Remember the 4 E’s of Better Business Blogging? It’s my short hand memory checklist before publishing a blog post: Educate, Entertain, Engage & Enrich readers.
You write to educate, entertain, engage and enrich readers when you want to build readerships and get great results with your blogging.
When it comes to educating readers, it’s important to take a page out of teachers’ notebooks. Teachers know that not all people learn the same way.
Most of us teach in the style we’re most familiar with: our own learning styles. If you’re analytical, you’ll teach using data. Your blog readers will understand and learn well if they’re like you.
But not all readers are the same. Take, for example, an active experimenter. They want to know how to do something and need to try it out before they learn something.
I’m probably more of a conceptualizer: I’ve got to sit and think about something a while. It also helps when there are visuals so I can see how it works.
Everyone has a preferred learning style and we also have combinations. Then there’s the right brain and left brain to consider also. If you’re not a savvy psychologist or a teacher, you may be ignoring some of your readers if you’re only writing to those with your own learning style.
What’s a business blogger to do?
Here’s some help:
I’ve taken information off the www.aboutlearning.com site which explains the 4MAT system for understanding four different kinds of learning styles. I’ve tried to simplify it so you can apply it to business blog writing.
It all comes down to how people perceive information, then how they process it – what they do with new information.
As you write on your blog to educate your readers, remember that people take in information differently – by thinking or by feeling. In other words, a ‘feeling’ person will pick up on emotions, personal sensations, memories, and imagine themselves experiencing something in the moment. A ‘thinking’ person will take new information and conceptualize how it fits into existing knowledge. They need to think about how something would work.
Different readers transform the learning experience into four different types or styles:
- Imaginative Learning – Feeling and watching, seeking personal associations, meaning, involvement.
Making connections. Key question: Why?
- Analytic Learning – Listening to and thinking about information; seeking facts, thinking through ideas; learning what the experts think. Formulating ideas. Key question: What?
- Common Sense Learning –Thinking and doing. Experimenting, building, creating usability. Tinkering. Applying ideas. Key question: How?
- Dynamic Learning – Doing and feeling. Seeking hidden possibilities, exploring, learning by trial and error, self-discovery. Creating original adaptations. Key question: What if?
How does this translate into blog writing for your business? I’ll continue the “business blogger’s version of writing to educate” with the four different learning styles of readers. For now, just remember these four questions:
- Why?
- What?
- How?
- What if?
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