Brian Tracy explains how writers choose topics: know your audience and their interests, write about what you're qualified for or willing to research, and pick subjects that cut through online noise. Commit to study and action to build competence.
Hello, I'm Brian Tracy and I've gotten a lot of questions on my Facebook page. So I decided I'm going to sit down and answer many of your very best questions in the minutes ahead. So let's begin.
Mira from Facebook asked when writing how do you decide what you should write about? When the themes and the possibilities are many, how do you prioritize?
Well, this is an awfully general question because I have no idea what your subject is or your area of expertise when you write, you write for another audience, is you write for someone else. So the question is, who is my audience and what does my audience want to read about? And of all the things my audience wants to read about, what are the things that are more important to them than anything else? And what are the things that I am most qualified to write about or can become most qualified as a result of research? So sit down with a piece of paper if you're a writer and make a list of all the subjects that you find interesting and then make a second list of all the subjects that readers find interesting and then say to yourself, which are the subjects that readers like the most that I'm most qualified to write on? Now here's the second point. Remember that in marketing today, customer attention is the scarcest single resource in the world. The ability to get the attention of a real life customer is hard. People read less and less. They read shorter and shorter things. They still read an enormous number of words, but they read them in little pieces, mostly on an Internet screen or newsletters or newspapers. I still read newspapers. So your job is to say, what is it that people will give up their very precious time to read in competition with every single other written word that other people want them to read as well? And what are you most qualified to write on and how can you write on it in such a way that people want to read it? So these are questions that really take a lot of responsibility on your own part. Now let me say this is that over the years, it's a speaker trainer, teacher, consultant for business, personal development, sales. I have identified subjects that are of great interest to companies and I sat down and spent three to 500 hours of reading and studying two or three hours a day for several months to bone up on a particular subject so that I could begin to teach it, train it, write it, and record it. Sometimes you'll have to start with a whole brand new subject because many times people are writing about subjects that nobody's interested in anymore. They say, well, I like this subject, but nobody else does. And so maybe you're going to have to change your subjects. So these are all food for thought. I wish you the good luck. The most important thing in life is action. So I hope that you've enjoyed these answers and these ideas. But what you need to do now is you need to take action. So my question to you is, what one specific action are you going to take immediately as a response to these ideas that I've given you? And whatever it is, type it down below and send it to me so I can take a look at it, maybe even get back to you.
