See Your Work Through Your Audience’s Eyes

You aren’t going to connect with your customers and your audience if you can’t see your work through their eyes. Before publishing those blog posts or sending the flyers off to the printer, you need to swap your writer hat with your reader hat and look at your content as if someone else wrote it.

Easier to say than to do, of course. You wrote it. Not somebody else.

But you can get there, sort of, by following a couple of steps.

Put it on ice

Just stop for a while. Save your document, close it and stick in the freezer.

The only way you can truly read your work as if someone else wrote it is to wait a long time. Like a year. And that’s obviously not going to happen. But the longer you can wait, the fresher your words will appear.

Read something else

You need a palette cleanser, though. If you pause a few minutes while drinking coffee, you’ll still taste the coffee even if nothing’s in your mouth. If you have a sip of water, you’ll still taste the coffee. If you want to stop tasting coffee, brush your teeth. Or eat a pickle. Your tongue needs a reset.

Your brain needs a reset, too, or there’s no chance you’ll see your own writing objectively.

So go read something else. And read something totally different. If you’re been working on a piece of content marketing all day, don’t read somebody else’s content marketing. Read a Jack Reacher novel. Try the sports page, some poetry, or the Huffington Post. Anything but copywriting and content marketing.

Write something else

Even better, write something else. That will really give you some distance.

Even if you work on something else for only an hour or two, your other piece of writing will look and feel a little bit alien all of a sudden. Almost as if someone else wrote it.

Go to bed

Your subconscious never sleeps. It’s always chewing on things. Solving problems. Turning things over. Coming up with solutions. It also moves on to other things entirely and gives you some space.

Print it

Have you ever laid down on your bed with the top of your head pointing toward the floor and looked up at the ceiling? Everything’s upside-down. It’s still your bedroom, but it looks like an entirely different and unexplored place, as if you’ve never even been there before. Everything is exactly the same, only totally different.

You can have a similar experience with your writing without hanging upside down. Just adjust the margins, alter the font, and print it.

It will look like someone else wrote it. It will even feel like someone else wrote it. It will be exactly the same, only totally different. You’ll see all kinds of things that you didn’t see before, especially if in the meantime you read something else, wrote something else, and slept on it.