3 Ways to Get Some Action and Give Satisfaction

Telling a great story does you little good if people don’t read it, watch it, or listen to it. Make your content more reader-friendly and get more action on your content.

Satisfying your audience’s appetite for your content can be as simple as following these three basic guidelines:

1. Write engaging headlines
2. Use a lot of subheads
3. Keep your paragraphs short

Give a little taste

If you want your audience to eat your whole content snack, you need to give them a delicious taste first.

Headlines are the online equivalent of the smiley lady in the uniform handing out chicken on a toothpick in the mall food court. Headlines bring your audience to you.

Play with it

Effective headlines can be provocative, controversial, or funny. You can key into a timely, noteworthy item or a timeless basic human theme and take a shot at it.

Another approach is to address a need. Promising to meet a need very specifically entices people to click.

This post’s title tries to do all of the above. Play around with it and come up with something that works. Remember, the online medium gives you freedom to experiment with your audience.  If your article isn’t getting any interest, change the title and see what happens.  If you’re using a good CMS tool, like WordPress, you can do this easily.

Entice them

Blogs have much in common with traditional newspapers. But where newspapers try to get the whole story concentrated in one long descriptive headline, online content needs to be shorter and snappier. The place to address summarization is in a subtitle (as with the italics at the top of the post).

It’s helpful to think of content headlines as more similar to print ad and interactive ad headlines. They are intended to pique your interest. To get you to explore further. To entice you to take action by viewing more.

Just a little bit closer

One of the nuances of web content is that once you get people to begin to read, you need to keep their attention. This is aided by sub-headlines. You have to tease people along from section to section.

Subheads should be more descriptive than the headline. If your audience chooses to scan your content, you want your subheads to tell a good portion of your story. But don’t be afraid to be a little punchy with subheads. That can be a great enticement for a reader to engage a little more closely with your content.

Also, some readers may only scan your content, so your headline and your subheads may be all they read. Better make them count.

Easy on the eyes

Speaking of scanning — this is a good word to describe how most readers read on the web. Long paragraphs inhibit scanning, thereby making it harder to read.

In many cases, harder-to-read means won’t-be-read, because many people will choose not to read.

Short paragraphs are easy on the eyes.

They help you read.

They make you happier.

Takeaway

Making your content reader-friendly is a major ingredient in the recipe for successful content.

As my friend Brad says,”Content isn’t viral. It goes viral. Focus on quality and messaging first. That is all.”

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.