Small businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of using great content to engage their audience. Everything from blogs, articles, videos and guest posts – these are all tools to capture and engage an audience with your brand. Creating high quality content may seem easy but here are a few important, but often overlooked 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 five to six 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.
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