Skip to the End: 5 Great Ways to Make Your Readers Care

Have you ever been part of a business presentation that just went south and keeled over right on the spot?

Okay, so you’re up at the podium speaking. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is laughing or even giggling at your jokes. Your throat is now as dry as the Sahara Desert and huge patches of panic-sweat are appearing all over your shirt and your forehead. You really need the bathroom RIGHT NOW. What’s the #1 thing on your mind at this moment?

Or let's say you are cringing and embarrassed for the person on stage while you are in the audience because the person performing or speaking is tanking up on stage. It’s no fun and sort of sad to watch and experience. This situation is making you feel like you want to crawl underneath your seat or fling yourself out the nearest window – but you’re totally trapped. You have to endure the entire agonizing mess. Now, what’s the #1 thing on your mind?

When this happens (and I believe it has happened to almost everybody at some point in time), the #1 thing on everyone’s mind in that room is: Please let this be OVER and END.

Endings are extremely powerful ways to motivate people, to create a loyal following, and generate a lot of sales. Marketers use scarcity tactics quite often to get you caring about the ending (“75% off, TODAY ONLY!”). So, how can blogs, with their main focus being on building conversation and community as much as business or commerce, use endings to hook readers? Here are some suggestions.

1. Level up

Steve Kamb (of Nerd Fitness) is a self-confessed gaming geek. He realizes the irresistible call of the next rung climbing the ladder of success. It’s difficult to make people care about a distant, fairly lofty goal – and much easier to hook people with nearly instant progress. (Example: Look at how level-based mobile gaming just plain exploded in recent years.) Bloggers love publishing personal ‘bucket lists’ – but for his site, Kamb went one step further and created his ‘Epic Quest For Awesome‘, complete with an "experience points" rule system. This is now front and center ~ okay, it’s top-right ~ of his landing page for the Nerd Fitness website and is clearly part of his strategy for making people care about what he’s doing.

What Can You Do? You can find a cool, exciting way to show incremental step-by-step progress toward a clearly-defined set of goals. Now, make sure that at least some of those goals will serve your site beneficially and its readers gain as much as you do.

2. Vague Storytelling

I think we all know those type of people who post things on social media like “You-know-who is doing you-know-what…AGAIN!” or “Worst day ever. I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!”!

Let’s all agree that this is always annoying. Let’s all agree also that it usually works – or we wouldn’t be annoyed, right? Otherwise, we would cruise right past the post without even caring or wanting to know more. Instead, we’re momentarily irked and annoyed because we’re presented with an imperfect view of something potentially interesting and, against our own wishes, we want definite closure. Maybe we think we really don’t care, but we still want to know more of the facts so that we can decide on our own that we don’t care.

Again, What Can You Do? You should lay down some subtle (or not so subtle) hints about the direction you’re heading with your blog, giving the reader a sense that you may know way more than you’re actually telling – which is really useful for those times when you’re making it all up as you go along.

3. Attempt the Barely Possible…

There are really very few things which motivate people quite like a harebrained idea of an adventure with an apparently slim chance of success. It may be wise to head toward an end goal for your posts/blog that’s pretty modest in scope and entirely achievable – but that’s a very poor way to market it. You should make the story of your blog "larger than life." You should make it so ambitious that you’ll have people questioning your sanity, or at least your sense of real proportion. I wonder how many people actually believed Chris Guillebeau would find a way to visit all 193 United Nations member states, an 11-year quest that would eventually be completed on his 35th birthday? That’s what he achieved and, by making it a very hefty challenge for himself, he raised the stakes of emotional investment with his readers/followers.

What Can You Do? You could decide to do something that will seem meaningful AND crazy to your readers – and then discuss it in a serious and very credible manner. If you do it right, you will have yourself a movement of people who really sincerely believe you can do this…and, of course, a whole bunch of people who want to see that you fall flat on your face. So let’s visit that issue right now..

4. …And Fail.

Whenever your blog attempts to show something different, you run a risk of failure. If you’re attempting something really big, then you run the risk of BIG failure. The cataclysmic, lightening strike, earth shattering, huge smoking crater version that you’ll never forget being a part of. To fail is to grieve or feel bad – there’s absolutely no denying that. But, the strange thing about failing is that it can be attractive to anyone watching – and that’s not because they’re being cruel or mean.

Human beings are automatically drawn to the dark and terrible stories ~ Stories of fear, sadness and everything best be avoided in real life. Stories of failure. Really. Why? Science writers tend to agree that it might be because storytelling arose as a way to keep us alive. Tell me, what happens if I climb down out of this tree and stroll past that sabre-toothed tiger? My story tells me: “you’d have a really bad day.” My story, though, keeps me alive – and now I trust my story, even though it’s a horrible thing that will most likely give me nightmares for the rest of my life. (Thanks a lot, story.)

Similarly, it’s a possibility that the modern appetite for choosing dark, miserable stories is really born out of a need to avoid those events ourselves – in this case, a story of failure is seriously compelling and thought-provoking. What lessons can we learn from someone who did it the wrong way? This is awesome storytelling. I think we tend to look up to or admire a character for trying more than just for their successes.

5. Start with the End

A few months back, the TV show Breaking Bad delivered its final few episodes. Its viewing numbers went totally through the roof, and numbers were tenfold from its first season premiere. In fact, Breaking Bad‘s popularity continued to rise all throughout its 5-season run. Increasingly and in larger and larger numbers, people really, really cared.

Why, we ask? The writing was completely amazing, the acting was over the top Emmy award-winning, the cinematography was absolutely to die for – plenty of creative reasons. I believe a key ideation and creative marketing of Breaking Bad‘s storyline appealed to the masses and this was because they knew how to use the show endings. Its signature opener of the show was a quick glimpse of things to come later in the episode – oftentimes it was baffling, bizarre, and without the context of the story to support it. No one knew why simple, mild-mannered Walter White was standing in the road in his underwear, holding a gun toward approaching police sirens – and you were glued to your seat to keep watching in order to find out, as the story flashed back to “X hours earlier”. Then, later episodes would show flash forward through entire seasons, eventually foreshadowing the horror of the finale itself – a place where terrible (but unspecified) things have happened. As the final episodes approached, the audiences were in the know of enough of the ending to be whipped into a frenzy of anticipation and speculation…and the show ended with its highest viewing numbers EVER.

This was all because the Breaking Bad team knew just exactly what to do with their endings.

What Can You Do: You need to decide where your blog is ultimately heading, and begin telling that story from the very opening act or beginning. You don’t need to give away very much – but unlike the "vague storytelling" approach above, you’re not showing the entire journey, you are just showing the destination. Yes, this is tricky and, in the face of danger ... errrr .... huge uncertainty, this will probably require a lot of courage and strength of purpose. The magical thing about this type of foreshadowing is that it works in both directions. Your viewers/audience will begin to care more, because you look like you know exactly where you are taking them – and you’ll care more about your content as well. The more you hint and communicate about the ending, the more you wll feel a sense of purpose. Then, it is more likely that you will be actually able to reach that dream ending. You will learn from your journey the truth about why you blog – and that is definitely an end worth chasing!