Earning Readership with Content Mastery
Don’t focus on having great content. Focus on producing content that’s great for your readers.
—Brian Clark, author at Copyblogger
In this era of infobesity, even the best of content goes unnoticed. Emotional content sparked by visual storytelling, entertainment, and inspirational messaging shows great promise in captivating audiences. But there are some basics to content mastery that have distinguished social-media pros that don’t always elect to entertain and inspire. Many stay with an educational or informational objective. But common to most is a penchant for consistent quality, a focus on pain points, and great writing mechanics. In effect, they earn their readers through content that is:
• T-U-N-E-D (trended, user generated, niched, evergreen, digestible) for audience connection;
• F-O-C-U-S-E-D (frequent, optimized, cross-platform, unique, shareable, eye-catching, documented for SEO) on audience attraction; and
• Consistently created with high Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y (quick, unbiased, advisory, lead generating, image intensive, talk-worthy, your voice).
Making Your Content T-U-N-E-D for Audience Connection
Getting your content T-U-N-E-D for audience connection implies that you are writing on burning issues relevant to your hypertargeted audience. It also means that the content is new and easy to digest since the average time to decide on content reading is under 10 seconds.
Trended Topics
So one of the first questions to ask when researching topics for your content is whether the topic is new and trending upward. To help in this effort, there are many tools you can use to gain insight about the latest Google and Twitter search queries. For example, I selected the domain name “blog.socialcontenmarketing.com” to host my blog based on what I found on Google Trends for search popularity as well as what Topsy revealed on the level of Twitter engagement for this term. Based on the results, it made sense to use the long-tailed term as a common thread throughout all of my posts.
But tuning your content to trends goes beyond a mere search for SEO queries. Another way to ensure high trending is to tie their posts to current events. Just witness the many ways bloggers attempt to tie in Mother’s Day or the Super Bowl into their blog post storylines.
User-Generated Questions
The second question to ask in tuning your content is whether the post is too focused on your own offerings instead of answering a user-generated question. One of the best ways to have your content resonate with an audience is to address an issue that keeps them up at night.
Another approach is to observe the questions that come up in discussion forums like those found in LinkedIn Groups. Ideally, you want to answer aggravating questions that cost your readers’ time and money. This will further help in search results since questions on cost and aggravating pain points get searched very day.
Niched Audiences
Based on the exploding number of registered blogs, the route often taken by successful bloggers is to hypertarget their content with long-tailed topics. For example, to connect in today’s overcrowded blogosphere, you have to offer more than advice on ladies footwear. You have to offer tips specific to elderly athletic women’s footwear.
Ideally, every content post should be mapped to one of your target audience personas along the lines of the residential realtor example as shown in Figure 4.1. Starting with four targeted audiences identified by their spending motivations (sunbelt retreats, wealth management, life transition, and temporary accommodations), 16 personas were identified based on their unique habits and aspirations. This led to a clearer understanding of pain points that would not be recognized without dissecting the audience into distinct personas.
The mistake made by many is to assume you can write for everyone. But imagine the interest an ROI Maximizer persona would have in first purchase handholding or the interest a Mobile Crew persona would have in high-society acceptance. Targeting as niche an audience as possible allows realtors an opportunity to address a target audience’s biggest pain point by tailoring everything to help only them. And by writing the post as though it was solving a specific problem for a single person (i.e., single casting), readers will likely credit you with empathy, helpfulness, and expertise.
Figure 4.1 Persona Pain Points Identified for Residential Realtor Bloggers
Evergreen
Once a content topic candidate is considered, it is important to ensure it doesn’t date quickly. Known as evergreen content, some content posts can be written once and rerun in the future without it being rendered obsolete. This is why content on how-to’s or foundational topics are more effective than news stories. Writing a piece on conservative politics, for example, could remain perpetually relevant. But a story on “Top Tea Party Members Likely to Shake Up the Republican Party” would not likely have any value two years from the post.
The timelessness of this content gives it a high search ranking and great potential for accumulating links over time. As a result, traffic to the site hosting your content will improve over time as the evergreen content continues to gain popularity with its target audiences.
