That’s how you write persuasively and combine it with the very best pricing strategies to explode your sales.
But writing is also key to getting people to your website and to building that trust in the first place. So how do you write content that will really thrive on the web and spread like wildfire?
How to Get Clickbait Results Without Writing Clickbait Headlines
The power of content marketing can really be seen when you look at a website like Buzzfeed. This site claims that it gains 99% of its traffic through Facebook and doesn’t even worry about SEO. In an age where Google changes its algorithm every few months, this is a desirable concept.
How can Buzzfeed manage this? Partly it’s through clickbait titles, unfortunately. These are titles that encourage people to click by being hyperbolic, or by appealing to our need to share, communicate and fit-in, and it doesn’t always result in the highest quality copy.
To be fair, Buzzfeed is not the worst for this – actually a fair number of their articles and quizzes are quite fun or funny. The worst culprits are the websites that use titles that are very extreme, or that try to leverage curiosity without really telling you anything about what you’ll be reading:
“You’ll never believe what this amazing rabbit does next, it will break your heart!”
That’s an actual headline from a clickbait article. And often, when you click the link and read the page, you’ll be flooded with ads and you actually won’t get to see what the rabbit does. Or you’ll see what the rabbit does and you’ll be pretty ‘meh’ about it.
Another strategy is to promise incredible things from your articles, and again to do so in a mysterious or unbelievable way.
“This one weird trick will burn your fat away in days. COMPLETELY!”
One of the most frustrating ones you’ll see regularly is:
“Men Are Getting Amazing Muscle Gains From Legal Steroid Alternative. But Should it Be Banned?”
Often this is accompanied by a blatantly photoshopped image of a man with bursting biceps.
This is bad for your brand in the long term and will make it very hard to build a big following or to get anyone to buy from you. This strategy is not recommended!
But just as bad is all the content that just sounds dull, derivative and done before. If your content is ‘How to Get Six Pack Abs’ or ‘The Top Ten Bicep Exercises’, no one will read it because it’s like 100 other articles they’ve read.
Instead, you should look at using titles that leverage curiosity and make promises but actually deliver. How? By coming up with something new and something interesting. The simple litmus test you can use for this is to ask yourself: would you read it? And then to make sure you back up what you promise in the title.
There are countless studies being conducted all the time, discovering all sorts of new unusual training methods. So why not write about one of them? Alternatively, why not write about some aspect of fitness, hitherto not covered? That might mean writing about how you need calf strength for martial arts, it might mean writing about how to develop perfect balance from climbing in trees. If you’re in the making money niche, how about writing something psychological – maybe about how online success changes you as a person? This is interesting stuff that people might actually be curious to read.
So spend some time coming up with original content and recognize that this initial concept is what will set you on the right track to really successful content.
Why People Click and Share Before They Read
What you need to do when creating your articles and your headlines is to view them as ‘mini products’. That means you want to build hype around them, you want to give them an emotional ‘value proposition’ and generally you want to do all the same things you would do for a product to make them sell.
And when you understand that, like buying a product, people click on links because they are emotionally impulse to do so, then you can understand a little more behind the psychology of clickbait and getting clicks and shares in general.
A lot of people do share content or ‘like’ it before they read it. Why? Because it says something about them. Or they assume it does. People are driven by a need to fit in as we discussed earlier and this drives a lot of their behavior on social media, as you might imagine!
A big part of this is expressing ourselves, feeling like we belong to a special club, trying to be understood etc. When we see a title that sums up something about us, or that is about a topic we find fascinating, we share it because then people see that this is how we feel.
Otherwise, we share content because we think other people will like it. We see a post on ‘The Difficulties of Working From Home’ and we share it with Dave, because Dave works from home and this will show him we’re thinking of him.
So sharing content is often a form of expression or of communication. And in order to get this right, you need to write your content so that it is aimed specifically at a particular person. This means keeping in mind at all times a ‘persona’ – which is a fictional biography of the kind of person who is ideal for your content. To get this perfect, you can often imagine a friend or someone you know in real life as being that persona and this will then allow you to write as though you were speaking to them. It will be more engaging copy as a result, it will be more tailored to meet the right audience with the right ‘voice’ and it will be better received all around as a result.
