Engaging Content: The 9 Essential Elements of Engaging, Attention-Grabbing Content

With the ongoing proliferation of content in various forms around the web, it's becoming ever more essential to ensure the content you create engages the attention of your intended audience and stands out from the crowd.

It's helpful to think about and analyze your own experience.

What causes you to engage with a particular piece of content above others vying for your attention?

What is it that maintains that engagement? Or, conversely, what causes you to lose interest and click away?

What aspects of the content encourage you to share it with others?

If you're searching for something online, what encourages you to click through to one result above another?

As you know, there's a no shortage of competing content out there, all pleading for our time and attention.

To rise above the noise and ensure your own content engages your intended audience is no mean feat. But with a few key elements in mind, it's certainly achievable.

So what helps create such engaging content? What ensures a piece of content not only grabs your attention in the first place but holds it and makes an imprint on your mind?

Of course, we all have our own individual likes and dislikes, and so I surveyed a group of people interested in content marketing on just these questions. Based on the answers I received, the following list represents what may be considered to be the nine essential elements of engaging, attention-grabbing content.

Essential Element 1: An Attention-Grabbing Title

Whether your content is an article, a blog post, a video, audio recording, or whatever, the title plays an absolutely essential role. It needs to both ensure your content stands out from the crowd and appeals to your intended audience.

It should:

- Be specific: what exactly does the content offer?

- Be intriguing: how can you arouse the curiosity of those you are hoping to attract, so they're almost compelled to click through?

- Offer a solution: where there's a problem, there's a desire or need for a solution - how can your title tap into that?

Essential Element 2: Deliver On Its Promise

Have you ever clicked through on a piece of content only to find it doesn't provide what you thought it would?

It's essential to deliver on the promise of your title for the following key reasons:

- Once you've engaged someone's attention in the first place, you then need to maintain their attention in order for the content to ultimately benefit you. For example, you're looking for someone to visit your website, share the content with others, link up with you on social media, and so on, as well as generally raise the online profile of you and your business.

- If someone is clicking through to your content from Google, and then rapidly clicking back to the search engine results to click-through somewhere else, it tells Google something about how to rank your content. If your content is not delivering what their search users are looking for, its rank will deteriorate over time. On the other hand, if your content grabs their attention and holds it, it can only benefit the ranking of your content.

Essential Element 3: Meet A Need

Your content largely exists for one reason only - to grab the attention of potential prospects for your business.

Your content must, therefore, meet a need that the audience has in order to grab their attention and engage with them.

What are the needs of your marketplace? What problems are they facing? What questions frequently arise? What are they looking for assistance with or information about?

There are various ways to find out, such as direct feedback from existing customers and prospects, social media, forums, industry publications, and so on.

Essential Element 4: Authenticity

People like to connect with people like themselves. Show through your content that you are a real person just like them, with real thoughts, opinions, feelings, and ideas.

Sure, you'll turn some people away, but try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no-one. Instead, be authentic and open, and you'll attract an audience who will resonate strongly with you, engage effectively with your content, and be very responsive because of the connection you have with them. And a smaller but responsive audience is far more valuable than a larger but indifferent one.

Essential Element 5: Originality - Offer A Unique Perspective

If your content is simply a rehashed version of similar content elsewhere, it's not going to grab anyone's attention or stand out from the crowd.

Instead, offer them the benefit of your own unique knowledge and experience, and put your own unique stamp on your content.

Essential Element 6: Improve Lives

Okay, it's not quite in the same league as discovering a cure for cancer or eradicating poverty, but none-the-less your content should aim to improve the lives of your audience.

By helping others through your content, you make your content memorable for them. They will also remember you, and more readily connect with you, whether by signing up to your email list, connecting over social media, or looking out for your content in the future and referring you to others.

Essential Element 7: Thought-Provoking

By making your audience think, even if they don't always agree with you, you'll engage more easily with them, stick in their minds for longer and raise your profile. Don't be afraid to challenge your audience or go against the grain: controversy sells.

Essential Element 8: Flows Easily

Unless your content flows well, people will rapidly disengage and click away.

Take time to carefully review every piece of content, or have someone else go through it for you and highlight any sticking points or parts they don't understand. You'll be surprised what you can improve by leaving your content for a few days after creating it, and then carefully reviewing it.

Ensure you are using correct spelling and grammar. Basic spelling mistakes, typos and poor use of English reflect badly on you and gives a poor impression.

Use effective formattings, such as bullet points, and short paragraphs for easy online reading.

