The Animalz Method is made of five steps, all of which just happen to start with the letter E.
We’ll go through each briefly.
1) Examine your reader
Go beyond marketing personas. Know them like you know your friends.
And for this purpose, the best way is to meet them in real life. Personalize the content whenever possible
These are some of the questions you want to ask them:
- What’s a typical day look like for you?
- What do you wish was different about your role?
- What LinkedIn groups, subreddits, Facebook groups are you a part of?
- What was the last thing you googled for work?
2) Explain your topic simply
You probably heard this many times, but it helps to write like you’re explaining your topic to a five-year-old.
Note: This doesn’t mean you should assume your reader is completely new to your topic. Rather, it’s a function to force you to write simply.
3) Engage your reader
Your headline, the body, the formatting, the layout.
Everything must be done keeping the reader in mind. You want to grab their attention and keep it through the whole piece.
Here are some suggestions:
- Find an intriguing angle.
- Write headers that make the article easy to scan. Almost nobody reads the entire thing.
- Write a conclusion that offers something extra beyond restating what’s already been written.
- Break up the text with images, lists, and charts. Bullet points might also help with SEO.
4) Engineer a logical structure
Lead your reader from the beginning to the end, increasingly convincing them of your thesis.
Don’t overlap your ideas and don’t leave out anything essential.
5) Earn your reader’s trust
Backup your statements with trustworthy content.
Here are three ways to make your ideas trustable:
- Explain the science, mechanism, or cause-effect relationships behind your topic.
- Use math, statistics, and data to build credibility.
- Stretch your reader’s imagination with new examples of something familiar.
