The Content Writer’s Survival Guide

The only 10 content writing tips you’ll ever need

This guide is for copywriters, content writers, social media managers, business owners, and CMOs — and for anyone else that depends on engaging audiences for a living. It will show you what makes stories work and how you can use them to write and communicate better online.

Chapter 1

Yes, please do spend some time on your headlines

People are attracted by the promise of being titillated, shocked or horrified. They’re even crazier about receiving, in a four-minute read, life-changing knowledge they otherwise would have forever missed out on.

Are we lazy when we surf? Gullible? Not really. We have brains, which are wired not only to make us smarter than the average ape, but also to satisfy cravings. For most of us, curiosity is a huge craving.

And, weirdly, an end in itself.

A simple shark analogy will make this clear.

A headline is like the dorsal fin of a shark. Seeing the fin and only imagining the shark makes our brains uncomfortable, a dissonance also known as an information gap.¹ We want to see the shark. We need to see the shark!

Even if the shark is, well, not really a shark at all, but a 12-year-old kid with a snorkel, a rubber fin, and a questionable sense of humor.

Actually, when it comes to enjoyment, they’re one and the same to our brains. The pleasure isn’t the payoff, but the anticipation of the payoff.²

Am I suggesting that baiting your titles to give your readers an instant dopamine rush without any real content is the right way to build a mailing list?

I’m not.

If your headline “Simon Cowell was eaten by pigs?” fails to deliver the feast, or any mention of Cowell or pigs, you’re eventually going to join the legion outfits like Showbiz Cheatsheet in Dante’s 10th circle of web hell: blogs blocked for all of eternity by conscientious readers.

But.

Titles are your stories’ dorsal fins (and a rapid information filing system for Google). Taking the time to find the right phrasing, spin and content for your audience is the key, if not to getting read, then certainly to getting found.

[1] Read more about the information gap in The Itch of Curiosity by Jonah Lehrer in Wired Magazine.

[2] To see exactly how this works, watch You’ll Never Believe How We Got You to Click on This Video, also in Wired Magazine.

Chapter 2

Reel us in with a story

Turning your web content into a narrative is a highly effective way of engaging your audience from the get-go because story structure is naturally engaging.

To see this technique in action, check out Amy Davidson’s intro to her blog post on Michelle Obama for The New Yorker,³ where instead of giving us background, opinion or argument, she drops us right into one of Obama’s speeches.

English prof turned cage fighter Jonathan Gottschall also uses storytelling technique in his Salon article “My Own Personal Fight Club: How an English Professor Became a Cage Fighter”⁴ (which is actually an excerpted chapter from his book, so it’s cheating a little).

This is one of my favorite examples because we enter the story at the climax, so tension is already high. On top of that, we have a problem to solve: what’s going to happen inside that cage? (It’s a fight, and no one can turn away from a fight.)

Make that two problems. Because we’ve also got to figure how on earth Gottschall, a professor, ended up in a cage about to have his face smashed in.

Or take a look at our breakdown of Richard Shapiro’s masterful intro to his strange and tragic feature on St. James Davis, the US chimp advocate who lost most of his face in a chimp attack.

If you look closely, each of these examples uses the same technique to reel us in. They throw us into the middle of things from sentence one, injecting us headfirst into their stories. This way, they don’t have to tell us anything. We see, smell, hear, and feel it all, as the action unfolds.

Does it have to be a first person account? No, but when you’re the narrator, you have a special advantage.

As we’ll see below, when you tell stories based on your personal experiences, you give readers something they crave even more than a good cage fight: authenticity and vulnerability. Readers simply love listening to anyone who’s lived a life-changing experience and survived to tell the tale.

[3] “The reason why I said yes was because I am tired of being afraid,” Michelle Obama told a crowd in Council Bluffs, Iowa, during the State Fair, in August of 2007, explaining why she had signed on to a long-shot campaign to elect her husband, Barack Obama, President of the United States. She stood in a middle-school gym, surrounded by a mostly white audience that was only beginning to know her husband and had an even vaguer idea of who she was. The stage was a small, low platform, but Obama, dressed in black pants and T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a bun, occupied it like a dancer, punctuating her seven-minute address with appealing turns and pauses, as her listeners responded.”

Read the whole story here: Michelle Obama and Us

[4] “It’s the night of March 31, 2012, and I am standing half naked in a chain-link cage. I’m bouncing restlessly from foot to bare foot, trying to vent the tension building at my core. I’m surrounded by a swarm of men in Tapout T-shirts who are hooting at me over cups of beer. I can see the young man coming through the crowd to break my face, to strangle me to sleep. It’s like a nightmare.I’m thirty-nine years old. I’m an English teacher at a small liberal arts college. My first book, “The Rape of Troy,” focused on the science of violence-from murder to genocidal war-but I learned all I know from an armchair. I’ve never experienced real violence, never even been in a fight. But that’s about to change.”

See what happens next: My own personal Fight Club: How an English professor became a cage fighter

Chapter 3

Break up your text

We don’t like big flat endless Texan horizons on the web. We like what a mouse would see chasing a piece of cheese to the end of a plate.

So no eight-sentence paragraphs, please. Our Twitterfied brains won’t go for it. If it can be broken up, break it.

Isolate rhetorical questions with line breaks. Orphan final “ands” of lists. Widow “buts.” This is called sentence variation, which naturally creates small-scale text chunks, and emphasis.

Font styles can also break up information very effectively — especially for static web copy, where readers have been trained to expect less and less.

If you’ve got more to say than you feel our eyeballs will stick around for, try putting your lead sentences into a smaller heading (h3 or h4) along with an accent color. This will give the illusion of less body text. Combine that with a bigger, bolder heading and you’ll also be adding hierarchy to your copy.

Graphics, pull quotes, and even horizontal dividing lines, can also give respite and direction to copy-tired eyes.

To read the rest, follow us on Medium and then send a request to max@maxcopy.co. We’ll send you a link to the complete guide.