Ensure you use the language your intended audience will understand. Avoid the use of jargon that is only like to alienate those you are hoping to attract.

Essential Element 9: Engage Emotionally

Various studies have shown that emotions are key drivers for human activity. That includes choosing whether to engage with or disengage from your content, and whether or not to share your content with others. Often such decisions are entirely subconscious.

Content that becomes viral nearly always makes some key emotional connection with its audience.

Speed is also important and is one reason why images are so prolific on social media and generally have higher levels of viral activity than other types of content.

Try to engage emotionally with your audience within the first few seconds of them finding your content, and you'll both hold their attention for longer and increase the benefits your content delivers for your business.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Steve_Shaw/4373

P.S.

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How to Get Your Business the Most Attention Possible in 2020 | Game Changers Summit Keynote 2019

Social Media Marketing - 25 Facebook Post Ideas to Attract More Customers & Sales For Your Business

7 Ways To Drive User Engagement On Social Media

When you're on social media, you want to get lots of engagement. Having said that, driving engagement can sometimes be a tedious task. But if you understand what you want, you can ensure that it happens by planning for it, using the right systems to ensure it happens, and then learning from it so you can do it more.

1. Develop an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy

You want the content you share on social media to integrate with the content you publish on your blog and website, email, and elsewhere. It should all have a purpose and a reason for being and a goal in mind.

2. Create and Share Content That Is Member Focused

When the content you create and that others have created is focused on what your audience want to know, need to know, and have an interest in, it will keep people interested. It will make them want to check out your blog, open your emails, and participate more because it's about them.

3. Share Video Content to Your Groups

Using video content is also a good way to get more engagement. People are more likely to comment on videos, share videos, and even watch the video over text-based content. This is especially true if the video is short and to the point.

4. Tag People in Posts

When you are sharing someone else's content, or mentioning someone in your content, or think someone would be interested in the content, tag them so that their name shows up to themselves and to others (depending on their privacy settings). This is a great way to get their friends to look too.

5. Schedule Your Content for the Best Times

Using data, determine when the best times and days are to share information with them, and then use scheduling features to share at the time when more people are more likely to see the post.

6. Write Better Headlines to Get Attention

Your headlines matter a lot because some people will just pass over your shares if the headlines aren't written correctly. You don't want to trick people, but you do want to get their attention, so it's a fine line to walk when considering how headlines affect open rates.

7. Study Your Audience Insights

Remember that data is important, so study the data available to you on each platform that you use so that you know the right content to share at the right time and how to get more engagement where your audience is at the time.

Facebook wants your business to succeed when using their social media platform. This just makes sense. If you achieve your business goals while spending money on Facebook advertising, you're likely to use it again in the future. To learn how to make your social media marketing successful and profitable on Facebook, download my Free Checklist, Successful Facebook Ads at https://jonallo.com/FBads

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Jon_Allo/1079948

SEO And PPC: A Powerful Combination

A decent marketing technique can take a business higher than ever of success. On account of current marketing procedures, regularly utilized as a part of a blend with standard methods, there are always new techniques for looking for upper hand regardless of expanding immersion in various ventures.

What we know as advertising today is unique about the past. The fast improvement in this specific industry is the aftershock of how rapidly the opposition is getting to be harder both in nearby and worldwide markets.

Showcasing is a mix of various procedures, which rely on your particular business objectives and targets. All were developing, and settler organisations are utilizing a couple of strategies. For instance, content advertising, which is not any more restricted merely to articles and web journals. Organizations are currently centered on offering fascinating substance as recordings, instructional exercises, info-graphics, and handouts.

Aside from making a drawing in content, organisations do depend on specific details to pull in consideration of the real market. This incorporates both site design improvement and pay-per-click, otherwise called SEO and PPC separately.

Understanding The Variance Between SEO And PPC 
SEO is directly related to content. These are particular words or phrases that are more than once added to the substance to influence a web to page rank among the prominently looked outcomes in web indexes. PPC is a piece of the promotions that fast moving towards the content and produces leads. In any case, the principal distinction is that SEO produces natural activity while PPC, as the name proposes, requires a specific measure of installment each time a potential lead clicks.

You may have gone over natural inquiry postings and paid pursuit postings. This is a result of the distinction clarified previously. Altogether, the two terms are a piece of the web index showcasing or SEM. SEM is regularly part of an association's entire internet marketing strategy. The more successful the technique is, the better the outcomes will be. For this reason, associations employ experienced experts to make the best promoting methodology.

