Add That Special Something That Makes Your Readers Adore You

This guest post is by Kirsten Simmons of Personalized Productivity.

Imagine your dream customer.  The person who comments on every post, and opens every email you send.  The person who replies to your tweets and tells their friends about you on Facebook.  The person who immediately scrolls down your sales page to hit “Buy Now” without even reading through the pitch.

One of the best ways to cultivate these sorts of relationships (once you’ve got the whole write epic shit thing down) is to seed your posts with Easter eggs—obscure references that aren’t apparent to anyone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about.  The people who don’t get the reference are none the wiser, and the people that do love you all the more for including it.

“But Kirsten,” you say, “I don’t have an endless well of obscure knowledge to create my Easter eggs with!  Must I give up on ever using this valuable tip?”

Of course not!  The idea here is to connect with some of your readers on a higher, more personal level and help them relate to you as a fellow human instead of an untouchable expert.  Your Easter eggs don’t have to contain obscure references; you can use references to a common problem among your readers that you also struggle with yourself.

Let’s take productivity (unless you’re a productivity blogger, in which case you might want to go with something else).  If you’re like the vast majority of people, you’ve tried a boatload of different theories and systems, and most of them didn’t work.  You have difficulty finding the motivation and time to maintain your system, and you often let pieces of it slip until it’s so far off track that you have to scrap it and start over.  Your productivity is a niggling source of frustration, but you don’t really know why and you’re not sure how to go about fixing it.

(The reason you’re having trouble is because you’re working against your personality type and you need a system that’s in harmony with how your brain works.  But that’s not the point of this post.)

Guess what?  If you’re having so much trouble, that means your readers are likely having the same trouble.  So if you sprinkle your struggles into your blog posts as Easter eggs, your readers will respond just as if you’d made a reference to a 90s British anarchist punk band.  You’ve just proven you have something in common with them and hinted at a very human flaw to boot.

The result?  Instant connection and adoring fans.  And you didn’t even have to dig through Wikipedia to get there.

Nine months ago, Kirsten started wondering about the connections between personality type and productivity strategies.  She started digging through the library, and came out with a business on her hands!  Interested in learning more about the Productivity Personality theory?  Come visit Personalized Productivity and take our free quiz.  You’ll learn about your type and get specific tips to begin customizing your productivity strategies to your personality.