Much like a creepy haunted house, bad copy is riddled with cobwebs, scary verbal arachnids and misplaced modifiers that leap at you from behind cracked doors. This Halloween season, the last thing you want to do is scare away your precious readers with bad copy. Instead of entertaining this horror show, focus on creating spook-tacularly engaging content this Halloween season and watch your readers flock to your site…like witches to the cauldron. 15 Ways To Get Your Readers To Engage On Your Content Like Witches With A Cauldron 1) Add some cackle to your copy Humor is important – especially if you’re writing about a topic others may perceive as “boring.” By infusing an approachable sense of humor throughout your content, you make it approachable, engaging and more relatable than content written from a stiff-upper-lip perspective. Need help on being funny – check out CopyBlogger’s “How to be 20% Funnier Than you Really are” post. Keep in mind, though, that being funny doesn’t mean being fake. When you try too hard to be hilarious, your audience is going to catch on. Instead of straining yourself in the name of hilarity, try simply pointing out the industry truths that nobody acknowledges or approaching your own confusion or difficulties with a light-hearted air. This will help your readers breathe a sigh of relief and think “Phew! She gets it!” 2) Information and interest and valuable content, that’s what good copy is made of Why do you write the things you do? Because you’re bored? To prove something to your college English professor? To engage your readers with valuable content? That last one is more like it. In order to be valuable, though, your copy also needs to be informational and interesting. To ensure your content is meeting the bar, spend some time putting yourself in your readers’ shoes. What do they want to know about? What are they struggling with? What would be helpful to them? Answering these questions in your copy can ensure that it stays interesting and engaging for years to come. 3) Stay on this planet Nobody wants to wade through dense analogies and when your readers need a roadmap to understand what the heck it is you’re getting at; you can bet that you’re going to lose a good deal of them. That said, it’s important to continue being relatable, even when you’re discussing a dense topic. One of the best ways to do this is to provide relatable analogies for complex ideas. To do this, think about something that all of your readers can relate to. The rental market, for example, or going to the grocery store, and use these commonplace topics to illustrate a dense idea like web hosting or coding. This will help your readers understand the ideas you’re presenting them, even if the topic is intricate. 4) Offer breaks It’s tough and intimidating to confront a page filled with tiny, single-spaced text and no images, paragraphs or links. Somewhere deep down, smart readers are still like little kids who love pictures, text-sparse pages and sensory detail. And as they should: content written in this fashion is much more interesting and useful than text-only pages that require a magnifying glass to dissect. Because of this, it’s wise to give your readers small breaks within your copy so that they don’t feel overwhelmed. Break text into small chunks, use headers and sub headers and consider serializing posts about dense topics into mini-series. This helps make your copy more approachable and keeps your readers interested. To take this a step further, consider branching out into different types of content. If you only write blog posts, consider offering a podcast or two or creating an infographic. In addition to keeping your text engaging and interesting, this also serves to help you meet your fans on the platform of their choice and gives readers even more ways to interact with your copy. 5) Incorporate pictures into the brew If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a great infographic, video or meme is worth ten times that, at least. If your story is ho-hum – the ins and outs of a new platform, for example – consider resorting to visuals to tell it in a stylish and intriguing manner. Never worked with any of these content types before? No worries, it’s easier now than ever to create them on your own. 6) Interview like-minded guys and ghouls By bringing industry experts into your site, you do several things: first of all, you create a larger following by bringing your guest’s following to your blog. Secondly, you pique your fans’ interest by showcasing new views and adding some variety to your posts. Plus, when you allow your site to become known as a melting pot of ideas, innovation and creativity, you draw people who want to engage with you, which is great for building a community of other writers while also expanding your reader base. 7) Give your fans a fright…in a good way! Not a literal fright…again, your copy shouldn’t be scary. While we don’t want you driving your fans toward the hills with poorly constructed web copy, we do want you to use specific, hardcore statistics to shock your readers. Even the most engaging topic in the world risks feeling a little dry if readers don’t have anything to sink their teeth into. Take, for example, social media marketing. When I say “social media marketing is an effective way to draw more leads” you probably nod your head, eyes wide, and think “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” When I tell you, however, that LinkedIn generates new leads at a rate 277% higher than any other social media platform, your eyes probably pop open for a different reason. The latter is interesting, the former – not so much. 8) Survey your fans Want to know what your fans would find interesting? Ask them! Brainstorm a series of topics with your team and ask your fans which of the batch they would … Read more
