ResourcesContent TipsLike This… 5 Tips for Crafting Content that is going to get Shared

Like This… 5 Tips for Crafting Content that is going to get Shared

What’s special about the content that you Like, Tweet, Pin and share online?…

…It’s valuable to you.

You wouldn’t e-mail to your friends an article that isn’t relevant to them, would you?

You wouldn’t Tweet a web page that doesn’t capture your imagination, would you?

Now ask yourself this – is your writing valuable to your audience?

If it isn’t, it will not engage, and it will not be shared.

Website owners often make the mistake of thinking like a publisher and not the reader. This, merged with a lack of understanding of an audience, can spell disaster.

If Google’s Hummingbird update has told website owners one thing, it’s that high quality content is more important than ever… the thing is, it has always been important.

So, if you’re struggling to write content for the web that’s going to get shared, here’s 5 tips to point you in the right direction.

1. Your headline is essential to your articles success.

In the case of a web page, your value proposition is essential to its success.

No matter where you are writing an article for it needs to have a good headline. Statistically, 8 out of 10 web visitors will read your headline yet only 2 out of 10 website visitors will read the rest of your article.

With so much weight behind it, a good headline is essential to bounce rates and time on page.

We wrote an article a short time ago featuring 5 headline formulas to help you generate more buzz. As well as those examples and formulas, the key to a good headline is to offer something for your visitor of value.

Remember that with a great headline should come great content – the two go hand in hand for maximum shareability.

2. Nobody cares… so gives them a reason to!

Following on from the above, you need to bear in mind that nobody really cares about you or your business.  Harsh, I know, but the sooner you realise this fact the sooner you can give your website visitors a reason to care.

The key to this is delivering content that engages your visitors and content that offers real value.

Ways to engage your audience include offering services or products for free and offering a solution to a problem they may have. Getting personal is also a great way to grab a visitors attention, especially if your customers will be able to directly relate with your own story.

3. Huge paragraphs of text will not engage your visitors. 

The majority of website visitors scan content to find keywords that are relevant to them. If they cannot find those keywords they will leave your website. The importance of scannable content is high for websites. Make use of italics, bold, underlining and CAPITALS as the first step to easy on the eye writing.

Huge paragraphs of text cannot be saved by good use of bolds and italics, though. Website visitors like to read simple and well structured content that does not make them squint their eyes. Make sure that your content for the web is split up in to bite size sections.

4. Linking to your sources and providing quotes backs up credibility.

At Content Hero we are a well regarded content writing agency, yet the very first link within this post is to a Copyblogger article. Why? Because linking to sources of information backs up credibility, and it also gives an option of further reading for website visitors.

You would be hard pressed to find a news story online that does not include a source or via link at the bottom pointing to another website. You should also do this for any quotes or statistics within your content.

5. Write all of your content for humans and not the search engines.

Furthermore, write as if you are the reader, not the publisher.

Search engines used to love keyword rich articles and web pages which stuffed keywords together. Now, they simply don’t. Valuable website content is content that converts visitors and engages them.

How is your content supposed to do that with sentences that are not relevant to the reader?

Mentioning your keyword terms within the first paragraph of an article or web page is fine. The trouble starts when you begin to stuff your articles with keywords and phrases in the blind hope that Google might find some relevance.

Jakk Ogden is the founder and CEO of Content Hero.


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