Digestible
A final question to ask when tuning your content for audience connection relates to how easy it is to digest. Audiences like posts that are concise and to the point. This starts with putting aside your writing formalities and using a conversational tone. If you write like you speak, your content more often stays on topic.
Consider the use of visual components as much as possible provided that they are self-explanatory. As discussed earlier, visual components like infographics are mentally processed much quicker than text.
All this assumes that the reader caught the gist of your topic from a well-crafted title and an opening sentence question that sets the stage for what is to come. The headline itself has to let the reader know how the post will benefit them. Blogging pros will argue that the ideal headline is six words long, the ideal paragraph falls between 40 and 55 characters, and the ideal blog post takes about seven minutes to read, roughly equating to 1,600 words.1
Getting Content F-O-C-U-S-E-D on Audience Attraction
Now that the content strategy and selected topics are tuned for the right audience connection, another critical exercise is to ensure that your content-writing efforts are focused on capturing the attention of your audience.
Frequent Postings
Content consistency is paramount. That is why it is important to blog at least twice a week especially when starting out. If there is nothing new for readers to see, they will quickly lose interest and see you as disengaged. But beyond the retention of repeat visitors, the frequency of posts impacts the number of new visitors to your site as well. Each new post, for example, adds to the number of indexed pages recognized by the search engines. Fresh content also signals to the search engines that your authority on the subject is backed by frequently updated information.
This not only improves the chances of target audiences simply finding the content, a study conducted by Hubspot revealed the following impacts on lead generation:2
• An average company will see a 45 percent growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11–20 to 21–50 articles.
• Companies that increase blogging from 3–5 x/month to 6–8 x/month almost double their leads.
Optimized
According to Lee Odden, author of Optimize, “Blogs are one of the most powerful publishing platforms that integrates the best of SEO, content marketing and social media optimization” (p. 147).3 As the centerpiece of content marketing, they serve as an aggregator of all your content while exploiting the power of its search potential and social outreach.
Search is greatly enhanced by its text-rich content and ability to attract links. But this requires attention to the following opportunities you have to boost search results.
1. Optimizing your blog domain URL, titles, and page construction descriptions around key phrases relevant to your target population and the benefits you provide.
2. Optimizing each blog post around keyword phrases you are targeting for persona pain points.
This last point refers to visible text opportunities as well as the hidden HTML text used in tagging and page construction. Each post provides an opportunity to exploit key phrases in the visible body of text where special attention should be given to the titles, headers, and the first paragraph of the post. In addition, bloggers have ample real estate in their HTML meta tags for describing their content through title descriptions, tags, anchor text, and image alt text.
The key is to tag and categorize everything but without overdoing the process. If the algorithms sense that you are engaged in keyword stuffing, you can get heavily penalized in search results. Instead, focus on simply being the best answer to what your target audience repeatedly asks. The latest of search algorithms (e.g., Hummingbird) will likely credit your content to a popular search query and reward you with high search results.
This also implies, however, that your content cannot be too short as it provides few opportunities to demonstrate your authority on the subject. So despite the pressure to keep blog posts short due to overcrowded content, blogging experts suggest that posts exceed 500 words for searchability as well as building thought leadership.
Cross-Platform
Blogs lend themselves well to hosting mid-of-funnel content often through registration pages, download links, and embedded presentations. For example, you can make an audio version of your blog post for an upcoming podcast show. This cross-promotion not only boosts the exposure of your other content (e.g., podcasts, webinars, videos, and apps), but it also allows a top-funnel to mid-funnel connection with your target audience.
The same applies in the outbound direction. You can make you posts social by abbreviated them for microblogs, newsletter digests, weekly roundups, social-media posts, or social-networking group discussions. A link to the more comprehensive blog post could then provide detailed information if needed.
In addition to cross-promoting, blog posts should be crafted with an intent to create multiple pieces of content often in the form of a blog series. Turning blogs posts into podcasts, slide decks, e-Books, or white papers are just a few of the many ways to repurpose your posts. This saves on resources while providing an avenue to mid-funnel content in the process. An additional blog post—remember this for search potential—can then be used as an introduction to the deeper content. As an example, see how this is done on my own blog for showcasing e-Books (http://bit.ly/1rz6dCu) and by the Content Marketing Institute for their podcast introductions (http://bit.ly/1m3x1Ye).
