But overt self-promotion is more easily denied in theory than eliminated in practice. Run a draft by a salesperson, for example, and chances are you’ll find a comment (scrawled in crayon, in capital letters) along the lines of, “WHAT ABOUT OUR ZINGLEPOODLE FLAMMEL CAPABILITIES? WE HAVE THE ONLY WHOOSIWAFFLE WITH A JINGLEJANGLE OF THIS KIND IN THE ROFORMEX INDUSTRY!”

Worse, maybe features are really the essence of your knowledge. Or, deadline looming, they’re the only things you can think of to write about.

Fear not. The following steps will help transform product and service features into viable topic ideas that have meaning for your readers.

For the purposes of clarity and continuity, we’ll exemplify the steps with the following hypothetical examples:

* A B2C lawn products company selling a fungus-resistant grass seed blend
* A B2B technology company with a packet-shaping appliance for controlling WAN traffic
* A B2B services company that offers keyword audits for search engine optimization

1. Identify the benefit.
Yeah, I know, this is another thing you already knew, but it’s the necessary first step in this process: identify the benefit (the positive influence or outcome) the consumer/customer/client gets by obtaining your feature. To wit:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed: grows in adverse, fungus-prone conditions
* Packet-shaping technology: gives IT the power to control/allocate bandwidth to selected network activities
* Keyword audit: identifies most effective words for efficient SEO

2. Put the benefit in context.
In other words, why is this benefit important to the reader (or to customers)? In what conditions, situations and/or environments does the benefit have meaning? When or how does this benefit matter? For example:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed: works well in shaded and/or waterlogged lawn areas
* Packet-shaping technology: accelerates traffic and improves networking performance without having to buy more raw bandwidth
* Keyword audit: helps companies drive more (and more precisely targeted) traffic to their sites

3. Place the benefit/context within a reader-centric theme.
As the creator of content, your motives are clear: you’re building credibility as a trustworthy authority, a resource to whom money may be reasonably transferred (i.e., ultimately, you’re moving toward a sale). But to motivate potential customers to read your content, you have to speak to their interests.

The theme of your ebook/white paper must address an audience concern—the more urgent, the better. Any feature, transformed into a benefit and placed into context, should be flipped into a supporting point or idea that reinforces the theme. It looks like this:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed:
Theme: 10 Turf-Building Ideas for Tough Lawns
Specific supporting point: “For wet lawns, apply fungus-resistant seed blends.”

* Packet-shaping technology:
Theme: Winning with WAN: How to Boost Performance Without Busting Budgets
Specific supporting point: “Allocate resources by activity and priority.”

* Keyword audit:
Theme: S.O.S. for SEO—Getting the Traffic You Deserve
Specific supporting point: “Review keywords for relevance and popularity.”

Let your customers flip over you
Notice what the examples didn’t do: name the product or service behind the topic idea. Successful trappers don’t go into the woods shouting, “Yoo-hoo! The net’s over here!” Your white paper’s job is to build a connection in readers’ minds between the things they want and your company or brand. Anything that stinks of “commercial” will break that connection.

Instead, let your ideas speak for themselves. If you work your flips correctly, they will automatically point to the unique virtues of your enterprise. To complete the connection, be sure that your ebook or white paper includes a call to action—a demo, a sample, a webinar invitation, etc.—that draws readers another step closer to your company. Make the right flips and your readers are more likely to become customers who’ll flip over you.

About the Author:  Jonathan Kranz is the principal of Kranz Communications and the author of Writing Copy for Dummies. You may download his ebook about ebooks (for free and without registration): The eBook eBook: How to Turn Your Expertise Into Magnetic Marketing Material.

I find these questions absolutely fascinating. That’s why I’ve spent a great part of my adult life studying success.

But it wasn’t until I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers that much of what I had learned came together into one unifying principle:

Success only happens at the intersection of preparation and opportunity!

To better explain this, let’s take this discussion outside of freelancing for a minute, because there’s a fascinating lesson here.

