How to avoid writing content no one will read

Podcasts are going from strength to strength. There are currently more than 900,000 of them to choose from and more than 7 million people in the UK listen to them every week.

Content marketing has grown hugely in recent years. And it has meant content is everywhere. Blogs, whitepapers, eBooks and articles are added to the internet in vast quantities every day. For example, this blog you are reading, is one of two million posted to the internet every day.

o put that quantity in context, according to TrackMaven, over the past five years, the average number of blog posts published per brand per month increased by 800 per cent.

Everyone wants their written content to engage, entertain and entice their readers, but with this content overload – or ‘content shock’ as I have also seen it called - it is increasingly hard for your words to stand out.

So how can you ensure your written content gets read?

Adopt a conversational style

It might break certain grammatical rules, but adopting a conversational style when writing your content will help your readers feel you are talking directly to them.

When I write, I always try to use the same informal language I would use if I was talking to a friend.

That doesn’t mean I write exactly how I talk, but, to adopt a quote from American novelist Elmore Leonard, I don’t want my writing to sound like writing. Formality is boring.

I avoid long words and unnecessarily complicated language and I place a lot of emphasis on the words ‘you’ and ‘I’ because I want to make it personal. I want to foster familiarity and for you, the reader, to believe the content you are reading has been produced specifically for you and not everyone on our mailing list.

And I ask a lot of questions. Why? Well because conversations are full of questions. The only difference in my writing is that I also (hopefully) provide the answers.

Make your writing look appealing

Inserting picture and infographics and including lots of white space into your content will certainly help, but there are other subtle techniques you can deploy to make your written content more appealing.

Readers find huge paragraphs and big blocks of text daunting and ultimately off-putting. If you look at newspapers, and yes I know print circulation figures are in decline, almost every paragraph consists of just one sentence.

Similarly, long sentences can be a big turn-off. If your sentence is longer than 30 words it needs to be split up into smaller sections.

You may have been told at school not to start sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’. But now is the time to break those rules because there is nothing wrong with this in the grown-up world of content. And it is a great way of keeping sentences short and snappy. (See what I did there!)

Pull-out quotes, click-to-tweets and sub-headings are also great ways of breaking-up large sections of text.

Show you are human

People are interested in stories about other people.

The human touch lights up content and prevents the author sounding distant, detached and boring. It also builds connections with your audience.

I often include experiences from my career and even parts of my home life to illustrate points in my writing and the content which includes these examples and anecdotes is often the best performing.

Why? Because it make the content more relatable and also validates why I should be in a position to offer advice.

Strong personal opinions can add the human element we look for in an increasingly automated world.

At Thirty Seven, we thrive on creating authentic content which is original, credible and packed with human interest. Via: @37agency

Offer something unique

Type ‘content marketing’ into Google and it returns more than 33 million results.

So your content needs to offer something different to stand-out from the noise.

That doesn’t mean you can’t write about the issues that other people in your sector have already been speaking about. But you need to offer a different perspective, point of view or an interesting twist.

You need to be able to add to the conversation, not repeat it.

Narrowing your subject down will help. I blog a lot on media training issues for our sister company Media First.

That is a broad subject area, so I often break it down into specific areas where it can be easier to add something unique or unusual. For example, I have written blog on how to handle specific types of questions, such as personal ones, and particular types of interviews, such as doorstep interviews.

Know your audience

The best way to attract readers is to ensure you know who you are trying to appeal to.

If you don’t know enough about your readers and the questions they are looking for answers to, it is unlikely you are going to be writing on topics that are relevant.

Spend time on the headline

The headline is obviously crucial for attracting people to your content. It is the gateway.

But it is a balancing act.

Over promise and you are in danger of creating click-bait which could result in people visiting your website and leaving again almost immediately (this is known as a bounce rate).

Under-sell it and you are not going to attract the number of readers your content deserves.

So how can you get the headline right?

Numbers are a good tool, particularly odd ones, and questions are enticing – just look at how often the Daily Mail uses a question in a headline on its website.

Words like ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘who’ also have reader appeal.

And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, keep it short.

Sites like CoSchedule will analyse your headlines and give tips on how to improve them.

Nail the intro

The introduction is a crucial part of any written content - it is the hook to get people to invest time reading the rest of what you have written.

The first thing I would say here is don’t repeat your headline in your introduction. This is something I see quite a lot of and it is incredibly dull and pointless.

It is also a good way of ensuring readers will quickly lose interest.

To entice the reader your introduction needs to show them they are going to read something relevant, timely, unusual or controversial (without offending them).

As with the sentences in the rest of your content, you need to keep your introduction short.

Promote, promote, promote

As much as I would like to tell you it is all about the writing, promoting your content properly is vital.

Email marketing, social media, PR, guest blogging and paid promotion are just some of the tactics you can consider to attract more people to your work and ensure your content marketing works.

At Thirty Seven, we offer content and design services to ensure your campaigns reach the right audiences at the right times. Our journalist led approach ensures your content is interesting, engaging and informative so you gain brand awareness and engagement whether it is social media content or a whitepaper.

f course, the regulations, which are supposed to improve data protection for EU citizens, residents and businesses, do have significant implications for brands and the way they communicate with their customers.

But is there another side to the doom, gloom and scaremongering?

Well, at Thirty Seven we believe the changes, which come into force on May 25, present an opportunity for marketers and could be a catalyst for good.

Before the rise of the internet it was very hard for brands to produce content, at least cost effectively.

But as the World Wide Web has gone from strength to strength it has become ever easier for organisations to reach customers.

However, this has come at a cost, because while content marketing has been enjoying a boom, there is little doubt it has been at the expense of quality. There’s now less craft and more churn in the majority of content and all too often what customers receive offers little in the way of value.

Of course what exactly constitutes ‘quality’ content is subjective, vague and elusive. However, Google uses a definition which I believe works as well as any.

Its evaluators use the EAT acronym when ranking website pages. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness and we believe it is a good model to adopt to ensure content stays ahead of the pack.

So how will GDPR impact the quality of content? Well, by giving people more control of their data they will also have more control of what information they receive.

Brands need to be able to show that consent to receive their information has been “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” – ideally this should be achieved through a double opt-in procedure involving a signup process, such as clicking a box, and a confirmation of that instruction by clicking a link in a follow-up email.

Businesses will also have to make it easy for that consent to be withdrawn at any time.

This means that, particularly in the days after the May deadline, many brands will have fewer people on their mailing lists. While there will still be those who argue that size matters, it is surely better to have a more concise list of people who look forward to receiving your content than a larger list of people who are indifferent and don’t really know how or why your emails end up in their inbox.

More importantly, it also means brands will have to work harder than ever to get people to subscribe and sign-up and continue to be happy to receive their content.

And that in turn means content needs to be better quality, targeted, personalised, niche and valuable. In short, content that turns recipients into fans.

Of course, it is possible that some email marketeers will try to duck these regulations or convince themselves that only the really big players will be targeted by GDPR enforcers in the early days, but the risks of non-compliance are eye-watering; a fine which is either four per cent of turnover or €20 million - whichever is the larger.

Another possibility is that organisations may simply reduce their email marketing activity as they struggle to comply with the GDPR May deadline and turn to social media more instead to fill the vacuum.

But to make that approach work they will still need to place greater emphasis on the quality of their social media output, because if customers are going to engage with that content they will again need to feel it has value and is worth sharing.

We are not suggesting that GDPR is going to improve the quality of the internet, but it will give the content you receive in your mailbox a much needed shot in the arm.

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Every company wants to be an authority in their sector - those that engage the media usually are