They’ve chosen the destination of their choice, submitted their boarding pass and are ready to take this content flight with you. They picked your “airline,” clicked your title, and now its up to you to fly them smoothly through a painless trip with the content you guide them through.
You aren’t the flight attendant feeding them peanuts, enticing them to click your headline, you’ve already got them aboard. You’re the captain flying this content show.
As this pilot, how do you avoid content turbulence or a scary written plane crash?
1. Visuals
When I board a plane it can go two ways, either it’s a pleasant experience or a miserable one. With the latter, the misery can be pinpointed to terrible, decrepit seats, no place to put my carry-on, and the dreaded middle seat. I can envision all of it now; however, I have had great flights, sans first-class seating, that I can picture perfectly. And that’s exactly what your passengers/readers can do too. Visually appealing images can capture a reader and signal them to keep reading. Whether it be infographics, high-resolution photos, pictures of corgis, all of these things can help the reader along to consume the content you are presenting them. Cartoons or more creative images compare 2:1 or sometimes 3:1 to standard stock photos. Avoid stock photos because as generic as they are, readers could associate your content with that too. Visuals will keep your reader stimulated and help ease the flight through your piece.
2. An Effective Amount
Long or short content varies just as much as the amount of time you are going to spend on a airplane to the destination of your choice. Sometimes people mistakenly think that longer content drives conversion rates down and deter people from reading over 1,000 words. However, that isn’t always the case. As pointed out by Neil Patel in his piece on how content length affects rankings and conversions, he finds “The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words.”
The data is there to point out that many of these pieces of content are more successful because they are longer; however, that doesn’t mean you should start writing novels.
It brings back to the idea of flying. Traveling to Australia is going to take 13+ hours depending on where you leave from and then flying to New York from DC would take about a couple of hours. Logically the first is longer because you are traveling to a different continent and the second is shorter because its basically a hop, skip and a jump away. Writing effectively about SEO could take a lot longer than writing about Corgis. Unless of course you do in fact want to read extensively about corgis (Here at TrackMaven we really have to hold back on this), we wouldn’t ramble on and on about how adorable corgis are. Establishing the effective amount of content to deliver your points properly is essential. You wouldn’t want 3 layovers and 10 delays adding negatively to your flight to Australia or New York, so solving the Goldilocks dilemma in finding what is “just right” in the amount of content you are producing. Read More
