Step-by-Step Guide To Make Your Content Worth Sharing
Reading Time: 5 minutes Content marketing has already become a household term. Writing lots of different content, marketers all around the world are trying to draw the attention of those valuable visitors. However, it still remains unclear for many people what makes some pieces of writing go viral and others – simply rest in the archives.
Moz and Hubspot claim that a full 75% of articles on the Internet doesn’t have a single like or share, making all the efforts contributed to writing them go completely in vain. Needless to say, these posts will neither further your marketing campaign nor enhance your SEO.
So if you really want to write shareable content that will help you achieve your business goals, you need to follow the next steps:
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1. Consider your target audience before writing
Zig Ziglar said: “A goal properly set is halfway reached.”
Before getting down to writing, determine what goals you are trying to achieve and who your target audience is. After that, think what information will be helpful for them. There’s nothing more futile than spending tons of time preparing content that is completely irrelevant or doesn’t correspond to your marketing goals.
On the contrary, if you deliver valuable information to the visitors for free, you will both drive traffic to your website and strengthen your image as an expert.
Besides, make sure you conducted a thorough keyword research to see what exactly Internet users are searching. Not only will it help to build your content structure but it will also enhance your SEO.
2. Make the quality of writing your paramount goal
Quantity over quality is a common misconception among marketers, resulting in the lack of views and inconsistent traffic to your website. However cool the subject you write about is, the article will fail to become shareable if it breaks grammar rules or has a lot of typos.
Even the most loyal readers will eventually get tired of poor quality content and ditch it altogether. How to avoid that?
Writing attractive content is not the be-all and end-all of content creation. If you really want your blog posts to go viral, you should constantly work on their quality. And I mean it. Fortunately, there are some useful online tools that can help you do that:
- Grammarly is probably the best tool for checking your texts for plagiarism and grammar or spelling errors;
- Hemingway Editor is a great app that helps to make your text more readable by highlighting all cases of wordiness or complex language.
3. Keep it visual
Many professionals claim that a picture is worth a thousand words. Besides, content with images on average attracts 94% more total views than content without images.
Why is that? Well, because it is much easier to comprehend an image than a long copy, especially if it lacks white space or any sort of division into logical paragraphs. Besides, whatever they say, people always judge a book by its cover.
On the contrary, your website visitors are more prone to sharing a piece of writing when it both delivers value and is visually attractive. So if the article starts with a powerful image, visitors will be more likely to open it. Thus, don’t neglect images and other forms of multimedia, such as videos or infographics.
Yet, you need to make sure that your writing is consistent with the visual elements accompanying it. Otherwise, the visitors attracted by the image will click on it, land on a completely irrelevant page, and bounce immediately.
4. Write attractive headings
Content has a little chance of becoming shareable or even opened if it fails to capture the attention at the first sight. Like a cover photo, the main goal of headings is to prevent your content from staying unnoticed.
Creating a powerful heading takes some time. The primary rule is to keep it relevant and brief. The most effective articles often contain:
- How to (How to Get the Most Out of Content Creation)
- A list (10 Most Picturesque Destinations You Didn’t Know About)
- Intriguing question (Internet-of-Things: Will It Change the Way We Live?)
- Problem and solution (Bug in the Code: How to Fix It Effortlessly?)
However, many bloggers and companies seem to overuse these ideas, creating hundreds of lookalike posts. The key to success lies in a unique approach. Even if you use the above-mentioned ideas, make sure you add something personal that will make your post stand out from the array of similar articles.
Last but not least, write headings after you’ve finished the article. This way, you’ll be able to make the title capture the most important aspects that you would otherwise miss.
5. Promote your content
The thing is that there’s no sense in writing if nobody sees the results of your work. So in order to become visible on the web, you need to seed your content on relevant platforms. There are numerous ways to do it:
1) Sharing content on social networks. Create a post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other network that you use. But don’t just post a link – add a picture and a short description to supplement it.
2) Send it in the newsletter. Share a new article with your loyal subscribers, outlining the benefits they will get from reading your content.
3) Asking readers to share. Word-of-mouth advertising has proved to be the most trustworthy marketing channel. So the chances are you’ll get more readers after some of your loyal subscribers share the post on social media.
4) Share content on Quora, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg. All these platforms have lots of visitors and thus, can be used to drive quality leads to your website. Besides, posting on these platforms increases the chances of your content becoming viral.
Wrap up
The viral content is considered to be the greatest achievement for content marketers in any industry. Yet, for many professionals in this field, it is still unclear what makes the content shareable. In this guide, we tried to outline the steps you need to take to get lots of likes and shares. So here’s a brief summary:
- Define the target audience for each piece of content
- Write with quality not quantity in mind
- Supplement your content with clear layout and visuals
- Come up with a catchy heading
- Share your content by various means
Following these steps, you’ll understand what it takes to spread your content all around the net.
Author’s Bio: Richard Nolan is a writer, blogger, and a private tutor, sharing his experience in spheres of writing, blogging, entrepreneurship, and psychology. Richard writes for numerous blogs and gives useful tips for bloggers and students. Currently, Richard works as a general blog editor for ProWritersCenter proofreading
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