Writing content that focuses on experience requires creating articles, blogs, and other forms of content around real experiences. The goal is to provide value to readers by sharing something useful they can learn from or relate to rather than just promoting a brand, product, or service. Experience-based content is very popular with readers because it feels authentic and helps them avoid just product pitches. Creating this type of content while maintaining credibility and value takes careful thought and effort.
Some key aspects experience-based content should focus on include:
Sharing real stories – The foundation of any experience-based content is an actual experience the author went through. This could be personal experiences, case studies with clients or customers, conference lessons learned, product testing results, or industry trends spotted. Avoid hypothetical or made up scenarios as readers will see through this.
Providing takeaways – Don’t just recount a story for storytelling’s sake. Highlight specific lessons, tips, or insights the reader can gain from what happened. Call out mistakes made or things learned along the way. Give the reader practical strategies, checklists, or next steps they can apply themselves.
Using emotions and quotes – Bring the experience to life by including feelings, challenges, failures, and triumphs. Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability. Add relevant quotes from participants or observers that support key points. Emotions and quotes paint a vivid picture for the reader and help them connect.
Own authentic expertise – Experience-based content requires credibility. Establish your expertise early on through achievements, credentials, case studies and testimonials. Readers need to trust you know what you’re sharing about. Be selective with topics and don’t try to position yourself as an expert in too many unrelated fields.
Anticipate objections and questions – Since you’re talking about real events, anticipate things that could be questioned or objected to. Address these concerns proactively in the content through explanations, additional context or counterpoints. This builds credibility by showing you considered alternative views.
Use visuals and formatting – Text heavy blocks can lose reader attention quickly no matter how good the content is. Break things up with images, videos, screenshots, charts and graphs. Format your content with headlines, bold sections, and plenty of white space for ease of reading on mobile.
Focus on the reader – The common thread throughout any experience-based content should be what the reader gets out of it in the end. Refer back to them, ask questions to get them involved, and emphasize value they can derive rather than self-promotion. This keeps them engaged and seeing your expertise as helping them rather than selling to them.
Since experiences are individual, follow-up comments – Readers may have their own related experiences or additional questions after reading yours. Reply to any comments or questions to continue the conversation. This builds a sense of community and shows your content is meant to initiate an ongoing discussion rather than just broadcast a one-way message.
Measure and improve – Track engagement metrics like comments, social shares, backlinks, email signups from your experience content to see which topics, formats and styles work best. Iterate regularly based on audience feedback to hone your approach. Just like using experiences to provide value to readers, learn from experiences writing content to enhance future articles.
Experience-based content allows you to provide helpful, humanized perspectives in a way promotional materials cannot match. By strategically crafting stories around useful lessons learned and focusing on reader value over self-promotion, experience content keeps audiences engaged and establishes credibility. With practice and audience feedback, experience-centered approaches can become a staple part of any content strategy and storytelling skills. Most importantly, by sharing applicable insights gained through real events, experience content helps others avoid pitfalls and guides them along similar paths.