Unique
In order to deliver something of value to your target audience in your post, you need to offer something unique. If not, your audience will merely see you as a curator of others’ ideas. A great way to start is to look for original content. This could include recently surveyed information or breaking news.
But as content-marketing experts will point out, unique content does not always have to be original. You can write about your unique strategies or experiences as well. Many bloggers, for example, merely provide a unique angle to widely discussed topics. If not their own, they invite experts to share their thoughts. Either way, by providing a unique perspective, you help your audience with interpretation and judgment.
I applied this to my own field when evaluating social-media books to read (http://bit.ly/1hrzk1G). There are plenty of practitioners who rate their top 10s; so I reviewed, rated, and ranked the top 25 social-media books from an academic perspective. As acknowledged by bestselling author, Jay Baer, the countdown offered something new to the social-media community.
Another approach to making your content unique is to play the role of the contrarian or devil’s advocate. Readers then benefit from the counterpoints often giving you the credit for having a fresh perspective. And by building controversy into your argument, readers will often become more engaged as they feel compelled to share their own perspective.
Ironically, a fourth way to make your content unique is to back off on overaddressing audience needs and focus more on injecting your own passions as was described in the previous chapter. After all, it’s how others respond to your ideas that count the most. Social-media author, Jay Acunzo, puts it this way: “If you only think about your audience, you’ll likely start to sound exactly like all your competitors.”4 Ideally you want to blend you audience’s interests with your own. This can best be accomplished with a personal story relevant to your audience.
Shareable
The key to making your content shareable is to first make your posts easy to share. Most content platforms allow you to accomplish this very easily through plug-ins that include sharing across dozens of platforms. At minimum, your posts must reach where your target audiences hang out. This could include relevant LinkedIn groups, Google+ communities, and Twitter chats.
As described in Chapter 3, the more emotion felt from your post, the greater the opportunity to be shared. This could include the use of humor, heartfelt moments, feelings of astonishment, or inspirational stories. Another inducement to share is based on the passing of bragging rights. This is why articles on breaking news are key. Readers are often anxious to share what they believe to be an exclusive discovery.
To ensure your content is shareable with a relevant audience, it’s important to syndicate it through an RSS feed or through the many blogging listing directories, social bookmarking sites, and news aggregators discussed more in Chapter 8. Finally, you can post the content outside your domain with the intent of creating a new audience. This can be done by featuring your posts as a guest blog on a high traffic site as well as posting on social networks like LinkedIn.
Eye-Catching Title
Without a doubt, headlines are the most important part of your post. And to craft one effectively, you have to pique your audience’s curiosity. One way to do this is to distract them with a message that seems out of sorts. When asking my students what advertisement they remember on a highway sponsoring over 50 signs, they invariably recall two of them. One says “Your Wife Is Hot.” Reading further, the sign says “You Better Fix Her Air Conditioning.” The other says “We Buy Ugly.” Both represent anomalies that capture our attention.
Asking a question—especially if it’s provocative—can also pique your audience’s attention. At minimum, curious readers may enjoy the insights from a contrary position like “Will Instagram Disappear”? Leading blogger, Jeff Bullas, often uses negative terms in his titles. His post on “The Top 15 Social Media Marketing Strategy Mistakes to Avoid” has amassed nearly 3K tweets.
As discussed earlier, the fast growth of video for content marketing has undoubtedly created the most powerful means of attracting and engaging target audiences. A challenge at this point, however, is to make the video searchable. One way to accomplish this is by transcribing the audio and posting the script along with the video. This will help the content get found by search engines. Once transcribed, the scripted version could be embellished with slides, diagrams, infographics, and photos to make it more appealing as a blog post.
The same could be accomplished for audio podcasts and conference presentations. Recordings can be spelled out into scripted versions with embedded slides and audio takes. This not only provides an additional opportunity to release another blog post, but it also captures the attention of search engines recognizing the embedded links potentially from high page-ranking sources as well as the keyword-rich text in the script. If permitted by the podcaster or presenter, the script could be optimized around additional search terms that further boost the page rank.
Creating Content with Consistent Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y
With your content now tuned to target audiences and focused on capturing their attention, a remaining step is to ensure your content is backed by consistent quality.
