Making Your Blog Content More “Share-Worthy”
Amy Porterfield of Social Media Examiner recently posted 5 Tips for Creating Shareable Blog Content. After all, if you are writing a blog, you not only want your ‘regular’ followers to read it, but you want them to share it with their networks, too. That way you get more exposure.
But (in my experience anyway), it isn’t always easy to predict which posts are going to ‘hit’ and which ones will fall flat. These tips might help you create more content that lands in the ‘hit’ category.
Here are Porterfield’s 5 tips (with a little commentary from me along the way):
1. Build instant rapport – Write as if you are writing to one person at a time.
One good way to do this is to think about your best client (or your best referral source or even that reporter who you want to take notice of your post), and write your post as if you were writing to them personally. Don’t write as if you were writing a legal brief – write as if you are explaining a concept to your best client.
2. Create relevance – focus on delivering value to your audience
The key here is to get people wanting more – and wanting to come back to your blog (and to share it – and keep sharing it with others). The way to do that is by consistently providing quality content that your audience wants and needs. Back up what you are saying with case studies, stories, statistics and visual aids.
3. Provide instant gratification – deliver your message in bite-sized pieces
This is probably the most difficult one for me, since I tend to write lengthy posts. As Amy says, your blog should be about making your readers’ lives easier. Most of us are pressed for time, so if your message can be read and understood quickly, your readers will thank you for it. Stick with one idea per post. If you’re full of ideas as you write, write a bunch of shorter posts at once (less writing to do later!), or break larger topics down into pieces and post them as a series, focusing on one aspect at a time.
4. Ignite shareability
This is about making things easy for your readers as well – only this time you want to make it easy for them to share your content. Provide easy ways for readers to share by adding Facebook “Like” buttons, Google +1 buttons and other sharing mechanisms along with every post to make sharing your content as easy as one simple click.
Porterfield recommends that you think about your audience when you create your posts – what would they be interested in learning about? What might be of value to them? It isn’t always related to what you do or the services you provide. Providing information about related topics can be very useful and keep readers coming back to you as a good source of information.
5. Make Your Closing Count – spark conversation
If your goal is for others to share your blog content, you want to make your post the beginning of a conversation – and you want to invite your readers to participate in that conversation. Ask readers a question at the end of your post, or ask for their point of view. As a lawyer, you want to be careful when inviting readers to participate or comment on your blog – make sure you have all necessary disclaimers in place about confidentiality and attorney-client relationships, but remember, too that you can invite conversation or invite sharing without specifically inviting comments on the blog itself.
For more tips on making your content more shareable, see my October post, “Make your content more share-worthy on social networks.”
What are YOUR best tips for creating content that others want to share?
What kind of content are YOU most likely to share? Leave a comment, send me a tweet or post your ideas on my Facebook page.
photo credit: http://flic.kr/p/7tRph2