Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

12Develop Pathological Empathy

Some people are naturally empathic. They easily understand another's point of view, and they immediately grok what another might be feeling in any scenario. If that is you, congrats: you're ahead of the game. The rest of us have to work a little harder, and a little more intentionally, to get into the customer mind-set.

“Good writing (and therefore crafting good experiences) requires us to understand and have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs and goals,” says Jonathon Colman of Facebook. “The best content experiences are pitched perfectly in the sweet spot, the nexus of all those human factors.”

In other words, empathy for the customer experience should be at the root of all of your content, because having a sense of the people you are writing for and a deep understanding of their problems is key to honing your skill. Content created merely to further a search engine ranking is a waste of time and effort. What matters now is creating useful content that solves customer problems, shoulders their burdens, eases their pain, enriches their lives. We wrote that in Content Rules, but recent and various Google updates have seemed to finally make it permanent and official. (Sing hallelujah!)

That means you have to meet people where they are, with an attitude of benevolence and largesse, to help them find answers to the problems they have. All of your content—your product pages, your landing pages, your customer support text, your About ...