Talent Is Overrated
Did you know that in Canada, arguably the most hockey-crazed nation in the world, nearly ALL top players are born (get this) in the first three months of the year?

Why is that?

Gladwell explains that it has nothing to do with astrology or magic. Quite simply, the eligibility cutoff for junior hockey leagues in that country is January 1. That means that a boy who turns 10 on January 2, for example, will be playing with kids who won’t turn 10 until November or December.

Why does that matter? Well, as you probably know if you have kids that age, in terms of physical maturity, a 12-month age difference is huge. In sports, it means you have a great advantage over the younger kids.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Canadian coaches start to select players for their all-star teams around age 9 or 10. And guess which ones they tend to pick? That’s right, the older kids, who, when compared to those just a few months younger, appear to be bigger and more coordinated.

Once a kid is picked for the all-star team, he gets better coaching. He has twice the number of practice sessions. He also plays in more games. And his teammates are better, which pushes him to improve continually.

By age 14, what started out as a small advantage (mainly in size and coordination due to his age) is now a huge advantage over the younger kids he left behind 4 years before. And now, this young man’s chances of making it to the junior league and into the big leagues are very high.

Gladwell found the same patterns in American baseball, where the cutoff date for almost all nonschool baseball leagues is July 31. As a result, more major league players have birthdays in August than in any other month.

Opportunity Is Only Half of the Equation
Is it luck? Call it what you want, but I say it all boils down to the intersection of preparation and opportunity.

These older kids were all given a chance (opportunity). But had they not prepared—or, more importantly, had their parents not signed them up for the junior hockey league—they would NOT have succeeded.

And once selected to the all-star teams, had they not worked hard, practiced day and night and loved what they were doing, they would not have made it to the majors.

I don’t know where you are today in your freelance career. I don’t know if you’re just getting started or if you’ve been at it awhile. But regardless of your current situation, if you want to succeed, you must continually practice, upgrade your knowledge base and work hard to become better.

In other words, you must constantly prepare. 
That means refining your craft.  Developing smarter prospecting strategies.  Experimenting with better pricing strategies.  Learning basic negotiation skills.  Sharing best practices with some of your peers (especially those who are more successful than you).  And much more.

Only then will you be able to take full advantage of the opportunities when they come your way. (And they WILL come. They always do!)

Earl Nightingale once said that if a person does not prepare for his success, when his opportunity comes, it will only make him look foolish.

Pay the price. Prepare today. Success is worth it.

Ed Gandia is the co-author of the newly released book The Wealthy Freelancer: 12 Secrets to a Great Income and an Enviable Lifestyle: www.TheWealthyFreelancer.com/amazon.

Have you heard of Facebook Markup Language (FBML)? Until I chatted with Denise Wakeman (www.biztipsblog.com), online marketing advisor and co-founder of BlogSquad, neither did I. But Denise swears by it as an effective white paper marketing tool.

Customize Your Page
“Creating a custom landing page isn’t an obvious thing to do on Facebook, but it’s a great option,” Wakeman says. “FBML is a free application. Search for it in Facebook applications and attach it to your fan page. It gives you a box where you can post HTML code for your landing page. When someone contacts you on Facebook, instead of having them go to a wall that has many posts on it, you send them to the landing page that tells them who you are, what you do and how to connect with you. It also gives free access to your white paper.” Click here to see how Michael Stelzner set up SocialMediaExaminer.com’s Facebook fan page.

Denise also suggests that you brand your Facebook landing page. When you create the page, accent it with your company’s logos and colors. If you don’t have an in-house design team, a designer can create your custom page for a small investment. It’s worth the price to give your page a professional look.

Target Your Message
Another potent tip comes from Mari Smith (www.marismith.com),  the world’s leading authority on using Facebook for business. Mari suggests advertising on Facebook “Using advertising on the site is the most targeted messaging you can buy. You can drill down into precise keywords to give your Facebook fans exactly what they’re looking for. This might sound like an expensive way to go, but it’s actually very affordable.”   Ads can be targeted by geography, gender, ad and keywords, to mention a few.

