Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash despises his band’s biggest hit, Sweet Child O’ Mine.
Slash came up with the famous intro riff as a joke, by playing a “circus tune” that mocked the popular guitar technique of string skipping. But the rest of the band picked up on the joke riff and developed the song.
They recorded it, and in 1988, it became their one and only no. 1 hit. Now, 30-something years later, the video for Sweet Child O’ Mine has over 1.2 billion views on YouTube.
You can file that away as “useless fact #754 that’s stayed stuck in JB’s head for the past 20 years.” Except there is a point to it:
If you create anything, even some bastard form like sales emails or blog content, you might start to get bored. Your taste and interests might evolve away from where your audience is. You might veer off and cover topics that you haven’t covered before, and stop covering topics that your audience wants.
Examples of this:
1. I used to follow a guy online who wrote a blog about picking up girls and self-improvement topics. All right. Then he started writing book reviews of the manly pulp novels he was reading. No. Delete.
2. I recently heard Gary Bencivenga talk about email marketing for his olive oil business. “If we don’t put ‘olive oil’ somewhere in the subject line,” Gary said, “we can’t get people to open up the emails at all.”
3. My own email newsletter. It’s mainly about persuasion, marketing and copywriting. Whenever I get away from those topics, I feel the pulse of my list slow down. I never tried pushing it… but I bet that after a week of off-topic emails I’d hear the flat line of no pulse at all.
So my point to you is to beware.
Your audience came to you for a reason. If you don’t respect that, even in spite of your own fancy and evolving tastes, you will miss out on those blockbuster #1 hits… and pretty soon, you will lose ’em altogether. And then you’ll be left singing like Axl:
Where do we go?
Where do we go now?
I’ll tell you where you go. At least if you’re interested in persuasion, marketing, and copywriting. You go to my email newsletter. Available for free here.