Nobody is going to read your content. At least, the whole piece of content that you have created. You made the effort of keeping a couple of hours a day to invest them on your content marketing strategy, and people are only going to read a mere 20% of those 2 hours (or even more) of your writing.

Well, we need to do something to change that, right? What I want to achieve with this blog post is to increase that percentage. Why? Because we want to make the most of our time and I refuse to spend that much time if people aren’t reading my content at the end of the day.

Do you agree and want to do something to fix this? Then, let’s plan together our strategies. 

1. Define your message

The term “connect” is very broad. We need to define it with a simple question: what do I want to achieve with this piece of content?

Maybe you want more visits to your blog, more subscribers to your mail list, more shares on Facebook or Twitter, among a long list. But we can’t talk about connecting if we don’t know what we want people to do with our content.

Also, if we bear in mind this objective, we will be able to analyse the results and improve every time we publish content.

It’s important to know what works and doesn’t work to hone our strategies.

2. Add value

Every piece of content must change our readers in some ways. If it doesn’t, that means that what we write is meaningless, is not causing anything. If that happens, I can guarantee that your readers aren’t going to read even that 20% of your content.

[Tweet “The key of content marketing: how is this piece of content going to change my audience?”]

If you’re writing a novel, I’m sure that you want to evoke certain feelings among your readers. If you’re writing a blog, maybe you want you’re readers to be informed about news in you business or offer the best content to build up a community, what are they going to learn with your new piece of content?

However, if your objective is to inform your audience, but at the end of every piece of content they haven’t learn anything new, something isn’t working. Define exactly how you’re going to change your audience with your content and how this is going to benefit them.

3. Be yourself

This doesn’t sound very creative, right? But when we write, we tend to overthink things. How can I write this so people will like it? How can I say thins so it doesn’t sound that rough? And we end up sounding robots.

This also has to do with finding your unique “voice”. It’s important that people identify our tone in every publication. Don’t be scared of giving your opinions and points of view and don’t try to like everyone out there.

4. Don’t create content that connects, tell a story

If your reader can notice that you’re writing a piece of content only to create content and fill a gap in your website, it’s done, you lose him/her. I’m sure that you have also read paragraphs full of keywords that made no sense. We don’t want to sound like that, do we?

When I’m writing content, I always picture myself with an old friend over a cup of coffee. How would you tell him/her what you want to tell with your content? Imagine how you’d start the conversation and draft an introduction. How are you going to phrase the main points of your content so he can engage with what you’re saying?

Stories will make your audience to actually stop and devour your content.

5. Analyse what other people are doing well

I’m sure that, like me, you’ve got this favourite blog that you like to read when you have a break or at the end of the day when there’s nothing distracting you. You just want to relax and read every single line. Well, ask yourself how the person behind it gained you.

Maybe it’s because every single topic in the blog interests you, which would mean that this person knows exactly the interest of his audience; or maybe the texts touch you in some way. Try to identify the strategies used behind those texts that you actually like to read.

6. Make it pretty

Sweet things never made anyone bitter, right? If you care about your content and invest some time to make it pretty, your audience will be more likely to stay with you for longer.

Invest some time to look for quality pictures and graphics to spice up your content. Be careful with you’re grammar and spelling, we all make mistakes and sometimes we don’t have time to proofread everything we write, but try to use some tools such as Grammarly to quickly improve your content.

To conclude, this is a visual sump up of some of the point I have talked about:

 

 

How do you create content that connects with your audience? Do you already use any of these strategies?

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