Life already feels too short online with the exponential explosion in the amount of written communication we all need to engage with – so our precious time spent writing should be reserved for quality over quantity – and the best way to do that is to make our answers to frequently asked questions publishable and reusable.
Turn email essays into website essays
If you’ve already been asked something twice and answered once – the next time should be making that answer a published article, document or help page – then you can simply answer with a link to your brand website.
If you’re answering one person’s question but they are asking on behalf of others – giving people links to articles can help save them time from all the copied and forwarded emails too as they are introduced to your brand knowledgebase.
Can’t remember the link to what you wrote?
Think about the words you use and be sure to include all the keywords in your article that you might want to search for later – which in turn should mean others can also search for these things by keyword – and include the questions too because often people search using questions and your answer may come up higher because of predictive search results as you type in a search box.
But I’m not a writer
Erm, yes you are – it’s unavoidable for almost all of us nowadays – you’re just limiting your audience if you’re not publishing your research and knowledge. Having the same high personal standards for private and public writing is just good for everyone, you in gaining recognition and authority on your subject, and the reader for having an article that considers readability and reusability, and therefore focuses the mind on composed, succinct, publishable communications. And, we all need to be aware that anything we write privately could be copied and published at any time anyway, whether we were expecting it to be or not.
The benefits of a publishing habit, and making sure you have a publishing platform that everyone wants to use, is an essential part of your organisation, business or group’s ability to project and grow messages you aim to by branding and packaging your products, services and creative endeavours.
Communication is the responsibility of the sender
The most useful thing any of us can receive is feedback – because otherwise we can be isolated in an echo-chamber of our own ideas, taking it for granted that others may have the same experience, which inevitably we don’t, so the more feedback we can get, the more we can evolve our writing to be useful to a broader audience.
Publishing benefits are almost infinite too – because now, the whole world can ask you that same question again and again via search engines – and you can answer infinite times without writing another email.
And when you have comments on your published posts, you can keep gathering feedback and refining your answer until everyone is happy and clicking that little *Like* icon to show their appreciation.
Why did I write this post?
Because I was just discussing something in our team chatroom that I am sure I had already discussed with them a few months ago – but neither of us published the conclusions, so we debated it again. Next time – we’ll both review the document we published on it and just check it is still relevant and correct.
The gift of time is infinite to share online – so make your next email an article for your blog, team documentation or improvement in your products and services descriptions – and get back to being the creator, innovator and the relationship builder that gives you the most satisfaction and pride from your good work.
