One of the biggest challenges for a marketer is to get your reader to open your email. Or to take action, which can even be to respond to your note.
The subject line becomes the most important tool for opening your email.
The content you put out become critical in nudging action.
Here are 3 psychological techniques that will get your reader to act. You can use these for cold-call emails, reaching a potential client or a prospective hiring manager. These never fail!
Arouse Curiosity:
You may have seen lists of pictures on online portals such as Yahoo. Typically, they go like this: “30 Incredibly Fantastic Picnic Pictures – No.15 is Unbelievable”.
The result is the reader not only clicks on the link, but scrolls through the list, spending time on your site and boosting page rank.
Or something like this:
You really want to what Cage lied about, don’t you?
Obviously, your content has to back up your claim. Else you will lose your reader.
Appeal to their Ego:
I was not getting responses from this service provider for a while. Every time it was stalling. Until, I write this one sentence after making a request.
“With a team as skilled as yours, I find it hard to believe that the issue is still unresolved after more than 3 weeks”.
Very quickly, they scheduled a call and the issue was resolved in a couple days.
The reason: the sentence appealed to their ego. Flattery (the sincere type) and appealing to someone’s ego can get you results.
Use this technique judiciously.
Fear of loss:
Studies have established that people respond more quickly to the fear of losing something that they already have, than to the appeal of fresh gains.
When you book an airline ticket or a hotel room online, you are offered, at the very end, the option of insuring your purchase.
There is a small box you have to check to indicate whether you want to opt for purchasing insurance or declining the insurance offer.
The text for the decline has evolved. Ordinarily, I would simply click decline and move on to completing the purchase of the ticket or hotel room.
But when it says “No. I am ok with losing my $550 purchase”, then I pause for a second and re-read.
This is the “fear of loss” at play. A great psychological technique in getting you to purchase insurance. Or at least to click and read more. Which gives you a prospective with a more likely intent to buy.
Buying, making decisions or even not buying starts with gut-feel. i.e. psychology at play. Use these techniques and see your writing improve.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. 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.
Anchoring is a psychological technique used to peg someone’s mind to an arbitrary number, that is of advantage to the proposer or seller. This technique is deployed in several areas and primarily in negotiation.
Human beings rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered.
For example, when negotiating the salary for a particular position, if the first number you hear is $180,000, you may ask for $200,000 – not $450,000. Or if you are negotiating the sale price of property and the number quoted first is $600,000, you may ask for $520,000 – not $200,000.
Negotiating time for completing a task, resources for a project, sale price, salary, concessions, or any give-and-take discussion has the opportunity for anchoring.
Be aware of this technique, and use it when negotiating – anything.
FOMO or “fear of missing out” tugs at our desire to be like others in our group or tribe. You see this routinely in action. When you buy a book, Amazon prompts you with another list, saying “people who bought this (what you bought” also bought this (new list)”. Or Netflix prompts your next movie, touting that people like you watched this one.
I am sure you have felt the urge to consider the new list. Objective achieved! Psychology worked its magic.
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Scarcity:
Studies have established that people want something that is less available, than something else that is more abundant.
When you book an airline ticket or a hotel room online, routinely you will see messages that tell you, “only 4 tickets remaining” or “only 3 rooms left”.
This is the “scarcity” at play. A great psychological technique in getting you to get you to make the purchase. Have you not had that quick thought at the back of your mind that tells you to speed up else you will miss out on?
Buying, making decisions or even not buying starts with gut-feel. i.e. psychology at play. Ensure that these techniques are an inseparable part of your content creation strategy, and see your writing improve.
The term “long-tail” comes from statistics. Where there are extreme values, there are fewer data points. The distribution of most data, displayed on a chart, creates the appearance of tapering off at the end; a “tail.”
For each additional keyword added to a keyword phrase, there are a smaller number of people searching for that specific combination of words.
The presence of a long tail for a particular keyword indicates that there is a group of people who are looking for very specific information. This is your target group. These are not casual surfers, but high-potential customers. They could be recruiters in your dream company and you want to write for them.
Targeting long-tail keywords has the following benefits:
Those searching for the long-tail keyword are more likely to be your potential customers.
Search engines can display results more accurately for long-tail keywords.
There is less competition for long-tail keywords.
Your site will stay high in the rankings for a longer time, relative to shorter keywords.
3. Identifying your top keywords:
To identify and gather keywords relevant to your site you must go beyond the obvious:
Identify 3-5 main keywords based on your ecommerce or blog site topic. One of these must be embedded in your domain name, such as Cheaptickets.com.
Use Google suggest (a.k.a. auto complete) and review the keywords indicated by “Searches related to.” You can also use Google Keyword Planner tool or other software in order to add to your list in this manner.
Even better, ask ChatGPT to give you a list of keywords. Then ask it to refine, and then refine some more.
Continue the process until you have 3-5 high potential “core” keywords and about 50 long-tail keywords.
4. Important attributes of the keywords in your target list:
A. Volume: They must have high search volume. This is for the keywords, and also for the search results produced by Google. High volume = more people are searching for this keyword.
B. Relevance: Less relevance means wrong audience. If your content is written for the wrong audience (i.e. targeting keywords will low or no relevance), you won’t get customer interest. For the right audience, you want to put out compelling content.
C. Commerciality: Present of ads in search results indicates that people are willing to pay for the resulting information, i.e. this indicates the presence of a market.
