This year has been challenging, not only in our personal lives but also our businesses. With COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, many business owners have felt a push to shift their attention to virtual spaces and increase their online presence. Everyone is doing their best to grab their ideal audience’s attention. How do you stand out?
So you want to stand out in the sea of online content…
As you spend time thinking about what your brand represents online, pay attention to the quality and relevance of your written content and the topics you choose to write about. There are a multitude of details that make a blog post or Instagram caption engaging. Let’s take a look at just a few.
What makes successful written content?
- It’s timely and relevant.
There are some simple ways to ensure that your content is timely. Post your content in time to celebrate whatever holiday or significant season is around the corner. Acknowledge what’s going on around the world and participate in the conversation, whether it’s COVID-19, Mother’s Day, or National Donut Day.
Great content attracts an audience because it is relevant and adheres to the current season and nationally trending topics.
- It’s relatable.
Content that sounds like it was written by a real person is compelling and unique. Readers respond to personalized information learned from the experiences of real people rather than an impersonal sales copy.
Especially if you are a small business owner – make it about you! Share something about yourself with authenticity, and watch your audience start a conversation because they want to relate to you.
“Share something about yourself with authenticity, and watch your audience start a conversation because they want to relate to you.”
- It grabs attention with a sharp and simple headline.
Want to get your readers to click on that link-in-bio or that article shared on Facebook? You need a headline that grabs their attention and sets the tone for the content ahead.
For example, a great “listicle” headline will let the reader know that it’s a list, it has 10 items and it will give them practical tips. It’s easier to commit to reading a piece of content if readers know what to expect and short concise lists are very easy to commit to.
- It has digestible sentences and short paragraphs.
Today’s online readers don’t keep their attention on one piece of content for too long. So writers have to leave their beautiful wordy stanzas in favor of short, precise and to-the-point sentences.
In the case that you need to use more words than you’d like, make the next sentence short. Try to avoid complex sentences with two subjects, then use connecting words at the start of the sentence instead.
Break your content up in paragraphs with the topic of your sentences. If that means two-three sentences per paragraph, so be it! Readers rarely focus and read something in-depth. Usually, they simply scan through – and short sentences and paragraphs make it easy.
“Readers rarely focus and read something in-depth. Usually, they simply scan through – and short sentences and paragraphs make it easy.”
- It’s optimized with relevant keywords.
As you can see in this blog post, I have used the words written, content, successful, online and some other relevant terms in nearly every other sentence. It may seem unnatural or unnecessary to use the same words over and over. But successful web written content differs from its print counterpart in that it is chock-full of words or word combinations that make it show up in searches.
So, if you don’t want to appear on page 10 of Google search results, make sure to draft a list of popular relevant keywords before you start writing. And as you write, generously sprinkle them through your copy.
Use these 5 quick and easy-to-implement tips to engage your audience with each piece of writing. And if you want to enhance the quality of your content, chat with WISE about how we can help! We have expert writers and idea generators and we love helping our clients become more successful through their content and online presence.