Mari also suggests that as you write your white paper, staying in touch with your fans can serve as “pre-marketing.” As you’re working on your paper, give status updates such as “I’m writing a white paper on this topic and I’d like your advice” or conduct a poll that lets you tap into your fans’ knowledge base. This is “crowd-sourcing”—letting your fans be a source of content for your white paper. It’s also an effective way to market your paper before it’s completed.

Tried-and-True Methods
Denise and Mari also suggest some tips for marketing white papers on Facebook:

* No hard sell—if you’re selling or offering something, don’t be too forceful or impersonal. Use friendly, conversational language. When you do a status update, mention that you’re finishing your white paper and you’re excited to launch it. This tactfully plants seeds in the minds of your Facebook contacts by telling them about the valuable information your paper will provide. 

* Post every day—once you set up your page, connect with your fans twice a day. In your posts, encourage them to ask questions and to comment. Answer their questions and post links to related information so they realize that you’re a trusted resource and not just peddling your own products. 

* Get contacts into your database—it’s best to move contacts from the platform—that’s what Facebook is—and into your own database. On your fan page, be sure to include information on how fans can sign up to get your free white paper. That moves their contact information into your database.

Endless Possibilities
Employing these tactics is worth it when you consider the immense possibilities of marketing your white papers on Facebook. There are over 400,000,000 active Facebook users and the average user is 35 years old with a higher-than-average income. Without doubt, many Facebook users run their own businesses and value the information provided in white papers.

So by all means, use FBML to create a custom landing page on your Facebook fan page and brand the page with your company’s logo and colors. Try the focused advertising available on Facebook and do pre-marketing by keeping fans updated on your white paper project. Avoid hard selling, do posts twice a day and move contacts into your database.

After your business booms, you’ll have to decide whether to reveal these tactics when an impressed competitor asks, “What’s your secret?” 

We’re Taught to “Talk Sideways”
When I took a speech class in college, one of the tips the instructor gave for handling stage fright was to look over the heads of my audience and avoid direct eye contact. Have you ever heard that one? Or how about visualizing your audience naked?

While these “talking sideways” tactics may have temporarily helped reduce my sweaty palms in public speaking, they didn’t help me connect with my audience. I later learned that this was much more important, both in public speaking and writing persuasive copy. Talking directly to your audience—making that eye contact—is what gets the best audience response.

Here’s a little nugget of wisdom I learned in copywriting that may help you avoid talking sideways and make better connection with your readers:

Visualize one person (your ideal reader) right down to their shoes.
The great marketer, David Ogilvy, once said to a soap manufacturer: “Your customer isn’t a moron—she’s your wife.”

Think about it. Wouldn’t you write differently to a spouse than to a group of faceless people? Of course you would—because you know that single person well enough to be able to picture him or her in your head, and understand where he or she is coming from.

So I like to get enough information about my prospects to visualize what they might look like—age, sex, married, kids, income, lifestyle, hobbies—and conjure a mental picture of them before I start writing.

Clayton Makepeace, who many refer to as the “King of Copywriters,” takes this type of visualization even further with a “dominant emotion” exercise before he writes a single word, as illustrated in this excerpt from his book: Two Hours to More Profitable Sales Copy:

“I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes and mentally inserted myself into the shoes of a 50- to 70-year-old man (our target demographic) whose life was plagued by chronic health problems–endless doctor visits–taking fistfuls of costly prescription drugs every day–suffering horrific side effects from those drugs–and never getting any better.

I saw myself showing up at the doctor’s office–cooling my heels in the waiting room reading dull magazines for an hour, waiting for my name to be called–ushered into the exam room–and made to wait even longer.

Finally, I saw the doctor hurriedly burst through the door, ask me a cursory question or two, scribble a few chicken scratches on a prescription pad and vanish as quickly as he had come.