5. What do you do with the keywords:
A. Write content: Obviously you want to write content, compelling content. Blog-posts, white-papers, curated content, stories, etc. All these can provide insightful information to your customer and keep them engaged.
B. Monitor ranking: Monitor the performance of your content against the keywords. This will tell you how your site and content perform and give you a chance to tweak the same, i.e. improve SEO.
C. Write cornerstone posts: For your “core” keywords (the 3-5 that you selected), you want to write longer, more informational posts. Then add multiple hyperlinks to these posts.
D. Ensure keywords are hyperlinked to your other content: Ensure that each of your blog-posts has at least 3-5 links to your own blog-posts. Ensure that you have at least 2 links to external sites. Use keywords to insert the links on. E.g. instead of hyperlinking “click here”, put the hyperlink on “herbal cure for dry cough”.
E. Include in your URLs: Ensure your “core” keywords are in the URL slug.
F. Use advertisements for your keywords: When your competition has all but captured all your top keywords, then use ads for those keywords. Counter-intuitively, you can also place ads for the keywords where your content is ranking high (to ensure you capture maximum value for those keyword searches). Do this when there is sufficient volume of searches.
Keywords are the foundation of search engine results. Targeting the wrong keywords means that your content is invisible to your target customer.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A solid content generation strategy has some essentials.
Impactful content, that achieves the expected results, should satisfy all of the following conditions:
Relevant or appropriate
Engaging
Insightful
Whether you are presenting a business idea to your executives, writing content for your customers or crafting your resume, these rules apply.
Relevant:
Relevant = closely connected to the matter at hand
Appropriate = suitable or proper in the circumstances, fitting to a particular purpose or to a target audience
How would you know what these are?
You get the chance to establish this – by declaring the “focus keyword”.
The focus keyword is the primary property of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
You will lose your customer if you write for the wrong keyword.
2. Engaging:
When a user clicks on a search result and begins consuming your content, they should get what they are looking for.
The user provides the input, in the form of the focus keyword.
You, as content provider, should ensure that the title and the description, that appear in the search results, provide exactly what would be expected when someone plugs in the keyword.
Your goal should be to provide highly relevant, interesting and valuable content to keep the user on the page for as long as possible. Provide valuable links to other pages on your site, and to other relevant sites.
Time your reader spends on your post/page = Degree of engagement as recorded by Google. The more time they spend, the more engaging your content or site is.
3. Insightful:
Your reader should always get more than what they already knew, before they read your content.
There are various methods of providing insights:
Arouse curiosity
Provide a framework
Provide data or information
Save them time by bringing information from various sites into yours (through content curation; not duplication)
Answer their questions (anticipate questions and use them in the form of keywords)
Teach them something new
Provide them with results of a survey (i.e. other peoples’ opinions)
Bring them expert advice (through guest interviews)
If there is no insight, your content won’t be engaging.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. 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.
I have written three examples of striking headlines. Use in your subject lines or blog titles, and watch the open rate climb up.
Next time you feel the urge to click on a headline, pause and examine what made you click.
Bulleted lists:
Lists make for easy reading. They are good for SEO. When you add a sub-heading to each list item, your writing becomes powerful.
Re-framing techniques:
Here are three examples of re-framing technique. The idea is to get your customer to pause and re-think their cancel decision.
Structure and Outline:
Whether you write a blog, a white-paper or a presentation, have an outline. Better still, show that to your audience and then stick to it.
Having an outline before you write, let’s you gauge completeness and flow.
Ask chatGPT to write you an outline of whatever you want to create. Then follow the outline.
Singular call to action:
Too many CTAs confuse the reader. On one page, or one blog-post, ask for one action. Click here, subscribe to my mailing list or buy now.
Better way is to assertively describe the action. Instead of “buy now”, say “get your awesome guide today”.
Appropriate keywords:
The internet works on SEO. SEO helps rank websites, products, profiles and almost all content in the online world. Search results work off of keywords.
If you write well for the wrong keyword, you are attempting to sell to the wrong audience. Your customer will not see your product.
You have to understand SEO. If you are a student, mid-career professional or business owner. If you are marketer, content creator or a website owner. Everything is subject to SEO. Lower ranking causes invisibility, as in invisible presence or sales.
Readability:
There are rules for readability. Search engines rank easily readable sites higher.
The Hemingwayapp helps you check if your writing is good for, say, sixth grade (considered good readability).
Ai tools:
You already know about ChatGPT. Also check out midjourney, copy.ai, synthesia.io.
They all help you write better and create content at scale.
Quantification:
When you display numbers, people are better able to compare, or understand the magnitude of something.
Ranked in the top 1% in my school (250 students) tells you something.
550 single star ratings can mean anything.
Out of 5000 it is 10%. But if a product has 550 single star ratings out of 100,000, it has an entirely different meaning.
Psychologically appealing:
Use psychological techniques such as FOMO, anchoring, sunk cost, recency bias, emotional desire, etc. to get people to act on your messaging.
Appeal to the human side for urging decisions. Where logic does not work, try appealing to emotions. People make decisions from their gut, and then use logic to justify.
I love the 10-20-30 rule from Guy Kawaski on presentations. You can’t go wrong with his prescription: 10 slides, 20 mins, 30 size font.
Proof-read using Ai:
Did you know you can use ChatGPT for proof-reading? Just paste a block of your content and ask it to check spelling, grammar, etc.
Oh, by the way, it can write code for you as well.
Multimedia:
For capturing your reader’s attention, add images, audio and videos. That is good for your customer, and also for SEO.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. 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.
