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Should You Reveal Everything In A White Paper?
By Michael Stelzner
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-06-13
Should you convey your expertise in white papers by revealing literally EVERYTHING you know about a topic?
Small rant: Lately, a LOT of people have come out of the woodwork making recommendations about white papers. Don't get me wrong, I like this. But I want to warn you. Much of this advice is coming from folks who don't really know much about white papers. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Richard Telofski says essentially "overwhelm them with your knowledge."
Let me share my thoughts on this
But first, let's look at what Richard actually said:
Within these publications [white papers], made available for free download on your blog, you will provide clients and potential clients with every detail about performing a service that you provide.
Every detail. Don't leave anything out.
If you were providing the service yourself, you would want to do a quality job. Rendering a quality job means attending to every detail.
So of course that is the level of information that you would want people to have, every detail. Okay, first, Richard is wrong.
No one will read a document that includes EVERY detail. If your goal is to scare people away, then follow Richard's advice.
Now, to his credit, Richard is attempting to do something desirable.
Here's what else he said:
But here's the "payoff."
By providing every detail needed to perform your service correctly, you make the process seem arduous, time-consuming, and difficult for the layperson to carry out correctly for themselves.
By reviewing all the information that you provide, we expect that most people will decide that it is less difficult, and in the long-run less expensive, to have a professional perform the service. And, if the information you provide is highly detailed, the client will also doubt their own ability to do a quality job. So here's the deal.
If you want to convey to a prospect that the task is challenging, you can do it WITHOUT revealing EVERY detail.
The key manta here is "useful but incomplete."
Make it useful to readers, but don't overwhelm with details.
This will convey your expertise AND can still reveal the complexity of a project without boring readers with "every detail."
Your thoughts??
Comments
About the Author:
Visit http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/ for extensive resources on crafting compelling white papers and applying creative marketing tactics.
Michael A. Stelzner is the author of the new book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and has written nearly 100 white papers for companies such as Microsoft, FedEx, Motorola, Monster and SAP.
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