I saw myself experiencing what my prospects experience every day, I started feeling the emotions they were feeling: Frustration with health problems their doctors couldn’t seem to cure–afraid of the consequences of failing health–exhausted by doctor visits that interrupted their lives–worried about the cost and side effects of conventional medicine–and disgusted with doctors who never seemed to take a personal interest in them.”

For Better Connection: Go Deeper
Granted, Makepeace is talking about sales copy here, but it translates well to writing white papers too. The deeper you can connect with your reader on an emotional level, the more likely you are to engage him or her in any type of writing.

Give this exercise a try. It may feel a little funny at first, but trust me—getting that deeper connection in your head before you begin a project will help it flow more smoothly from start to finish.

About the Author: Apryl Parcher is Michael A. Stelzner’s apprentice. You can learn more about her at http://www.aparcher.com.

Give Them Value
“One important trend for 2010 is a focus on value,” says Rob Birgfeld, director of audience development for SmartBrief on Social Media, one of more than 100 daily publications produced by SmartBrief. “There has been a massive blitz by companies clamoring to get involved in social media. Many of them started their Facebook page, their Twitter account and a blog, and they feel that simply providing a constant flow of general information will suffice.”

“But in 2010, consumers will weed out the ‘non-value’ participants—companies that are just broadcasting—and look for those that are putting something valuable into a social media channel, such as an informative white paper that helps them solve a business problem.”

Let Them Share
According to Birgfeld, a key trend is to empower white paper readers. Just as important as sending a white paper into social media channels is giving readers the ability to pass the paper along on their own terms. To achieve this, provide the mechanisms that let readers share, whether it’s via email or posts on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (you can make your PDF file “tweetable”). Ensuring that end users can pass the white paper on avoids the mistake of impressing readers with your brilliant paper and having the marketing “trail” end there.

A Community Effort
Another major trend for 2010, says Birgfeld, is enlisting a community of users to help create your white paper. “Involving people in the overall development of your paper makes it better and helps it reach more people. One way of tapping into your social media community is to send a first draft of your paper to your best customers and ask for their comments. Once you have multiple ‘contributors,’ you also have multiple marketing channels because your community will take pride in the white paper that they helped create and will send it to other people.”

Powerful Endorsements
In the coming year, more marketers will solicit product testimonials from their social media users and publish the comments verbatim in white papers. In addition to providing valuable feedback on a company’s product, user comments market a product in their own words, not with a company sales pitch.

“When members of your social media community who are end users say that your product is good, it’s a much more powerful and credible statement than a sales message that most people won’t even read,” says Birgfeld.

Follow These Tactics in 2010

* Don’t broadcast useless information on social media sites—give your readers value.

* Make it easy for readers to share your white paper and let them collaborate in the creation of your  masterpiece.

* Don’t feed readers a sales pitch—let your user community tell readers how great your product is.

Keep the latest social media trends in mind and soon you’ll be tweeting your old college cronies about your new-found business success.

1. The Business Environment: The recession has caused businesses to seek cheaper white paper solutions, resulting in shorter, more cheaply produced, text-oriented formats. Shorter white papers also have become more sales-oriented, and businesses are demanding that these documents must now generate leads and provide a substantial ROI. The white paper marketplace has also become extremely crowded. Just about every business has used one or more white papers, and businesses can no longer enjoy the unique competitive advantage that the medium provided just a few years ago.

2. The Business Reader: Knowledge workers are putting in longer hours with larger workloads resulting in greater stress. The amount of distractions (meetings, phone calls, travel) leave precious little time for reading large tomes of complex information, especially large blocks of standard paragraph-oriented text found in most white papers. Finally, these readers are also turned off to the abundance of white papers that contain overt ’sales messages.’

3. Social Media: Short, quick, colorful, rich information has become a new norm, best exemplified by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These new online social media are changing the face of business communications and how users interact with promotional information. The short attention spans common with today’s knowledge workers are fueling new forms of rich information such as video, audio, and interactive webcams. As users grow accustomed to this form of interaction, there is less of an appeal with traditionally formatted text documents.

What’s the result of these changes on the white paper?