SEO VS. PPC? OR SEO AND PPC?
Google led more than 400 investigations in 2011 on whether the search and ripped apart their natural traffic, if search advertisements were stopped, would clicks on organic search results boost, and compensate for the misfortune in paid traffic?

As uncovered in the gathering of the considerable number of information,

"The level of paid clicks that are not compensated for by natural clicks when look promotions are stopped. The outcomes were amazing. The incremental advertisement clicks rate crosswise over verticals is 89%. This implies an entire 89% of the movement created via look promotions isn't supplanted by organic clicks when advertisements are delayed. This number was reliably high crosswise over verticals."

This demonstrates utilizing both PPC and SEO has enormous effects the outcomes created. Convincingly, it is just when they cooperate in a settlement that they give the results you are searching for in these campaigns.

Advantages Of Using SEO And PPC Together
One can't deny the fact that PPC and SEO are both different strategies. Each has various benefits when used individually. But, some experts do say that using both together can enhance specific effects. There are some particular situations where the two diverse strategies complement each other and form a sturdier SEM strategy.

Here are the top 5 benefits of using PPC and SEO together.

Improved Visibility 
Both SEO and PPC are utilized to target search engine result pages or SERPs. The issue is that specific search terms can end up ordinary, which occupies advertisers concentrate far from PPC endeavors. In any case, bear in mind that the best 2 to 3 comes about on most SERPs are PPC promotions.

Joining SEO and PPC gives you a superior opportunity to rule both the natural and paid outcomes. This will likewise offer a shot at building up a definitive position in your specific industry.

Gaining From PPC
Information demonstrates that specific PPC components work for SEO too. If a particular advertisement of PPC is helping you with lead age and deals transformation, you can add similar ingredients to your content strategy. You can enhance the meta descriptions, title labels, and page content to impact the same successful outcomes. This is a fast method for figuring out what parts of the procedure are working. When you attempt an organic search strategy, it can set aside the opportunity to decide these properties. Paid content will tell you far prior, and you can rapidly apply the same for SEO to double the impact.

Social Media Optimization 
PPC and SMO joined have the ability to be to a high degree compelling. Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube permit open doors for an impressive advertisement campaign. These promotions can likewise be focused towards a particular section of your target market. For instance, you can demonstrate specific content just to individuals between 20 to 30 years of age. You can apply this data to your SEO techniques too.

A Double Strategy 
Getting organic traffic is troublesome. Indeed, even social media sites are presently advancing paid campaigns over organic traffic. It is conceivable that individuals from your target market indicate premium and visit the pages you have set up, however, neglect to make any real move, for example, memberships or buys. What you can do is utilize SEO to draw in visitors to get an idea what you do and what you have to offer. Afterwards, you can pursue these clients and recover their consideration through convincing PPC advertisement campaigns.

Reveal More High-Performing Keywords
An incredible advantage of SEO is that it usually uncovers keywords that weren't in your unique procedure. A significant number of these keywords can produce more activity. You can cross-reference these with commitment measurements to figure out which ones will yield the best outcomes. Add these watchwords to your PPC technique. Thus, you have extended your keyword set to include the ones you were generally disregarding.

Joining SEO and PPC may not be a new trend but rather among all the new data coming to your direction, it makes no mischief to attempt some old jewels also. Your general internet marketing strategy can turn out to be very useful if you consolidate SEO and PPC. Nonetheless, this may require the assistance of your best specialists, time and the power utilization of your advertising spending plan.

How Can Intelicle help? 
Intelicle is a well-known SEO expert London based agency, we can help you grow your business online organically and utilize via any PPC (pay per click) platform such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you want to get the most out of today's online marketing competition just get in touch.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Andrew_Scott/2500792

How To Make Banner Ads Attractive And Realize Online Marketing Goals?

We are now in the digital world where technology shapes the way we live. Brands are not immune to changes brought forward by constant advancements in the technology. Take for instance, the norms of marketing have completely changed with digital taking precedence over traditional. From mobile to social to e-mail to content, the routes of marketing have evolved and entered an altogether different territory. With more people going online and socializing than they ever did, it's now the turn of brands to head where all the prospects lie. They have to advertise and tap into the ever-exploding potential of the internet world.

In a way, brands have to leverage different techniques and methods of advertising to catch the attention of their target audience, including existing customers and prospective ones. To catch attention, effective marketing campaigns and attractive ads will be needed as they stir imagination and demand some sort of attention. Banner ads have to aesthetically impeccable as only they can they make the heads roll. In a way, your banner ads have to stand out from the sea of campaigns unfurled by other marketers. For that to happen, you need to have a team of creative and experienced graphic designers with, of course, proven credentials.

