It is difficult to wrestle the writing animal we all love and hate, when trying to write an intriguing piece of work. How do you keep your readers engaged in your material? Do they even care about what you had on your mind that day? Well - make them. When writing your blog posts, articles or even whitepaper materials, lead your sentences with curiosity peaking words and phrases.
5 Simple Ways to Make Readers Love Your Writing on Ragan.com give some good points on how to make your readers pay attention - but let's take it a step further. Laryssa Wirstiuk, who wrote the article, says there are 5 steps: Be specific as possible. Avoid talking down to your reader. Use transitions and section headers when possible. Use rhetorical questions and quotes. Incorporate multimedia wisely.
Let's address the issue of readers and blogs first. Many bloggers tend to write about their every day routine. They explain what they had for breakfast, what vitamins they took that morning and a play by play of the next 14 hours of their day. Then there are the bloggers who are writing posts wanting and expecting people to respond back. You want to be the second one. Readers will only respond when there is content that applies to them or that they find interesting. Now how do you do that? Talk about what you know. Address the interesting things about your business and apply it to your customer.
Rhetorical questions are great - "How are presenting your brand on social media platforms?" or "Do you need help with your social media presence?" Obviously you won't be able to hear their response but you can anticipate that if they are reading that article or even blog post - they need help.
Articles are much easier. They are like blogs but stylized much better. Articles are expected to be worded just right, with sophistication and precision. Readers look to articles for useable information such as stats, facts and information that applies to what they are doing. For instance I use articles to spark ideas for blog posts here. In some ways articles spark ideas, blog posts spark actions.
Whitepapers are slightly different. No one is going to download a whitepaper if they are not willing to read through it. The landing page and cover page of a whitepaper are the most important elements that need killer wording. Don't deceive people on the wording - if the whitepaper isn't what they thought it would be, they are not going to read it. Tell them exactly what you are offering in the whitepaper and jazz it up with images, graphs etc. Make them WANT your content. Catering your business' useful information to your customer is not difficult. Be the matchstick that sparks an idea AND action in your customer.
For example: you have created a whitepaper about social media and handling negative posts on Facebook and Twitter. How are you going to write the title? "Social Media Response Practices" is probably not going to get as much interest as "How to: Handle Negative Social Media Postings" or "Social Media Response Etiquette". This wording is going to catch more eyes than just Social Media Response. Get creative with your wording and you will start catching more eyes than back arrows off your web pages.
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