Engaging content writing
You read about engagement a lot these days? How can you engage your target audience and how can you use content writing to achieve that?
The entire purpose of content marketing (and hence, content writing) is to elicit an active response from your audience/readers.
You want them to do something constructive that leads to them becoming your paying customers and clients.
Why is engagement important?
We live in a world full of distractions.
Even when we are doing something very important, something that requires our full attention, something that we cannot afford to ignore, we are being distracted.
We receive phone calls. We receive text messages. There are zillions of notifications from mobile apps. Your friends and followers want you to respond on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram. You are bombarded with pop-ups when you visit websites. There are hyperlinks everywhere.
Then there are distractions in the non-digital world (physical world).
You want people to pay attention to your content writing. If they don’t pay attention, they are not going to understand your message, and if they don’t understand your message, then what is the use of writing and publishing content on your website?
They are not going to pay attention just because you want them to.
You need to engage them.
When you engage them, they automatically pay attention to your content.
Even Google takes engagement seriously.
For Google, engagement means how people interact with your content when they find your content in the search results.
Do they immediately leave your website?
Do they explore other web pages and blog posts of your website?
Do they come back to Google and carry on the same search that help them find your link? This means they didn’t get what they were looking for and this further means, your content is not relevant to the search term being used and hence, doesn’t deserve to be ranked at the place it is currently ranking for that search term.
What makes your content writing engaging?
Engaging content writing is easier to read.
It means writing shorter, relevant sentences that people can quickly read and understand.
They shouldn’t have to figure things out in order to be able to engage with you.
Most importantly, engaging content writing delivers what it promises in the heading or the title or the email subject.
Your visitors want to go on reading when you write engaging content because they are deriving something out of it.
Remember that what you want to say isn’t important – what they want to read is.
Sometimes, content writers use headlines as if they are offering readers what the readers want to read, but eventually, they end up writing what they want to write, which is not a right practice and is counter-intuitive to the concept of engaging content writing.
Your content writing is engaging when people respond to it.
Your writing prompts people to contact you.
People want to share your blog post or web page or article with their friends, family members and colleagues using their social media and social networking profiles.
They leave comments.
They create their own blog posts and articles using the ideas and opinions seeded by your writing.
Are you writing engaging content?