What if your small business can't afford any investment in hiring designers? What should be the strategy when the budget is relatively too small to hire creative people? In such scenario, the only option is to design banners ads by own or explore the market to find any advanced tool for the same purpose. It'd be great if you could find a tool as in that case, a lot of time and money would be saved that otherwise get spent on manual efforts. Finding such a tool, and an advanced one at that, means getting the freedom of designing your own banner ads.

What's more, having a tool will also give the benefit of creating multiple designs at one go and then choosing the one that suits the marketing requirements in the best possible way. With the tool doing all what is needed, a business then won't need to hire a designer to produce several mock-ups of the banner design. Given so many benefits attached with the tool, it'd really be a great decision to get that one and let the business benefit, at least on the banner designing front. Options are many in the market and you should choose a tool that delivers speed and responsiveness.

In addition, a business should always select a tool that provides multi-browser support feature. The tool won't serve the purpose beyond a point if it is not compatible with device such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops. It should enable adding of text, arches effects; should help upload images, rotate texts & images; facilitate adding of shape & clip-art and changing of background. What's more, the chosen banner designing software or tool should come packed with a huge selection of themes and templates to bring more ideas and more creativity into play.

Yusuf Javed is the proud founder and director of Product Designer Tool - an innovative company that provides personalized and customized banner designing software to clients. A tri-national (citizen of the US, UK & India) and tri-lingual management executive with decade-long experience in Digital Marketing, he has vast experience in building teams, strategic planning and direct sales.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Yusuf_Javed/2123248

Instagram Story Hacks: 5 Tricks You (Probably) Didn't Know

7 Instagram Story Ideas To Build Your Following

Keeping your Instagram busy is a good way to build your following. An active account is more interesting than an inactive one. Plus, using Instagram to share all types of content with your audience in many forms is going to be much more interesting to them than if you shared only one type.

Let's look at some ideas that you can incorporate into your stories to build your following.

1. Show a Day in the Life

A great use of Instagram stories is to take a day and show up a few different times of the day to share what you're doing as it relates to your audience and your business. For example, if you're a business coach, you might want to share how you run your own business and team with others.

2. Go Live

Take some time to go live each day even to share just one exciting tidbit of news. When you go live randomly, your audience will get notified if they signed up to be notified. They'll pay more attention to you and will even be sad if they miss it live, but they'll also watch the recording if you leave one.

3. Provide a Sneak Peek

Creating a new product or service? Provide a sneak peek about it. Trying out a new software you want to recommend? Do a story about it. The more reasons you can find to show up in stories, the better for your quest to find more followers.

4. Conduct a Poll

Instagram allows you to conduct polls, which is a good way to find out what your audience is thinking. Keep polls short and sweet to avoid any confusion, since these polls aren't very scientific. If you want accurate results, consider keeping choices limited.

5. Trade Instagram Stories for a Day

If you have a colleague that serves a similar or same audience as you do, you can trade Instagrams for a day. You run their stories, and they run yours. This is a wonderful way to get cross-promotion and more followers.

6. Count Down to Launch

If you have a launch or an event coming up, use Instagram stories to do a countdown for the launch. This is a fun way to get everyone excited about your new offer.

7. Use Stickers and Special Effects

Instagram has ways for you to grab your audience's attention; use them. Add special effects, use stickers, add great hashtags. Call out the right people. Make yourself known so that you can grab those followers who like you.

When you do share a story, always remember to include a call to action. Your audience will not act (or only very rarely) if you don't tell them what to do. Each time you make any content, you should know what you want the results to be after your audience views it.

Instagram's popularity continues to rocket as the cameras in smart phones become better at taking high-quality pics and videos. To learn more about this social media powerhouse and to get more tips to gain followers on Instagram, download my free Instagram Marketing Guide at http://jonallo.com/instagram

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Jon_Allo/1079948

6 Greats Ways To Make Money Blogging

Blogging has become a popular choice among people. Blogging is also another way of establishing your web presence. Besides, it provides an insight to your life for the entire world. Not everyone resorts to blogging only for these purposes alone. Instead, some prefer to make money blogging. Is it not surprising to see many earning their likelihood as a full-time blogger!

If you too wish to earn money blogging, you will find 6 great ways to accomplish this:

Start Your Own Blog

There are several blogging platforms available in the internet. Just register with one wherein you will find all requisite instructions. Using top level domain name is another way of creating a blog. This will help you to transform your blog into a full-fledged internet business.

