Creating Compelling Content – What You’ve Been Missing Out On for Maximum Engagement and Sharing
Whether you write content for marketing, blogging or presenting, you need a strategy to make your content memorable. Memorable content is engaging, provides insights and guess what, people share it.
Firstly, you need to know who you are writing for. So your topic and content can resonate with them.
Secondly, you need a strategy or technique to keep them continuously engaged. i.e. consistent posting. If they visit your site and do not find new content, they will stop coming. As simple as that.
Lastly, you need a variety of forms in which you present your content. It takes ‘”boring” away, and keeps things interesting.
Let’s begin…
- Understanding your target audience:
You first need to understand who you are writing for. i.e. your target audience. It could be a recruiter or hiring manager if you are a student.
Your audience could be prospective customers or influencers whose attention you are seeking. Or they could be senior executives to whom you are interested in presenting your business ideas.
3 attributes that your content must have:
Your content must be:
- Relevant
- Engaging
- Insightful
2. Posting content consistently:
Since content is the lifeblood of your blog, you have to entice your readers to visit your site on a regular basis.
For this you need to publish content regularly, or on a consistent basis.
Consistent could mean weekly, daily or even every other day.
This is where you can best use Ai tools such as ChatGPT.
Ask ChatGPT for blog-post ideas on your topic and selected keyword. Ask it to provide ten ideas, and then another ten.
Then ask it to write out a post for you on one of the titles that you like.
Then another, and another.
It is easy to get drafts for about 50 posts in less than an hour.
Once you have those, then you spend time fine-tuning, adding keywords, finessing the title (use ChatGPT) and proof-read (again, ChatGPT) and posting (or scheduling the posting) on WordPress.
I have published about 10 posts (once the drafts were ready) in about an hour.
So in a few hours, you can realistically schedule your weekly posts for the next six months!!!
If you can use ChatGPT creatively, you will never complain about not having enough content to post.
3. Varying your content to make it more interesting:
To keep your readers interested, you need to bring some variety to your content “type”. This means that you present content in different ways.
The following are some of the content types that you can successfully deploy to keep your reader interested and spend more time on your site:
A. Stories
Stories help build a personal bond between yourself and your reader. Any lessons you have learned from your experiences with your topic can be converted in a story post. People love stories, and when a story is not only related to your topic but also weaves together your passion, frustration, and challenges, it makes for a very interesting read.
When you can reveal how you overcame a challenge, or even discuss a time when you failed, the lesson stays with the reader. If you can show them how they can possibly avoid a pitfall you encountered, your story becomes invaluable. I love this one from Tim Urban of Wait But Why.
You cannot go wrong with stories.
B. Techniques
Any “how to” post can be converted into a technique post. People are always looking for ways to accomplish certain tasks. Once they know how to do something, they look for ways to do it faster, cheaper and more efficiently. Supplement a technique type blog post with a worksheet, image, questionnaire or other tools.
Here’s a good example of showcasing a technique for cleaning out frosted glass.
C. News
News content can be pulled from events around the world, provided that they are related to the topic of interest. Not all topics lend themselves to a news-type of blog; such content is most relevant for technology, politics and other fast-moving topics.
News content will not be timeless; anyone visiting your site in six months may not find it relevant. Therefore, instead of adding a series of news posts, consider having news as a separate page on your site and periodically but frequently “replacing” the content.
D. Reviews
People are always looking for reviews from sources they trust. Whether they are about software, a book or a new gadget, reviews always generate interest.
Consider all the merchandise, software, training, subscriptions, etc. that your readers can buy in connection with your blog topic. Start writing reviews on those.
Make sure the content is valuable. Your expertise should come to the forefront. Your review will be meaningful only if you can speak from personal experience. Therefore, you must ensure you have experienced the product.
Here is a great example on comparing MailChimp and AWeber.
E. Interviews
One of the easier ways to begin a series of posts is to borrow someone else’s credibility by interviewing a few experts.
The interview technique is very well-suited to some blog types. Tim Ferriss of the “4-hour work week” is big on interviews. His posts are mostly interviews and podcasts. Check this interview of Rick Rubin on Tim’s blog.
Additionally, interviews provide the following side benefits:
- They help spread the word – you can bet that the interviewee is sharing the post with her friends (at least in cases where you are able to disclose the interviewee’s identity).
- There is an implicit testimonial added to your blog when the “achievers” you interviewed share those interviews with their own contacts.
- Your list of contacts grows and this, over time, can result in other business leads.
F. Curated Articles
Content curation is the process by which you gather a group of carefully-selected articles on a specific topic, weave a story around these articles, provide your insight, judgment or recommendation, and publish it as a paper or post on your blog.
It is hard to think of any content type more powerful than curation. As you curate content, you are providing the following services to your reader:
- Helping them get diverse perspectives from different people
- Assembling the information in one place so they don’t have to scour the web
- Filtering so that only the most relevant, interesting and high-value articles are selected for curation
- Contributing your own spin, story and insights on the topic
The author of the original post accrues the following benefits:
- Their post is now hand-picked and posted on an authority site. This helps them achieve higher search result rankings.
- They get higher viewership when your readers go read their article. This means more publicity and marketing potential for their blog.
- You, as an authority blogger, become their contact.
You and your blog benefit from the following:
- A different type of content publishing that gives you ideas for future posts
- Better value to your readers increases engagement with your blog
- Establishment of relationships with experts in your topic
- Marketability for your blog, since the expert authors whose articles you curated are now sharing your post with their followers
Thus, curation creates a win-win situation.
G. Surveys
Another excellent way to generate content ideas is to do a reader survey. This is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, ask for suggestions on how to make your blog better, confirm or refute hypotheses you may have and discover what your readers want to hear more about.
Use Google Forms or Survey Monkey to create and send surveys. Don’t send surveys too often; run them at very infrequent intervals. The appropriate frequency for surveys depends on your blog topic. For my readership, I have decided to stick with one survey a year.
You need to build a relationship with your readers to ensure that you get at least 50 to 100 responses, surveys can’t be done on Day One.
To make your surveys successful, keep the following points in mind:
- Use surveys sparingly and design them with care.
- Use a sophisticated survey tool such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.
- Don’t overload the questions by asking too much at once.
- Use “other” option or open responses to elicit subjective information.
- Publicize the survey on your social media, mailing list and your own website.
- Offer prizes to elicit more responses.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. Keeping your writing engaging and interesting is of paramount importance. Better writing is a sure way to find your next job, get customers to take action and generally have your ideas and thoughts recognized. You can build credibility and a powerful presence online with your writing.