Cheaply produced, short length, overtly sales-oriented, stark, all-text white papers suffer a disconnect with today’s short attention span social media–aware business reader. While businesses can claim that they “now have a white paper,” the lack of clear differentiation with a “me-too” all-text white paper fails to engage today’s rich-media–oriented business reader.

What’s the solution?

The incorporation of visually engaging elements will grab attention, allowing key bottom-line solution messages to be easily assimilated by the time- and attention-challenged business reader. These elements include:

* Summaries, both executive and concluding, that appeal to short attention spans
* Text elements such as pull quotes, bullets, shaded text sections
* Graphic elements such as concept graphics, business charts, and industry-specific illustrations
* Page design that grabs initial reader attention and creates a visual invitation for business readers

The use of these and other elements will provide clear differentiation for white paper marketers. The application of a visual approach will generate a unique competitive advantage for business marketers who face a crowded field of plain text papers. It will also provide a unique way for white paper writers to produce more engaging and profitable white papers for their clients. Both writers and marketers should consider the advantages of visual enhancements and design as part of their ongoing white paper strategies.

To learn more about this topic, be sure to catch my sessions at the forthcoming White Paper Success Summit 2010.

About the Author:  Jonathan Kantor has been writing white papers for 11 years as principal of The Appum Group, “The White Paper Company,” and is author of the blog WhitePaperPundit.com. His new book, Crafting White Paper 2.0 is now available via Lulu Publishing.

“Understanding your audiences will help you write the content they need in the words and the way they need it,” says industry veteran Ginny Redish in her excellent book, Letting Go of the Words. This can also help you select and organize your content to be useful and appealing.

That’s why you really must start every white paper project with an audience analysis. This doesn’t have to take very long or cost a great deal. But it’s a step no white paper writer can afford to skip.

Knowing your audience helps you decide:

* What problems they experience
* What terms and acronyms they know
* How much technical detail they can understand
* What proof points and sources resonate best with them
* What to put in and what to leave out

Assuming your white paper is a pre-sales document aimed at likely prospects, you need to find the answers to these three questions:

1. Who is the ideal prospect for the client’s offering?

This includes demographic data such as age, sex, education, location; anything you can state as facts or numbers. It can also include psychographic information on the attitudes or opinions of those prospects.

2. What do they do on the job?

This includes their job title, responsibilities, and where they fit in the pecking order: Are they a decision-maker, technical recommender, or member of a selection committee?

3. Where do they work?

This includes the size, type, sector, and location of the organization.

Ideally the client has developed a set of personas (typical customer character sketches) that spell all this out.  If not, consider this your first research job. Ask anyone who talks to prospects: people from marketing, sales, or customer service. A customer advisory board can be an ideal source.

Then use your research to develop a brief description of your intended reader. The closer you can get to an actual person you can visualize, the better.

Here’s the format I generally use:
“Our intended reader is a [sex] [age] [job title] in a [size of company] [sector of company] in [location of company] [anything else important].”

Here’s what this looked like for one white paper project I did recently:
“Our intended reader is a male 40- to 60-year-old IT director in a mid-sized manufacturing company with headquarters in North America and manufacturing outsourced to Asia.”
Sometimes the demographics are less important than the concerns driving your audience.

Here’s another example I developed for a white paper:
“Our target reader is a seasoned project manager working in a federal government agency or with a prime contractor for a major stimulus project. This project manager is responsible for coordinating many subcontractors to bring in the project on time and on budget.”

As you draft your white paper, you may have dilemmas or differences of opinion about what to put in and what to leave out. Asking “Does our audience need to know this? Would they understand this? Do they care about this?” quickly gives you the answer.

What if you have more than one audience for the same document? In that case, call one the primary reader, and the other the secondary. And if you need to, layer the information for the secondary audience, as I discussed in a previous article.

This is the first key to your white paper success, drawn from my upcoming presentation “7 Ways to Guarantee Your Next White Paper Is a Success” for the White Paper Success Summit 2010. To find out about the other six, be sure to register for the upcoming summit here.