Start Working On It

Once you have successfully created the blog, start to work on it. Remember - short cuts won't bring any money. Instead, hard work can pay rich dividends. Make sure to add fresh contents to your blog on regular intervals. The posts you make ought to be easily identifiable and distinct. For instance, promote your business with interesting and relevant posts.

Thousands of blogs get created in the cyberspace every day. Only a handful of them succeed in making money. If you wish to stand out from others, working extra hard is the key. Opt for an extremely good layout and catchy content in your site. Opt for excellent templates, themes and layout.

Explore The Money Making Alternatives

When it comes to make money blogging alternatives available, the list is endless. The most popular options are:

· Contextual ads - you can sign up with websites like Google AdSense or Chitika and keep adding advertising links. When a reader click's on the link provided by you, view's the advertisement or make purchases from a sponsor, you get a commission from Google.

· Sell available advertising space - when you witness a steady flow of visitors and a growth of your blog's popularity, you can sell advertising spots. There are several companies looking for such spaces. Unlike Google AdSense, selling the space guarantees a fixed monthly income.

Join Paid Blog Networks

You can earn money blogging simply by joining any paid blog network. By joining these networks you get a chance to write for fellow bloggers. You can even promote their products/services on your blog. Make use of blog sites that pay a fixed fee for coming up with a particular advertisement and linking the same into your blog.

Adopt Affiliate Marketing

This is regarded as a performance based marketing technique. As an affiliate, you are rewarded for bringing customer with your affiliate marketing efforts. Here, you promote a merchant's product through an affiliate link. The reward in question is paid in the form of a commission. The internet is filled with such affiliate programs. You can join the popular ones like Chikita Mini Malls or Amazon.

Go For CPA Offers

CPA or Cost Per Action is almost like the affiliate marketing technique. the only difference is - here you get monetarily rewarded on completion of a task assigned by advertisers and companies. Here, you need to choose an offer you wish to advertise. This advertising is usually done through banner ads or hyperlinks in your blog to make money blogging.

For further information, please visit: http://typenmakemoney.blogspot.com. The blog tells you the easiest ways to earn online.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Bijoy_Ranjan_Dey/617766

Once Upon A Time..? - How To Build Suspense In Your Content

A lot of content on the internet just seems to be the same old thing, with nothing new, exciting or noteworthy that deserves being paid attention to. One of the best ways to stand out from this is to create suspense.

Journalistic Writing versus Blogging

Journalistic writing is the kind of writing used by newspaper and magazine writers. It centers around the five Ws in order to report the facts:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why

Journalistic writing is also an "inverted pyramid" style of writing, with all of the meaty information in the first paragraph or two, tapering down to less and less important information until the article finally concludes.

With this style of writing, there is very little suspense or a "twist in the tale" at the end of it. About the only place you ever see suspense consciously being used is in the headline. A good headline is designed to lure those skimming a paper into reading the entire article.

Therefore, you need to master more than journalistic writing if your content is ever going to get read.

Marketing as Storytelling

All content online is marketing. And one of the hottest trends in online marketing is storytelling.

Storytelling is as old as time itself, and one of the earliest activities we engage in as a child. "Once upon a time, there was a... " is a common storytelling formula because it works.

The most successful stories have a beginning, middle and end. They don't even have to be very long. What the best stories have is a twist in the tale - that is, a surprise ending. Or they might end with a special point that was intended to be made via the story, such as, "the moral of the story."

Adding Suspense

Every good story has some element of suspense. Even though in most cases, we love a happy ending, it's thrilling to be kept on edge, not knowing if things were going to turn out for the best. Stories like "The Three Little Pigs" or "Little Red Riding Hood" keep you guessing until the end. We move from an unhappy situation to a happy one where everything has been solved.

This formula works well with content too. Think of the problems the people in your niche have, and how they can be solved. What solutions have you discovered along the way? What has really worked for you? What setbacks did you have? Was it a straight progression from A to B, or did you have to take a more winding route around the scary woods to find what you needed? What lessons can you offer your readers as the moral of your story?

This type of content will not only be more vivid and suspenseful, it will also help position you as an expert in your niche worth paying attention to. This can be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when it comes to your content marketing efforts.

When you write and manage your content correctly, it will make your life easier and your business grow. To discover how the most successful online entrepreneurs plan, create and deliver great content, download my free checklist, The 5 Step Content Strategy, at https://jonallo.com/contentplan

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Jon_Allo/1079948