Creating Quality Content: Tell A Story

Using an exorbitant amount of superfluous verbiage invites your following to expedite their time gleaming over your content, rather than perpetuating the minutes they spend construing your content.

Did you want to stop reading? I would be mad if you said no…

That wasn’t even the most ridiculous sentence I could come up with, but it makes a point. Quality content isn’t reliant on flashy vocabulary; rather it can be detrimental to the growth of your following. Exciting vocabulary can help, dependent on your target audience, but it plays a minor role when it comes to quality content that readers engage and interact with.

What keeps readers on your website/blog/social media/etc. is a great story. People love to put themselves in other people’s shoes and live someone else’s life for those few short moments. So, no matter what you’re writing, be it an actual news story, Facebook post, blog post, etc.; try and tell a story. Easier said than done, right? Right…

It’s not easy. There isn’t a cookie cutter mold to craft a great story, so the best place to garner quality information is your current readers/viewers/clients. Listen to them and follow them. What type of content are they engaging with? What pages are they liking? What blogs are they commenting on? The business of quality content is equal parts talking and listening.

And, it’s not a one and done situation. What the heck does that mean? What I’m getting at is that you simply can’t craft a story, post it and call it a day. Crafting a story takes time. Write posts with recurring subject matter/theme/ideas/etc. A great example would be a company’s blog in which they feature a new worker on every post. They write about their background, what they like, what they do, why they do what they do and so forth. This humanizes your company and your readers/customers understand that your company isn’t a robot, rather it’s a lively business with real people, writing real stories. We, the readers, want to know that the content we read isn’t a waste of time, and we often feel that mechanical, boring and mundane content is.

You have mere seconds to grasp the reader’s attention. So grab them with a luring title, intrigue them with your intro copy, and deliver a quality story. Don’t simply create click bait that has a quality headline but awful content. Tell a story. Be yourself. That’s all that your reader really wants.