About the author: Gordon Graham helps B2B software companies tell their stories with crisp, compelling white papers. He’s the founder of www.thatwhitepaperguy.com, and a frequent poster on the www.whitepapersource.com forums.

At White Paper Success Summit 2010—the only online professional development event of its kind—white paper thought leaders will serve an all-new menu of proven business-building tactics.

Michael Stelzner, organizer of last year’s sold-out inaugural White Paper Success Summit and author of the best-selling Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, says now is the time for white papers: “The old-fashioned way of selling—advertising, traditional press releases and product marketing—doesn’t work anymore. These days, educational marketing is much more effective and that’s where white papers come in.  And white papers are especially effective in a down economy.”

White Papers Influence Decision Making

A September 2009 survey by Eccolo Media supports Stelzner’s comments. In the study, which polled 501 executives involved in B2B technology purchases, 84% rated white papers as moderately to extremely influential in purchasing decisions. The survey also revealed that white papers are the most frequently shared type of collateral—with 89% of respondents passing them on to other people.

If you’re a marketer who is under the gun to produce quality leads in 2010, the masters of white paper marketing will share their secrets at White Paper Success Summit 2010.

In addition to Stelzner, you’ll interact with an all-star team of white paper experts, including Bob Bly (The White Paper Marketing Handbook), Brian Carroll (Lead Generation for the Complex Sale), Jonathan Kantor (Crafting White Paper 2.0), Roger C. Parker (White Paper Design That Sells), Joe Pulizzi (Get Content, Get Customers), John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide), Jill Konrath (Selling to Big Companies), Ardath Albee (eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale) and Gordon Graham, to mention a few.

Tricks of the Trade

Here’s a sampling of a few of the Summit sessions, where the white paper pros will reveal the tricks of the trade:

* More Business Than You Can Handle: How to Achieve the Business Dream With a Single White Paper
* Supercharging Your White Paper Distribution for Maximum Impact
* Launching White Papers Like Products: 7 Steps to Boosting White Paper Performance
* Leveraging Social Media to Promote Your White Papers
* Proven Techniques for Using White Papers for the Complex Sale

In exclusive live forums at the event, attendees will pose questions to the white paper “professors” and use special LinkedIn groups to network with peers. If you miss a live session, no worries—you’ll have  access to recordings and transcripts of every one.

No need to book pricey hotel reservations, pack a bag and trudge off to the airport to attend this conference. You can relax and enjoy the online Summit from a comfortable chair in your home or office. The sessions are spread over an entire month so you can fit them into your hectic schedule.

Highly Successful Event

To say that last year’s White Paper Success Summit was a hit is quite an understatement—96% of attendees said they’d recommend the event to a friend. The 2010 Summit starts Tuesday, February 2 and runs through Wednesday, February 24. Attendees can get tickets at significant discounts by booking early.

Don’t rely on the same old sales pitches in the coming year. Attend White Paper Success Summit 2010 and learn how to generate a steady stream of leads by providing valuable business content with white papers. Now is the time—your business might depend on it.

“Without costly ads or fancy designs, white papers are saving businesses by establishing thought leadership, attracting steady streams of quality leads and helping businesses close deals,” says Stelzner. “Once a white paper is done, it can continue to reliably deliver leads for months or years to come.”

For more information or to register for the Summit, visit http://www.whitepapersummit.com/ms/.

As companies scale back their marketing budgets during recessionary periods, marketing expenditures are being carefully scrutinized, renegotiated and reduced if possible. The result of these cost-containment initiatives has been an explosion in shorter, less expensive white papers, typically between two and four pages in length.

While these short white papers may include the label “white paper” on their cover, and may provide an organization with bragging rights to claim that they have a white paper on their website, these short documents do little to satisfy the expectations that business readers have of the medium. On the contrary, the monetary savings gained by employing such a strategy typically do not offset the diminished perceptions of the featured solution, company and/or brand sponsoring the white paper.

Why?

