Page 55 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

like:

Give: Offers, discounts, deals, or contests that can benefit a wide audience.
Advice: Tips, especially about problems that everyone encounters.
Examples are how to lose weight or how to choose a college.
Warning: Posts about dangers that could affect anyone in your audience.
Inspire: Inspirational quotes. Love them or hate them, they work.
Unite: Posts that highlight a danger, an evil, an enemy, a cause, or a
personal or community need.

And while we’re at it, the research also showed content behaviors that shut
down social sharing (don’t do these!):

Only talking about yourself
Being too edgy or offensive
Being too obscure or niche
Publishing content nobody can understand
Asking for Likes

4. Go long.
Every marketing trend seems to point to a need for short content. Six-second
Vine videos. High-level infographics. Tweets that top out at 140 characters.
Shorter content enables social sharing in a busy world, right? Not necessarily.

According to an analysis8 of 100 million web-based articles, long-form
content actually gets shared more than short-form content. In fact, the longer the
content, the more shares it may get, with pieces of 3,000–10,000 words getting
the highest average shares of any category. Research by the New York Times
confirms this trend; more than 90 percent of their most-emailed articles are more
than 3,000 words long.

Not surprisingly, short-form content abounds—there are 16 times more
articles with less than 1,000 words than there are with 2,000+ words. Here’s
your opportunity to fill the gap. When writing long-form content, remember to
make it easy to scan—no one likes an intimidating wall of text. Using a list
structure is a simple way to do that. Write short, easy-to-read paragraphs, and
use subheadings and bullet points to break up the text. Bonus tip: Using a
keyword in a subheading normally provides some SEO value.

5. Aim for conversation, not controversy.
Without question, controversy ignites content. A few consultants even