A Detailed Guide for Writing Engaging Content
Table of Contents
A Detailed Guide for Writing Engaging Content
Writing engaging content is necessary for everyone, be it content writers, students, webmasters, or SEO specialists. But, while it is necessary and all, it can be a little difficult to come up with.
Here we’ve outlined the various tips and tricks that will add the ‘engaging’ factor to your content. However, the benefits of the tips will only be possible if you implement them correctly. So, if you want to know the tips and the right way to implement them, let’s dig in.
What is Engaging Content?
Engaging content refers to the one that captures the attention of the reader and induces them to read the entire piece. It typically includes a compelling headline, a conversational tone, visuals and multimedia elements and storytelling techniques.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Engaging Content:
Engaging content helps capture and retain readers’ attention, encourages them to act and helps build trust and credibility with the audience. So, apply the following tips to write engaging content:
1. Understand the 3Ks of Engaging Content:
When it comes to producing engaging content, understanding and identifying 3Ks for your content’s topic is crucial. But what are those 3Ks?
Well, the 3Ks of engaging content are:
- Know your audience.
- Know the objective of your audience.
- Know the purpose of your business behind the topic of your content.
However, let’s subtly explore each K.
Know Your Audience:
Before starting to write something, identify your topic’s target audience. But how can you do that?
Well, you can take the internet’s assistance to determine who will search for your topic.
Know the Objective of Your Audience:
If your content doesn’t relate to your audience’s objectives, it won’t be powerful enough to engage them. Therefore, it is essential to identify and understand why your audience is searching for your topic.
Know Your Business’ Purpose Behind Your Content’s Topic:
Once you have identified the first 2Ks for your topic, you should answer the following questions for your content:
- What is the purpose of covering this topic?
- In what ways does this topic matter to your business?
- Is there a specific goal you want to achieve with this content? If yes, then what is that goal?
2. Craft a Compelling Headline:
Research shows that 80% of people ignore content with a dull headline. Therefore, if you want people to read your content, you must write a captivating headline. But how would you know if your headline is compelling?
Well, there are three techniques to determine whether your headline is captivating.
- Content marketing tools are ideal when it comes to determining trends. So, you can type your main keyword in such a tool and find out the current headline trends in your niche.
Figure: This picture shows an example of how a content marketing tool presents the trending headline styles according to the input keyword
- Similarly, you can also take assistance from platforms like Reddit and Twitter to determine the latest headline trends in your space.
- You can also take assistance from headline analyzer tools. Such tools analyze the headlines according to their likelihood of attracting the audience and guidelines of search engines.
Figure :This image demonstrates how a headline analyzer performs analysis on a headline
3. Write a Captivating Introduction:
Once you’ve urged the audience to read your content, make the next few seconds count. How? By creating a hook in the introductory part.
Generally, readers determine whether a post is worth reading or not through its introduction. Therefore, a captivating introduction is the key to your content’s ‘engaging’ part.
Hence, consider the following tips when writing a captivating introduction:
- You can start by identifying and highlighting an ideal reader’s problems related to your topic.
- Then, you can inform the readers that you’ve got the correct answer to their problems.
- And lastly, you must share why you are qualified to discuss your content’s topic.
4. Try a Conversational Writing Approach:
When it comes to the body part of your content, you should imagine that you are writing for one person only. Why one person only?
Well, people might stream video content as groups, but they don’t read textual content with groups. Therefore, while writing the body part’s content, you should imagine as if you are conversing with your topic’s ideal reader. For instance, you can address the reader as ‘you’ and yourself as ‘we’ or ‘I.’ However, the conversational tone must not impact the writing quality.
5. Keep Enough Breathing Space:
Writing content for the web is different from academic writing. Therefore, to keep your content engaging, you should try to keep sentences as simple and small as possible. However, the wording shouldn’t be so simple that it becomes difficult to distinguish between a toddler’s language and a web content writer’s.
Besides small sentences, another ideal way to improve your content’s readability is to create small paragraphs. However, if you can’t write small sentences and paragraphs without ruining the content quality, you can try the modern AI-based rephrase online tools.
Figure: This image demonstrates an example of how an AI-based rephrasing tool shortens the text without ruining its quality and context
6. Maintain a Proper Flow:
Besides an engaging writing style, the flow of writing is another crucial aspect of compelling content. But what is meant by writing flow?
Well, it means that the introduction, body and conclusion content should be in sync. Otherwise, your audience will not be engaged with your content.
7. Incorporate Visuals and Multimedia Elements:
An all-textual post can be challenging to read. But you can minimize this challenge by including memes and relevant data as visuals.
In fact, according to research, content with visuals gets 94% more eyeballs than all-textual content. Therefore, you can take assistance from pictures, infographics, GIFs, videos and podcasts to increase the audience’s engagement.
However, it is crucial to include original visuals and multimedia elements. Otherwise, you can fall prey to copyright infringement problems. Therefore, the best way to avoid copyright infringement problems is to
- Include original or stock media.
- Purchase copyrights before including copyright-protected media.
Thus, if you take assistance from the above-discussed techniques, you won’t fall into copyright issues. However, you can still fall into accidental plagiarism even if you write all the content yourself. Therefore, an excellent way to ensure that your content is free from plagiarism is to try a plagiarism check tool.
Figure: This picture shows an example of how a plagiarism checker presents the content originality and plagiarism status of the text
8. Break Your Topic Into Multiple Subheadings:
Another ideal way to increase audience engagement in your content is to play the divide-and-conquer game with your topic.
You can divide your entire topic into various headings and subheadings. Then, you can explain each heading and subheading individually. Doing so will not only make writing easier for you, but it will also help in increasing the audience’s engagement.
9. Include Relevant Statistics and Research Material:
Everyone takes the internet’s assistance for researching a topic. However, if you can link the relevant statistics and research in your content, it will engage your audience more.
Besides engaging the audience, adding links to relevant research and statistics will also help you gain the trust of your audience.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry and its popularity is becoming increasingly evident to businesses looking to improve their online reputation. This marketing strategy differs from traditional advertising strategies in many ways. However, one of the most important is that a blog post or other type of content can generate sales long after it has been published.
But the content can only generate sales if it appeals to the readers. So, content becomes the king of content marketing if it engages the audience.
However, writing engaging content is easier said than done because some digital marketers have made things more complicated. So, if you want a comprehensive and simple-to-follow guide regarding engaging content writing, you can read the above discussion.
