A new client of mine was complaining this week about all the dry ‘borrrrrring’ content clogging up her social media feeds.

And yet, when we looked at the content her business was producing, guess what? Yep – as stale and stodgy as a month-old pork pie. Dry as a cracker. Dull as dishwater.

She had to laugh when I pointed out the irony.

But my client isn’t alone.

We constantly complain about the rubbish out there but then produce cr@ppy content ourselves.

We unwittingly make our audience endure the pain that we ourselves go through.

And here’s why it happens:

We assume that our content is automatically better because we ourselves are interested in the subject matter.

This gives us a skewed sense of our content’s value. We make false assumptions based on our unconscious bias.

So how do we end this cycle of cr@ppy content production?

Well, we need to shift our approach.

Instead of sitting down and thinking: ‘What do I/we want to say?’, we need to ask ‘What does my audience want or need to know?’.

And, after that: ‘Why should my reader give a damn about a single word I write?’

Follow my advice and you’ll start to see a big shift in your quality’s effectiveness. But then, I suppose I am biased…