4 Content Styles That Drive Meaningful Followings | Justin Welsh

4 Content Styles That Drive Meaningful Followings

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This week's tip: Understand what content powers solopreneur business

Social media content can be one of the most powerful and valuable tools for building revenue in your online business.

I've spent the last 4 years building my LinkedIn audience to over 530,000 and my Twitter following to over 475,000 people, and both of these platforms power my business.

Even if you don't have a service or product to sell now, you should always be building a following in anticipation of having one in the future.

In order to effectively build a following that will purchase from you, you should consider following these 4 rules of content:

4 types of content builds a following:

1. This person teaches me
2. This person entertains me
3. This person makes me think
4. This person understands me

That's about it.

Let's break each of them down, and provide some examples of great content.

Content style 1: This person teaches (or educates) me

I've found that the easiest way to show off your expertise is by teaching prospective followers and customers how to do something.

When teaching or educating, it pays to really dive in tactically. This helps show the reader that you're truly a master of your domain, rather than providing high-level fluff.

Someone who does a great job of this is Dickie Bush. As a successful writer himself, Dickie pulls the curtain back on long-form writing for his audience through educational threads.

Here's one of my favorite examples of him teaching his audience something extremely tactical related to writing effectively:

How to generate 100 ideas to write about in 30 minutes - even if you think you have nothing to say (THREAD):

Content style 2: This person entertains me

Teaching your audience is helpful, but if you hammer your audience with facts and teachings 100% of the time, you run the risk of boring them.

Once you bore your audience, you get tuned out. This is where entertainment comes in.

If you learn anything from this issue, it's that education and entertainment rolled into one (i.e. "edutainment") is the most powerful combination in content.

Someone who is extremely entertaining is JK Molina.

I don't agree with everything he writes or Tweets, but that's sort of the point. With entertainment comes edgy content, and with edgy content comes a more close-knit tribe.

Here's one of my favorite examples of him entertaining his audience:

My goal in life is to write a book as effective as this one pic.twitter.com/4jyiRlZrSI

Content style 3: This person makes me think

Outside of teaching and education, there are philosophical pieces of content that we all know and love.

Philosophical (or thoughtful) content doesn't teach, nor does it entertain. But it should leave your audience with the reaction, "wow, I've never thought of it like that before..." or "woah, what a great way to describe that..."

The content writers who do this incredibly well are people like Naval or Sahil Lavingia.

Here are a few of my favorite examples of philosophical or thoughtful content that really made me stop and think:

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

Invest your money where the smartest people invest their time.

Content style 4: This person understands me

Last, but certainly not least, is content that is high on empathy.

Content that reaches out to your audience and says, "I understand what you're going through" or, "you're not alone in that experience".

Empathetic content draws your audience and readers in closer and greatly humanizes an otherwise inanimate social media profile.

The best at this are people like Amanda Goetz, who runs a DTC brand called House of Wise.

Here is one of my favorite examples of nailing empathy by showing she understands her follower's wants, needs, and desires.

Things I want for Mother’s Day:

1. Federally paid maternity leave
2. Pelvic floor therapy covered by insurance
3. Lactation consultants for all
4. Changing tables in all gender bathrooms
5. To not set our careers back when we have a baby
6. Affordable childcare

If you're interested in building a step-by-step system for creating high-quality content at scale, in 50% less time, join 7,000 students in my self-paced course, The Content Operating System.

Inside, you'll learn the 9-step process I use to generate one newsletter and 6-12 pieces of high-quality content each Monday.

See you next week.

TL;DR

4 types of content build a following:

1. This person teaches me
2. This person entertains me
3. This person makes me think
4. This person understands me

That's about it.

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