Imaging someone you know is just one way to identify the persona for a specific article. Other things you can do include thinking about aspects of who they are: how old is this persona? What are their other interests? Where do they spend their time? What’s their average income?
Posting to the Right Communities
When you do this, you can identify a kind of ‘mini niche’ within your larger niche and this has the additional benefit of creating more routes to market. For instance, once you identify your persona is a martial artist (for that calves article) you can then find a community dedicated to that niche and post there. Google+ has lots of communities like this, as do the aforementioned Reddit subpages.
You can even use this strategy in reverse – by identifying a route to market and then writing something perfectly tailored for that audience. For instance, if you have a fitness site and you notice that Sylvester Stallone’s fan site has a particular active forum, then why not write something about Stallone and post it there?
Now of course we don’t want to write ‘Stallone’s Training Program’ because that article has been done to death. So again, how about something unique and different that hasn’t been seen before like ‘How Stallone Tore His Pec in Half’. NOW you have an article and NOW you have a market for it that will lap it up. Of course remember as we tie all this together, that your luck on a forum will be far greater if you spend some time getting known there first – don’t just dive straight in.
Finally, a last interest aspect of this is how you can combine different niches. Certain niches and demographics overlap and you can use articles to combine them in interesting ways. The health and make money niche? How about an article on how to make money from your fitness interests, or something on the health benefits of blogging? (I said benefits because the downsides article is again, done to death). When you combine your niches like this, you open yourself up to promote your products to a new audience thus finding new people to follow and enjoy your content.
What’s the Perfect Length for Your Content?
Once you’ve got people reading your content, the last question is how long it should be. Of course there’s no hard and fast rule to this but according to some research it’s generally thought to be about 1,600 words for maximum engagement and sharing.
What you might notice about this is that it’s rather long. Which in turn means that not everyone is likely to read through to the end. So how’s this a good thing then?
Well for starters, it means that your content will now be long enough to include lots of those long-tail keywords we discussed earlier. Likewise, it also means that your content will be in-depth enough to provide real value and to dig deep into your subject. This means that people can consider it as adding something new to a discussion or even as being a resource or authority on a subject. Longer content tends to have more value and that in turn means that it gets more shares and likes.
Of course not every blog post must adhere to this rule though. Ultimately the length of the content will vary depending on what you hope to achieve with it, who it’s aimed at… etc. Just make sure that you’re diving deep into your content and not just skimming the surface.
Making Money From Other People’s Content
This headline might sound a bit parasitic and perhaps it is… but making money from other people’s content is a legitimate and smart strategy used to great effect by a number of different Internet marketers.
One way to do this for instance is by posting content you find online on your own social media account. We discussed this earlier as a great means to populating your feed with hand-picked content.
You can also do something similar on your own website by publishing curated content or aggregate content. Aggregate content we discussed earlier as a way to gain exposure, it means that the content has been selected from various different sources and featured in order to provide a source of interesting headlines and news for the reader.
Likewise, you can also get ‘curated content’ which is an article made from excerpts of other articles. An obvious example of this might be a ‘top quotes’ article, whereas other examples could include featured paragraphs that help to illustrate a point, or that provide a single ‘master resource’ on a given subject. Again, your job here is to ensure that you are still providing value, which you do by finding the content, adding your analysis and generally creating the resource. Make sure though that you aren’t in breach of copyright and don’t rely on this type of content. Still, it’s good for filling your site with value on days when you don’t have time to create an entirely new article or blog post.
How to Get More From Your Content
Here’s one more quick tip that can save you a ton of time. If you want to get more from your content, then bear in mind that often it can be re-used. For content to perform well on Google, it needs to be unique meaning that it’s the first time that Google has found it.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be given away in a PDF, or as part of an app, meaning you can get value from it more than once. As long as you’re the owner of the content then there’s nothing wrong with doing this. So why not use the content that has already been on your blog to create an eBook to put on Kindle? Now you can profit multiple times from the same piece of writing.
Note: Some marketers will use a strategy called ‘content spinning’ to try and change their content enough through an automated process that Google will consider it ‘unique’. This almost always is met with failure, as the results tend to be garbled and illegible. Often this leads to penalization from Google and it certainly alienates your audience.
