A Clear Strategic Vision for Your Writing or Speaking

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Monday, July 6th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

How can you develop a clear, strategic vision for your writing or speaking project? In other words, how can you find a clear path to your goals? A couple of the following tips will help:

For starters, remind yourself you’re investing time and or money into this communication exercise, and so you should expect a return of some kind. In other words, what is the objective? Now, go one step further and articulate that objective in terms of reader or audience response. Write down what they will do if you successfully use your communication skills on them.

Follow up by clarifying for yourself why your audience should do what you’re asking of them. It’s one thing to have objectives, and it’s quite another to serve readers’ objectives as well as your own. You need to make your audience or readers aware of WIIFT – What’s In It For Them.

Does this sound like a lot of work? Well, it is. But, ask yourself how much value you get if you rush off and do something without thinking it through.

Consider the case of the publisher who published two newsletters. The first went ahead quickly, with little strategic planning. Instead, the publisher was concerned with matters like color, typefaces, and so on. That was a mistake; the newsletter died after perhaps six or eight issues, and accomplished little.

Before starting the second newsletter, the publisher carefully worked through all the strategic issues. In fact, he started on the newsletter project in May and didn’t publish the first issue until September. He didn’t work full time at it, but still a lot of hours went into clarifying the strategy.

And, it worked. More than five years later, he was still publishing it every week, and it did the job it was developed to do.

In summary, your communication project has a greater chance of success if you take time up front to identify and articulate your objectives, as well as the desired reader response.

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