5 Commandments in Creating Content That Gets Shared

It would seem that content is easy to create. Just share your knowledge, and people will reach out to you as an expert in your field. Then maybe you can tell us why tons of excellent examples of content never get into a powerful whirlpool of sharing? Today the amount of content is outrageous. Unfortunately, this also applies to low-quality pieces. Having wasted time on another useless rewrite, a person will subconsciously avoid materials on similar topics. It is quite common, and that is why a lot of good content goes unnoticed — resulting in undermined trust and all that jazz. How do you get people to read and share your copy? How to set up the process of creating content that gets shared and to activate the reader with a blurry eye? Read on to find out.

1. Reader Comes First

Before you start writing, read, and feel a special mantra. It has different names, but we can agree on the version “Selfishness, get lost”. Unfortunately, this is one of the most global problems, which in most cases, leads to the flooding of the Internet with terrible pieces.

We are used to treating articles as pieces of content to insert a backlink and place it on a third-party resource to praise a new feature of your company. To avoid such mistakes, thrust the professionals at https://adsy.com/content-creation.

Many brands that are ready to improve, unfortunately, start turning in the wrong direction and impose on readers what interests them, and not their readers. At the same time, they firmly believe that they have successfully put themselves in the client’s shoes and now everyone will rush to research their new content.

If you want your content to be discussed and shared:

1. Fill it with shareworthy value.
2. Don’t fool your readers with super-complex technical information.
3. Put it in plain language and explain as simply as possible how the topic will affect their life, health, or business in a positive way.

As soon as you move from the abstract to the particular, you immediately become much closer to people, and they become ready to listen to you. Listening is one step away from discussing. And discussing is a straight road to sharing.

2. Eye-Catching Headline

The headline is your showcase. The dull trope will leave people indifferent, and they will just pass by. But even if you are writing about what is generally known already, the showcase can make the difference. At first, it is striking because it stands out from the crowd of paraphrased duplicates. And then the readers go inside. And then it all depends on your presentation and the juiciness of the content. The job of the headline is to make the person want to come in.

We will not dwell on the most common recommendations such as using numbers, year, popular keywords and classic “how-to” in titles. Writing a headline is a challenging creative task, which can take up to half the time of creating the article itself. Options that are lively, intriguing, appealing to the readers’ deep feelings, emotions, or memories will work best. You can use famous allusions or metaphors from your field that will be understood by most of your target audience.

Avoid standardization. Don’t just put in your headline something like “How to improve content marketing”, give more expression: how to help content marketing explode, ignite content and make readers fly at it like moths to a campfire. Don’t be afraid to look funny, cocky, contradictory, ironic, or overly pompous. Be afraid to look milk-and-water.

3. Focus On Attention

So you’ve managed to attract the reader with your headline. Your next challenge is to craft the introduction. If you fail to throw a hook there, the reader will lose interest.

Have you heard that a person’s attention span has become less than that of a goldfish? Just 8 seconds and the reader is gone if you preferred to speak in a circumlocutory manner in the introduction. Your task is to keep the reader engaged at any cost.

Imagine that your opening words are the essence of everything you wanted to say. That’s your 30-second elevator pitch. The reader will not go beyond these paragraphs. Put your passion into them. You can do it in different ways:

1. Create strong emotion;
2. Surprise with unexpected or shocking information;
3. Scare with a possible unpleasant outcome;
4. Give hope for a solution to the problem;
5. Tease by knowing something that no one else does.

Just don’t shoot the breeze. Don’t use general phrases and platitudes. Don’t write that we are here to talk about creating good articles. It has been written, discussed, decided, and closed for a long time – no one will share an article with such a dull introduction.

Proofread it. The reader will automatically project your attitude towards mistakes in the text onto everything else you do, including your services.

4. Digestible Format

No one writes haphazard canvases of texts. Even those articles that are written for SEO purposes get a well-organized, concise form. We must ensure that our material is discussed and shared. And for that, it must be perfectly structured.

Each subheading can be compared to a stair by which readers rise to the next level of information acquisition or a new semantic round. If there are no stairs, people will feel that they are marking time. And if the next stair appears to be an illogical jump on another topic, then a person may simply not take it. And then what will they do? The article will be closed, of course: no one wants to break their “legs.”

Additionally, your copy’s proper structure is essential for the search engines to rank your article higher for the keywords you need. It is very difficult to create text according to the rules of SEO. It needs to contain:

1. Heading H1
2. Introduction
3. The main text, divided into blocks with subheadings H2-H6
4. Lists, tables, and links
5. Conclusion

Other valuable requirements to consider:

1. Write no more than 5 sentences per paragraph. At the same time, do not try to deceive yourself: the sentence should not contain more than 25 words.
2. Do not torment the reader with complicated language.
3. Space between paragraphs will help to make the text more scannable.
4. Use visuals. A shareable text should attract the reader. Do this through diverse forms of content. This is really important. Since many people are frivolous about the pictures in the article, we’ll talk about this below.

5. Visual Pillars

It is not for nothing that we have resorted to construction terminology. Images serve as a natural diluent of the text; columns or pillars, if you wish,  that summarize and hold a large amount of text for consideration. Infographics are a great example. If they did not exist in large formats such as long reads, the reader is quickly buried under the crumbling bricks of endless text (breaking the text into short paragraphs or lists won’t help).

However, if you hope that your content will be shared on social networks, graphics are essential. Have you seen a lot of content on social media that doesn’t have at least one image? Trust Hubspot: posts with photos generate more than 50% more likes than posts without ones. To get even more, the photos should be processed so that they look beautiful and at the same time natural. We recommend you to learn more about photo retouching and how to do it yourself.

Perhaps you have never worked with visuals and are afraid to depersonalize your content with multi-user stock images that do not have a semantic load. Fortunately, the topic of visual materials has been studied by responsible and authoritative platforms, which, at your first call, will tell you how to harness the power of graphics wisely.

Continue Reading: Email copywriting tips to create content people want to read

In Conclusion

Moving away from creating content for the sake of word count and starting to add value to it is a sure first step towards cherished share worthiness. This step will not be easy, and the path will not be quick. But when you start to see the first results, when you notice with a sinking heart the increase in the number of shares and the general resonance around your materials, you will realize that the game is worth the candle.

Remember that increased social engagement with content isn’t just about brand awareness. It’s also a significant SEO boost because (whoever denies it) the number of reposts and mentions of your articles is conceived by Google as a signal to raise your rankings. Good luck with your noble content endeavours!

About the Author

Marie Barnes is a writer for bestforacar. She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs.