Using message structuring to develop your audience base

If you're just hanging with your friends, you don't need message structuring. In fact, in many friendship circles, slang and informality go a lot farther than grammar and vocabulary.

But things are a lot different in the business world. Although it sometimes pays off for a salesperson in a one on one presentation to abandon business formality, it almost never pays off in a larger audience. Even your best buddy may feel humiliated and embarrassed if you speak and act the way that you do when the two of you are just hangin' out.

In the venue of Internet Publishing, if you are seeking to build a large audience in the business community, there is a very fine line between formality and personality. Unfortunately, that fine line moves drastically in one direction or another depending upon the specific audience on which you are focusing.

Let me illustrate this by referencing two writers whose articles are featured regularly in the right sidebar of rainmakerwebsites.com

Jill Konrath writes articles that are specifically geared towards helping those sales organizations and sales people who are involved in long term sales processes with large corporations. Within these processes, there are several sales stages which need to be respected and are only occasionally skipped. Both the critical nature of these negotiations and the amount of structure that is built into the organizations involved necessitate that the presentations be relatively formal. In her writing to this audience, Jill must focus more on the structure of her message than on presenting herself within her message. However, enough of Jill's personality comes through to make her message viable in the internet venue.

Rosa Say writes articles that translate sound business practices and processes into the Hawaiian traditional culture and which help integrate traditional Hawaiian values and principles into activities which result in long term business profit and growth. As part of her effort to communicate these values both to the business owner on the islands and to the internet business world outside of the islands, Rosa must incorporate more of her own personality into her articles as a means of illustrating the principles and values of the Hawaiian culture.

Both Jill and Rosa use message structuring as an essential tool for communicating with a business audience.

If you want your business message to develop a visitor base or an internet audience, you need some method of organizing the process you use in developing each of your postings. David Peralty suggests one method of internet article development in "Organizing A Blog Post."