No matter how many blog posts you publish, no matter how many videos you upload, no matter how many updates you share on social media and social networking websites, your customers don’t pay attention to your content.

It’s frustrating.

Unless they pay attention to your content, how are you going to draw their attention and consequently, lead them to your website, blog or landing page, and unless that happens, how are they going to buy from you?

This Forbes article rightly says that for your customers to pay attention to your content, you must first understand who your customers are:

Defining exactly who your consumer is — and I mean truly knowing the consumer persona you want to speak to. Maybe for your brand, this includes multiple personas, and in that case, great!

I also face this problem when writing content for my clients.

Many clients simply want to focus on the keywords they think are important for them rather than providing meaningful content to customers and clients.

And when people don’t pay attention to their content, they wonder what’s the problem.

Fortunately, after playing around with their own ideas, they agree to try out some of my ideas.

Take your personal example. Do you give your attention to everything that comes by?

Or do you pay attention to only those things that interest you?

Similarly, when you want to use content marketing to attract people to your website – especially those people who will become your paying customers and clients – do you make sure that you know what they’re looking for in terms of content consumption?

When you publish a blog post, what objective do you have?

What persona have you defined find?

This brings me to another point: don’t try to please everyone when writing your content, or when getting your content written by a professional content writer.

This dilutes your message and content density.

Take a problem, and solve it.

This blog post, for example, tries to tell you how to make your prospective customers and clients pay attention to your content, and consequently, your business offers.

It does not teach you about content marketing.

It does not try to sell the idea of regularly publishing quality content.

It does not talk about SEO.

It talks about getting the attention of your audience.

What makes people pay attention to your content?

When I say content, I mean web content.

The way people read content on the web is totally different from the way they read it in a magazine or in a newspaper.

A magazine or newspaper is not a multimedia experience.

You are not constantly getting notifications. The area that you are viewing is considerably large.on

The consumption of web content happens mostly on a computer screen, on a laptop screen, on a tablet, and mostly, these days, on the mobile screen.

So, whatever attention they are able to pay to your content, you need to make the most of it.

Since I’m a content writer, when it’s content, I mostly talking about written content.

But you can apply the same philosophy to video content, audio content and images and graphics.

Here is a small list of things you can do to get the attention of people when writing content:

1. Be relevant: Tell them something they can really use to improve their lives.
2. Be timely: Don’t suddenly wake up and talk of something that happened back in 2003, unless it is relevant right now.
3. Be trendy: People pay more attention to what’s trending right now.
4. Deliver what you promise: If you are promising a solution, then deliver a solution.
5. Write shorter sentences.
6. Use line breaks after every sentence – makes it easier to absorb one idea at a time especially on a small screen.
7. Use headings, subheadings and bullet points to make your text scannable.
8. Use images wherever possible.
9. Apply law of copywriting – the previous sentence must make the reader read the next sentence.
10. Use data to make points.
11. Back up your claims with authoritative references and links.
12. Write sincerely and with enthusiasm.
13. Focus less on keywords and more on value.
14. Personalize as much as possible – this can be achieved by narrowly focusing the subjects of individual web pages and blog posts.
15. Make yourself familiar by publishing regularly.

Whereas many of the things mentioned above are cosmetic, two things that are very important for the success of your content marketing, to make people pay attention to your content are

1. Focus on delivering value by clearly understanding your audience.
2. Be regular.

With so much content being available round-the-clock, it becomes difficult for your target customers and clients to remember you.

If you’re talking about the same old stuff repeatedly then also, it will put people off.

Seth Godin is known to publish a blog post every day, even on Christmas.

He is among the most known people on the Internet, at least among those who take interest in doing business online.

The point is, if you want people to pay attention to your content, offer them something they are interested in.

Offer value regularly.

So regular that they begin to remember you.

It’s easy to pay attention to people you are familiar with.