You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
The best practices in content writing often consist of some simple rules on improving user experience.
There are no set rules in content marketing – they different from audience to audience and niche to niche. However, a few things are pretty fundamental to improving your audience engagement. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can improve experience of your audience that reads your blog.
Write Concisely
Write like you tweet. When we’re forced to put our message across within the prescribed limit of 140 characters, we’re at your brevity best. We rarely use lengthy adjectives or words that don’t add any additionally value. Have a similar approach to writing your blog posts, each paragraph at a time.
[Tweet “When you attain clarity of thoughts, it resonates with your audience.”]
Make Your Content Consumable
Are you articles readable on smartphone screen? Do they look attractive or intimidating and bulky?
Because of the huge of amount content pieces we come across every day, we tend to shy away from the ones that look rather bulky to our eyes.
It’s important to understand why people tend to favorite more than they tweet or like more than they share. We all have very little time at our disposal and we want to consume a lot of information within a short span of time. Therefore, we tend to look for a quicker way of acknowledging information on the social web.
Based on this logic, you have to find a way to make your content quickly consumable for your audience.
[Tweet “Make your content look like fast food – let them consume it quickly and easily.”]
Make Your Content Sharable
It’s mandatory to have social sharing buttons at the beginning or end of your article, but you have to think out of the box. You need to allow them to share any part of your content if they like. This includes images as well. Talk to your web developer if they could find some web tools to make any part of your content shareable.
If your website is running on WordPress, you can use Selection Sharer plugin to empower your audience to share any part of the text content they are reading on your website. It has the same functionality that you can find on Medium. You can also use Click to Tweet plugin.
[Tweet “People want freedom on the Internet – let them have it and they’ll love you for it.”]
Make Your Content Curate-worthy
A lot of digital marketing professionals curate high quality content these days. They are constantly looking for content that is worth a mention in their content. So you have a real chance of being mentioned in their content if your content has something unique to offer. Before you start writing the actual post, look at your content blueprint and ask yourself if it has something your best friend would tweet about.
[Tweet “Make your content ridiculously valuable.”]
Quote Industry Authority Sources
Unless you’re an authority in your niche, your audience is not going to take your advice for granted. But the good news is your can gain their trust by directly quoting many reputable industry authorities they already trust.
According to Sujan Patel, tying in influencers is one the secret ingredients to boost your content marketing results.
[Tweet “When you quote authorities your audience trusts, they are more likely to trust you.”]
Cite Authority Sources
Nobody believes in what you’re saying unless you have proofs to support your claim.
Links to authority sources also indicate that you have done your research before writing a content piece. You have done all the hard work so your audience doesn’t have to. Done frequently, this is great value creation for your audience and a great opportunity to establish your authority as content curator. Embedding tweets in your content is one of the most powerful ways to cite your sources.
[Tweet “Show them the links or it didn’t happen!”]
Make Your Image Pinterest-worthy
Using high quality images that perfectly match the context of the content piece can make a huge psychological impact on your readers. To help your audience share images on your posts, you can use Social Share on Image Hover.
Used with discretion, images can add value and context to your articles. Images should be used to help your audience understand something better. But it really depends on the niche. Sometimes, images are required to create a strong visual impact that leaves a lasting impression in your audience.
Although Google Images are a great source, use a great deal of caution while using them because most of them are copyright-protected.
That leaves you with the option to choose low-cost royalty-free images or build your own images. I’d go with the latter.
Here are two great tools to create your own images.
Optimize images for different dimensions so they fit well inside the prescribed frame across Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Use Semantic Phrases
While writing an article around content marketing, try to use the words or phrases that are semantically relevant. For example, words/phrases such as best content marketing tools, content marketing challenges, influential content marketing techniques, social media best practices, build authority content can offer you strong context to create internal linking to the previous posts on your blog. Doing this will help your blog stay relevant to the future of SEO.
Make Your Content Scanable – Focus on Sub-headings
With so much of content pieces being shared on the social web, nobody has the time to read all of them. Moreover, the link-baits make people disillusioned and sceptic and they develop a habit of ignoring tweets that sound salesy or too good to be true.
Therefore, when you are able to put your articles in front of the target audience, make sure they are able to scan it in three seconds. This is where the sub-headings can be critical. Make them so good that your visitors find a reason to stay longer.
As you can see, the above rules are just fundamental to improving user experience. When you focus on offering value, your blog posts tend to find the audience on their own.
