Letter #80: Try this exercise to improve your content and documentation’s quality

Takes 5 minutes tops

Hard truth: sometimes it’s easy to forget the basics.

Now hear me out before you disagree.

When you practice the hard stuff, it’s easy to assume:

👉 Your brain remembers beginner-level problems
👉 Others know that thing too — you think: it’s common sense, of course, they’d know it

But more often than not: you, me, and the people we work with need reminders.

Which is exactly where this content exercise comes in: read average-quality content ✨

Yes, that’s ‘average quality.’ You read it right the first time 😁

When you take a handful of minutes to read content that isn’t as high quality, you see the:

👉 Mistakes it’s making
👉 Ways it’s talking *at* the reader
👉 CTAs it’s getting wrong

And you picture a ton of ways to fix the piece + the strategy behind it.

Nodding your head? Yes, I thought so. 

But the question is: what are the tangible outcomes of this exercise? 

For one, you get a refresher on the mistakes you need to avoid ✅

Two, you see ways you can further improve your content ✅

For instance, when I read average content last year, I realized how the featured examples weren’t tailored to the target reader.

In fact, the examples were all over the place. One from the SaaS industry. Another from the retail sector. Yet another from construction 🤨

Lesson learned? I now make sure all the examples I include in my content are tailored to my target readers’ interests.

So if it’s a piece on running a successful Mother’s Day campaign and my target reader is new ecomm business owners, I don’t add examples of Coca-Cola or Nike’s campaigns because my target readers’ budgets are different so the examples are practically useless for them.

And three, reading average content helps you see what’s missing in your documentation ✅

Because here’s the thing: good documentation explains what to do and what not to do with examples.

And where do you get those examples? I’m sure you know the answer 🙌

Example: I’ve been going deeper into creating high-converting product-led content. And one of the ways I’m recognizing the points I’m not covering is by doing this exercise. 

In fact, this product-led content teardown email was a result of this exercise.

So you know what to do, right?

Give reading average content a shot — it doesn’t matter if you’re a VP of marketing, content lead, or a senior writer, I promise you, it’ll benefit you tons for:

👉 Training your team
👉 Creating better documentation
👉 And for getting refreshers yourself

That’s all, folks! *she says as she pops some confetti since this newsletter just hit 80 (!) issues* 🥳