The limited amount of space available in a short white paper (two to four pages) is typically used for a solution description and its various beneficial attributes. Because marketers want to “cut to the chase” and quickly describe their solution rather than wasting space educating the reader with background information, these short white papers are often perceived as glorified sales brochures. This “short length” strategy is one of the leading complaints of business executives when pollsters asked their opinion of the white paper medium.

As evidence of this position, a February 2009 study conducted by InformationWeek.com titled, “White Papers: How to Maximize the Use of White Papers in Your B2B Marketing and Sales Process,” concluded that over 78% of the executive respondents indicated that having “Minimal Marketing” is either extremely important or somewhat important in a white paper.  This means less selling and more educating are preferred.

The label “white paper” means something very specific to this business audience. Not only does it imply that the document will provide high-quality information on the designated topic, but also that there needs to be sufficient length to thoroughly educate the reader on that topic. In my opinion, an ideal six- to eight-page white paper would include the following attributes:

* Executive summary (one page)
* Introduction (one page)
* Assessment of existing challenges (one to two pages)
* Presentation of the solution and benefits (one to two pages)
* Optional case study (one page)
* Conclusion (one page)

If you do not have an adequate amount of information to fill six to eight pages, then don’t call your document a white paper. Call it a solution guide, a product reference sheet, a technical primer or a vision statement, but not a white paper. Creating a short two- to four-page white paper that doesn’t meet readers’ expectations will not only waste your limited budget, it will frustrate your target business audience as well.

About the Author:  Jonathan Kantor has been writing white papers for 11 years as principal of The Appum Group, “The White Paper Company,” and is author of the blog WhitePaperPundit.com . His new book Crafting White Paper 2.0 was just released.

In a previous article, I described how to “clone” one basic document for various segments of an audience (link to: http://www.whitepapersource.com/writing/how-to-clone-your-white-paper/).

But what if you can’t even do that? What if you have to write one white paper for people in two very different roles, such as technical versus financial or top executive versus line manager? What if you know that your white paper will go to people with vastly different levels of knowledge or experience?

In this case, your white papers need two “layers” of information, one for each segment of your audience. Here are six possible tactics for doing this (you can mix and match these as needed).

Layering tactic #1: In-line definitions (brief asides that define a term or acronym, just like this) are used after the first occurrence of a term that not all readers will know. You can see this every day in any newspaper.

Layering tactic #2: A glossary of terms may be useful if your white paper is peppered with terms that one segment of your audience may not know. In this case, gather together all of your in-line definitions on one page at the end of your paper.

Layering tactic #3: Hyperlinks to background material can be useful. For example, if you’re discussing virtualization, you can include a link in your white paper to a good background article from a credible source. You can even link to an illuminating discussion on a blog, as long as it takes the same dignified tone as your white paper. If you’re distributing your white paper as a PDF, make sure to make the clickable text visible, and test it before you send it out.

Layering tactic #4: Sidebars are short pieces set off from the main narrative, often as tinted text boxes. These are useful for presenting background that more knowledgeable readers already know, or a list of bullets, steps in a process, or a mini case study. A sidebar can be as short as a single sentence, or as long as a whole page.

Layering tactic #5: Quick summaries are small text boxes that sum up an entire section or page in a few quick points. Scientific American uses a little text box labeled “Key Concepts” with each of its major articles. This has the double benefit of boosting the “scanability” of your white paper.

Layering tactic #6: An appendix is a separate section tucked in at the back of a white paper. While we don’t often see these in white papers, there’s no reason not to include one to help reach a second audience with the same document. An appendix can present more or less technical information, procedures, describe the methodology used in your paper, or any other information that you think not every reader will want or need to know.

One or more of these tactics should help your white paper communicate to your different audiences. And they may be useful in almost any white paper, because they provide different pathways through your document for readers who want more or less information.

About the Author: Gordon Graham helps B2B software and clean tech firms tell their stories with crisp, compelling white papers. He’s the founder of www.thatwhitepaperguy.com and a frequent poster on the WhitePaperSource Forum.