With the industry abuzz over native advertising and its various uses, it is necessary to remind ourselves that however you define it, the content that comes out of it to engage an audience should only ever be high quality content. Seems obvious but too often, some may feel the need to stand on a soapbox, chest-beat and sing the praises of their product or company. Creating great content means creating value to keep your audience engaged and to serve their interests first.
Here are the 5 seemingly simply yet often overlooked content creation tips:
1. Know your audience
Different types of content appeal to different people. Make sure you know who you targeting and tailor your content to connect with your desired audience from the get-go. In addition, make sure of all your content is edited. Poor grammar and spelling mistakes are a fast way to lose credibility and your audience.
2. Keep it compelling
When creating longform content, beware of long blocks of content that will have people skimming to the end or worse, losing interest after the first sentence. Keep your ratio of text to images in mind by using 5-6 paragraphs of text per page interspersed with high-quality images.
3. Mix up your media
High-quality content doesn’t only mean a well-written piece. Beyond articles, using multimedia like videos, slideshows, photos, playlists and recipes is a great way to keep your audience engaged across a variety of formats.
4. Offer more
If your content is engaging, your audience will want more. Offer the option to read or sign up for more, provide you with feedback or share it with others.
5. Present value not a pitch
The best content focuses on educating, entertaining and delivering value to an audience rather than a hard pitch for a product or service. Don’t clutter your audience’s time with pointless content geared for SEO juice and links. Instead, ask what’s in it for your audience and how you can captivate through your expertise on a particular topic in your space.
Natalie Chan
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4 Responses to 5 Steps to Creating High Quality Content
Well, the info is pretty narrow. I would also add a few more points to it. But in general everything is correct. Audience and the variety of info! Thanks for sharing
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Thanks Evan for your feedback. Yes I think there’s a lot we could add to this but in the interests of keeping it short, sweet and singleminded, we focused just on these key points.
Thanks so much for keeping this simple and at the same effective. True, there are more to add, but you addressed the most important of all true traffic technique- CONTENT RELEVANCE-
Thanks so much! I am working on an article on self/talent marketing on the social media…for members of my niche community website. My audience are artistes, musicians and other entertainment people. ‘Knowing your audience’ as you mentioned comes to play here, and the other tips to keep them attached and educated.
Thanks again!
Twitter: abusamuel
Great post Natalie!Some would argue that content marketing is the most efficient way to boost your SEO and also an excellent engagement vehicle. But if there’s anything stopping you from writing high quality content, it would be not knowing who exactly you’re writing for. In addition to content selection itself, the tone of voice and style of writing will depend on your target audience, so keep in touch with them by friending and following them in social media, asking them for feedback whenever possible, and generally engaging with them:)
Twitter: BrbaraMcKinney