If you think that your job ends at cooking up fine content, you are clearly mistaken. A content creator these days needs to bring much more to the table.
With a mind-boggling number of articles being published every minute on social media platforms and blogs, a writer today has to literally wrestle for attention. Your target audience is spoilt for choice and with an average on-screen attention span of fewer than eight seconds, it is a tough job to get a reader to read through an entire article. Let’s face it, reaching out to your target audience is practically impossible without some amount of promotion. So what are the best practices that content writers follow?
The trick to successful content is a connection with the audience and promotion to reach the right audience.
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Know what they want
It’s crucial for a writer to know what his readers want. Keep yourself self updated with the latest trends in writing. What you serve should be in tune with the latest content best practices.
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Customize content according to the platform and audience.
To optimize the impact of your writing, you need to make sure that the right words reach the right sets of audiences. Know the demographics before you frame your writing. The cheat sheet that I personally follow is making one master content and then tweaking a few lines as per the platform. It also works well when I extract a few catchy lines for a short tweet or Insta post.
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Don’t brag about your brand.
Of course, the entire purpose behind your write-up is to promote the brand, but don’t make it too obvious. Let the concept make an automatic impact through its interesting tone. Social media is an excellent platform where you can be creative without being too direct. Let your Insta handle speak of background stories, inspirations, and cool clicks on the way.
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Your content should tell a story.
Be engaging. To create an impact, try to make your readers feel an emotional connection with your article. Your social media presence can do wonders if you have an interesting story to tell.
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Be personal with your audience.
A one-to-one tone creates more impact than you can imagine. Statistics say that more than 70% of the audience engages with content that is personalized.
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Optimize your keywords for faster attention.
A little keyword research can help you with the words that most searched for your type of content. Draft your title, meta descriptions, and first paragraphs to include such words or phrases.
And finally, promote your work. Once you know where you want to reach, how do you promote?
Your own media is of course an obvious option. You already have a pool of audience who knows and trusts you. Communicate with them in your own media, send out emails and newsletters. True that doesn’t cost you anything to promote in your own webpage or blog, but make sure that you don’t overstuff it with your promotion posts.
Paid media
can get you good results if you use the right platform. Locate the platforms that your target pool uses and spend on paid promotion. But be sure to check the ROI along the way.
Earned media in the form of third-party attention from reviews or recommendations can also be useful, though this takes some time to build the PR. Reach out to influencers.
Remember that the person on the other end of the screen is spoilt for choice. A little slack on your side and he will go back to binge-watch the series or scroll down to a funny video. Be engaging in the first instance for you won’t have a second chance, and reach out as much as you can for you never know where your audience is waiting.
