Developing a Content Strategy
19-06-2017
The blogger’s most difficult challenge is often trying to get people to read through their entire posts.
Writing blog posts (or even drafting content for your other pages) takes a lot of time and effort to complete. Blog articles, especially, are an average of 700-1000 words apiece, and the average writer takes about an hour and 40 minutes to write a 500-word essay. What’s more, many serious bloggers write an average of one-two pieces per day to increase their SEO and provide value to their readers. That’s a lot of work!
If you pour a substantial amount of time and effort into writing your content, there will be an urge for readers to finish your posts. Yet, the reality is that 55% of users spend an average of 15 seconds looking at the piece before clicking away. 15 seconds is hardly enough to finish reading through the third paragraph, let alone a 700-1000 word article!
To optimise your posts for maximum ROI, and ensure you have a proper content strategy, try the following tips:
Content Strategy Tips: Captivate Your Readers with Urgent Titles
Urgent titles are titles that are emotionally provoking for the purpose of getting higher engagements. Think of websites such as BuzzFeed, Reddit, or UpWorthy. They create titles that give value to the reader; titles that are phrased in an informal and relatable way. The result are platforms stuffed with viral content. Think of titles that utilise punctuations and capitalizations, or titles with informal questions your targeted audience would search.
Content Strategy Tips: Pack the Introduction Paragraph with Surprising or Empathetic Statements
The reason why we tell you to include surprising or empathising statements is because both attention hooks work incredibly well. Most writers naturally include both shock and empathy in their introductory paragraphs because that’s just how we usually hold a conversation. You don’t start a conversation with someone by stating the longest, most boring idea you have (unless you’re not a very good conversationalist). The most engaging conversations begin with shocking, sad, or just interesting ideas in general to sustain the listener’s attention. It’s also important to note that the most engaging conversations are always about the other person—what he or she can gain from listening to your words. The same rule applies to writing. If your introductory paragraph doesn’t catch your attention, then it probably won’t catch anyone else’s, either. Run it by a friend!
Content Strategy Tips: Use Powerful Statistics to Convince Your Reader
Moz released a study that showed how headlines with numbers perform at a 36% higher success rate than headlines without. The most interesting part is that this was true for an even amount of male and female readers. The second most high-performing titles addressed the reader by using the personal pronoun, “you.” However, the use of numbers far outweighed the personal pronouns because it provided more credibility to the post. When our brains see numbers, we immediately assign a measure of credibility to the text (even though few of us actually go to investigate these sources). If statistics are this captivating in titles, why not also put them into the body content of your articles? Incorporating interesting statistics into your text will definitely give your content the juice it needs to keep readers fascinated.
Content Strategy Tips: Use Irresistible Subheadings in Your Content
When it comes to reader retention, sub-heads are absolutely crucial, especially if you have longer text. Nothing scares people away than a jumble of seemingly monotonous text. When you break your content up into bite-sized groups, add sub-headings that are just as interesting as your main title. This can also be done by quoting your own text to break up paragraphs, as we often see bloggers do. These quotes are usually stand-alone sentences in large, italicised fonts for the purpose of breaking up the long paragraphs and creating more intrigue. If you want to get fancy, you can even include a one-click tweet option for your block quotes.
Content Strategy Tips: Write Succinct Body Text
Like we mentioned, body content is not the place where writers can neglect their readers’ best interests by writing long, monotonous text. To keep your readers engaged, your content must be succinct and straightforward. It’s fine to build suspense, but even this needs to be relatively entertaining. Add statistics! Break up paragraphs using images, quotes, or captivating headlines! As long as your readers are entertained, they will continue to read your content.
If you have a blog and are interested in monetising it, consider signing up with T.UK as an Affiliate.
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