As described earlier, the use of a conversational style and visuals makes a blog more scannable. But much can be done with writing structure to make it even quicker to digest. That is why expert bloggers spend considerable time on the first few sentences. This opening must spell out why the topic benefits your audience and what you plan to say.
The first point implies that the fewer points made the better. The concept works much like an ad. You have a limited number of seconds to convince your readers that the one pain point or passion they have will be well covered in your post. And there will be nothing else to distract them.
The second point means you have to “tell them what you are going to tell them”. Then “tell them” in the body of your post. And then “tell them what you told them at the end of your post.” Progression of the post should be quick and to the point if you want today’s reader to stick around.
To accomplish this, leading bloggers like Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman offer the following advice:5
• Use bullets and lists to edit out unnecessary words.
• Make sentences and paragraphs short (<6 lines paragraph).
• Break up text with headings and subheadings.
• Highlight key points in quotes or bolded phrases.
• Use easy to read fonts.
Unbiased Content
What distinguishes true journalism from the average content post is the information-vetting process used to validate findings. Few would argue that traditional journalism is based on far more rigorous standards for source accuracy than what is found in the blogosphere. This does not imply you shouldn’t express an opinion. But it does suggest that readers appreciate content that is unbiased and backed by either well-documented evidence or well-respected insights.
So for content to be considered high quality, the information offered in your post has to be accurate and reliable. Among the best ways to accomplish this is through empirically tested results or the insights offered by recognized experts in the field. This is why leading bloggers regularly post interviews with leading authorities often in the form of a playbook of insights from many experts.
Survey results from your own client sampling can also remove this biased perception especially if the sample is large, representative, and empirically tested with at least a reasonable methodology. This can be done without laying out the entire testing procedure in the base of the post. It merely requires a brief explanation or reference to the study background.
As an example, I released 15 blog posts on ways to create entertaining content from a study conducted on viral videos. Each post made reference to the study posted on SlideShare and included the following closing paragraph on the study background.
A total of 3351 high performing videos (> 50K views) were examined in this ranking of top YouTube videos. These viral videos included re-casted television commercials that were posted on YouTube as a social media video back channel. Statistics were then recorded on the number of likes, dislikes, comments and views, where an exploratory study was subsequently published with the Academy of Marketing Science and 2013 Cross-Cultural Research Conference.
Advisory
What often separates blogs from articles is the advisory nature of the latter. Blogs have to be either instructional, insightful, or helpful to decision making. Without advice from a credible source, we are merely adding to the information pile. If you are not convinced, just check out the popularity of blogs that begin with “5 Ways to . . .” or “7 Steps to . . .” Readers obviously have an expectation for following advice.
In addition to laying out an advisory trail, it helps to single out specific audience questions to answer. This is where comment trails on blogs and discussion forums serve as an excellent source of topics to consider in a blog post. Blogging pros will often pose questions to their audiences on Twitter, Facebook, or a LinkedIn Group like “What is you greatest challenge . . . ?” or “What question do you have regarding . . . ?” With large enough audience, the responses then serve as questions to answer in a blog post or newsletter.
By having a question-driven and advisory-driven style, your post may further benefit from readability. If the first sentence of the post starts with a question for your audience, a clear expectation of the post is made up front. Furthermore, should the post merely address answers to the question, readers will likely find the content more digestible and to the point.
Lead Generating
Blogs are used primarily as top-of-funnel content. This makes them ideal for capturing audience information at an early awareness stage. But much of that blog traffic may be wasted unless readers are encouraged to take immediate action after reading the content. This requires that your blog content host lead generating calls to action (CTA) such as the following:
1. registering for free webinars;
2. downloading white papers, case studies, reports, or e-Books;
3. joining live events;
4. following on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest;
5. sharing with friends;
6. subscribing to newsletters and blogs;
7. offering comments;
8. posing questions;
9. requesting demos or more information; and
10. buying through shopping carts.
These CTAs not only provide an avenue to maintain engagement, but they also help escort your prospects through the sales funnel (more on this in Chapter 4). A compelling CTA, for example, represents an opportunity for you to analyze data from the downloaded content or subscriptions and measure which topics had the greatest impact on conversion. And by encouraging your prospect to take the next step, you stay in the loop. This allows another opportunity to demonstrate your trustworthiness while keeping the prospect from researching elsewhere.
