Page 57 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

Make it tweetable (i.e. short). Headlines with eight words or less are shared
21 percent more than average.9
Make it descriptive and accurate. Never mislead readers.
Make it creative enough to stand out in a crowded list of content choices.
Reference a numbered list to increase social transmission by 50 percent
(like: “Six Extraordinary Lessons from The Content Code”).
Make sure the headline offers something helpful.
Include one keyword or phrase to help a search engine determine the theme
of the article and aid your SEO.
Don’t let your headline be an afterthought. The headline is the most critical
part of the post. Work it.

Warm words help, too. In a study of blog posts that had received more than
1,000 social shares over a year, headlines that featured a “human” word like
“food,” “home,” and “lifestyle” accounted for 85 percent of the world’s most
viral content. Words like “business,” “tech,” and “news” made up just 14 percent
of this traffic.10

A useful tool to use when creating headlines is the free Headline Analyzer
from the Advanced Marketing Institute (http://bit.ly/headlineanalyze). It works
on the theory that increasing the emotional marketing value (EMV) of your
headline drives more social sharing. In my independent research, I’ve found that
social sharing drops off if the headline is too emotional. The ideal score seems to
center between 30 and 50 points.

7. Be visual.
Read a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10 percent of
it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65 percent.11 Reading is inefficient for
humans. Your brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and then you have to
identify features in the letters to read them. That takes time.

According to a BuzzSumo analysis, adding a photo or illustration doubles the
probability that your content will get shared. Another study verifies that when
using Facebook as your content distribution channel, sharing of the content is
doubled, on average, if you include a photo. Naturally, brands are figuring this
out—74 percent of all Facebook brand posts now contain a photo.12

When formatting a photo for a blog post, most blogging platforms give you
the chance to assign a meta tag or “alternative text” to the photos. Attaching the
keyword or theme from the article to the photo doesn’t take much time and can
provide a small SEO boost.