Authority-to-authority: You’re talking to your peers at a high level; readers with less expertise will be immediately confused and leave. You have whitepapers, interviews with experts and incredibly solid resources and tools. You’re a standard in the industry.

Level Three: Expert

Your audience: advanced beginners, the basically proficient, authorities and other experts

How you write it: Wow, the air’s thin up here. Stuff is named after you. You can write any way you like, really.

Extra tips

Of course, you can combine a bit of all of these. If you’re an authority you can write a complete newbie’s post when you start on a related subject that you’ve never studied.

Be honest about where you are! Whatever level you’re at, you’re not alone; it’s far far better to admit your gaps, even when you’re the expert.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

Name the topics you write about and make a guesstimate of what level you’re at for each. If some are lower than you want, start planning how you’re going to increase your knowledge. Otherwise, get writing at the level you decide!

What level are you at for your subject? (It’s a hard question, I’m not sure how to answer it.) Tell us in the comments!

Copywriting has a number of potential pitfalls. One of the biggest is this:

“Oh my god, I must be really getting good at this… the training has started boring the shit out of me!” – Me

photo credit: left-hand

Yeah, you know what I mean. Becoming an expert means that more and more topics become easy. More than easy. Simple. Obvious. And it becomes harder and harder to remember what it feels like to not know this stuff intuitively. Dan and Chip Heath in their fantastic wonderful must-read book Made to Stick call this the Curse of Knowledge. Knowing stuff isn’t a curse, but feeling that everybody knows this stuff is. Because it’s the reason 90% of presentations, copywriting and articles suck a pile of ass.

When you forget what it felt like when you were a newbie, it’s likely you’ll talk about a subject using terms and assumed knowledge that will leave most readers confused, angry and embarrassed. If your website copy has this problem, do you think many customers will warm to it, and you? Absolutely not.

How to avoid the Curse of Knowledge when copywriting

Avoid jargon

Use the plain language version, especially with verbs. There are three big temptations to use jargon:

1. It’s faster. Using an example I overhead recently: “We’ll break the mirror and hot-swap the scuzzy drive” is a lot faster to say than “We’ll turn off data replication between the disk drives then replace the hard drive without turning the server off”. (Also, pronouncing SCSI as “scuzzy” never stops being fun.)
2. You feel cool when you’re using it. Cop shows, procedural dramas and all CSI franchises are successful because we love watching people talk in the confident shorthand of insider language. Actually using it feels even better.
3. You look goddamn smart. The easiest way to look authoratative is to use jargon the other person doesn’t understand.

Resist all these lures. People are more likely to give you money when they feel confident, and they’re more likely to feel confident when they understand what’s happening. Real experts are the ones who make a complicated subject accessible.

Explain the terms

Every single time you use a technical term, explain it. You will feel like a complete idiot when you’re copywriting your 100th article about real estate and you have to explain the body corporate AGAIN, but your reader hasn’t read all 100 articles. They’ve only read this one, and so they don’t know what a body corporate is.

No acronyms

It’s a lot easier to type EPA than Environment Protection Agency, but a new or confusing acronym will derail your reader. Some people use the full version the first time and then the abbreviated version, and that might work. Respect your readers. If they need the full version every time, use it.

Keep a sequence

Your readers are struggling with new concepts. Don’t bounce around. Help them understand the progression of events. “First you’ll sign the document, then we’ll complete the conveyancing work, then we’ll courier it to the real estate agent”.

Don’t get fiddly

There are a lot of fascinating details that you know about this topic. Intruiging facts and interesting you-might-not-knows abound! Naturally, you want to share them and, you know, sound a bit cool in the process. It can’t hurt to tell them about the sidenote, right?

It really can.

1. Stress matters. Anyone looking for information on divorce law is probably not in the mood for amusing anecdotes.
2. Don’t get in the way. If your customer is trying to complete a task (especially one that will earn you money), make that task as simple as possible. Eliminate everything unnecessary.
3. Respect cognitive load. If you have readers who are already struggling to absorb ten new terms and concepts, more information is just going to burden them – no matter how cool and interesting. (Mechanics always seem to do this to me. I just want to know how often to change the oil, people!)
4. Keep ‘em separated. Write an article: Ten Fascinating Things You Didn’t Know About Roofing. These are often really popular, because everyone likes trivia. They just don’t like it as much when they’re trying to calculate how much a new roof will cost and whether they can afford it and if they should go with the Colorbond steel.

Explain it to your mum

Or your neighbour. Or the bored dude on the bus. Write it to someone who doesn’t know or care about your subject. Write so that someone skimming the words can follow it, because that’s how people read on the internet. They scan, and if your writing is too dense or eye-squinting, they’ll leave.

Incredibly important point

All of the above is true even when your audience are experts. They might not know about the specific subject area you’re talking about (small business accounting instead of corporate accounting). They might not be as expert as they claim to be. They might just have one or two tiny acronyms they’ve never understood and will be grateful to you for explaining. They WILL appreciate you making it easy to read.

Is your copywriting easy for your customers to read? Tell us in the comments!