A clear drawback of predominantly textual content in a content post is its often overwhelming and impersonal appearance. Graphical and photo-based imagery not only require less mental processing; but, as described earlier, they also strike an emotional chord that even the best of written poetry cannot accomplish. Moreover, imagery allows you to mix up your content as a diversity tactic. Audiences often appreciate the change up.
It is no secret that images are the most shared media on the likes of Facebook. That in itself is testimony to its appeal as a content element. But the rise of photo-messaging apps (e.g., Snapchat), mobile photo-sharing services (e.g., Instagram), and visual discovery tools (e.g., Pinterest) attests to how dependent social-media users are on viewing something over reading something. Pinterest, in particular, has become one of the leading drivers of traffic to websites. Your benefitting from this traffic, however, assumes that your blog post accommodates photos to be pinned. Besides photos, SlideShare decks can be embedded into your blog both as a site traffic builder and a preview of deeper content. Notice from this example on my own blog where an embedded slide gives you a preview of the content from SlideShare right on the blog. A downloaded e-Book, on the other hand, would not give you this built-in preview.
Talk-Worthy Content
For content to engage with your audience, they have to invite a dialogue. Some refer to this tactic as making your content REMARKable (by inviting remarks) or talk-worthy.
This may not be the same incentive they have to share or link to your content. Share-worthiness and link-worthiness have more to do with leveraging your bragging rights or backing your story. The intent of making your content talk-worthy, on the other hand, is to stimulate a conversation or invite feedback as a method to keep your readers involved.
Some of the most popular techniques for accomplishing this are to include open-ended posts that fuel a debate. Rather than solving the problem, you could engage in a series of points and counterpoints enlisting your reviewers to share their own thoughts. More reputable bloggers often engage their viewers for crowdsourcing (i.e., the process of gathering content by soliciting contributions from a large sample of followers). But even a simple request for feedback or response to a poll can often spur a dialogue.
Your Voice
One of the most common responses offered by content-marketing experts on tips for drawing in an audience is to be authentic and enthusiastic. This starts with writing about something you are passionate about and in a voice that best reflects your personality. As leading blogger, Michael Hyatt, points out, many bloggers attempt to be someone that they are not when building a blogging platform.6 Instead, he prescribes one of three possibilities (authority, empathy, or transparency) to examine in defining your own authentic voice:
1. The Sage: This is a recognized expert in the field who can speak with authority.
2. The Sherpa: This is the trusted guide who has learned from their mistakes and who speaks with the voice of confidence and empathy.
3. The Struggler: This is a fellow traveler who merely shares their own successes and mistakes as they embark on their journey. They have the voice of transparency as they tell it like it is.
Once you determine your role as Sage, Sherpa, or Struggler, you have a clearer path as to how you want to solve your target audience’s problems. The Sage may entertain an interview or FAQ format, while the Sherpa chooses a more talk-worthy approach where the two-way dialogue permits more shared experiences. The Struggler, on the other hand, may elect to be more visual in their approach so the reader gets a more intimate look at what works and what doesn’t.
Regardless of the chosen role, upholding this authenticity requires that you stay consistent with the voice. Too often we read blogs written by someone with a low-key blogging tone only to hear a motivational speaker when they are interviewed in a podcast. By resorting to these pumped-up impersonations, you run the risk of tarnishing the connection your readers, listeners, or viewers may have had with your candor and personality.
Notes
1. “5 Steps to Get Followers to Amplify Your Best Content Marketing” by Content Marketing Institute’s Dave Landry (http://bit.ly/1AUBQXa).
2. “12 Revealing Charts to Help You Benchmark Your Business Blogging Performance” by Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughan.
3. Lee Odden. Optimize. New Jersey: Wiley. 2012. p. 147.
4. “Why ‘Write for Your Audience’ Has Become Dangerous Advice” by Jay Acunzo (bit.ly/1muU67j).
5. Ann Handley, and C.C. Chapman. Content Rules. New Jersey: Wiley. 2011. p. 148.
6. “5 Reasons You’re Not Getting Traction with Your Platform” by Michael Hyatt, (bit.ly/1nAUNh9).