No matter if you are a freelance journalist or blogger, if you write about politics or celebrities, if you publish your own content or sell it — one thing is for sure: you want to create content that other people like to consume. Content that’s entertaining, informative and absorbed by your audience to the last word. Here are the top 4 tips on how to become a better content creator.
20 Second Summary:
Audience behaviour has changed due to digitalization
Information must be divided into short and clear bits
Information must be provable. Opinions and facts must be separated
Content creators must translate events into news and reduce complexity
It’s important to find the right way to publish your content. crumbl can help you with that. Learn more here
A good content creator produces for his audience. But the habits of audiences have changed a lot in recent years due to digitalization. Here are the 4 best tips on how to best impress your audience in the 21st century.
- Consider the attention span.
The average attention span of any human being today is eight seconds, according to a study published by Microsoft a few years ago. Thats a reduction of four seconds in the last decade alone, since the attention span is said to have been 12 seconds in 2000. Often you read this in conjunction with the claim that even a goldfish has a longer attention span.
Although more recent studies have revealed that these results are controversial, as it is unclear where the data actually came from and to what extent it is empirical (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790), though one thing is certain:
Tech adoption and social media usage are training consumers to become better at processing and encoding information through short bursts of high attention. (Microsoft Study)
This does not necessarily mean that the attention span decreases, but more that people have become better at filtering information according to their needs. Good content helps people filter their information and is designed to imitate natural filtering mechanisms.
Even absolut basic journalistic knowledge can help you here: Write the important information at the beginning of your text and only add details as the text progresses.
In addition, it is worth dividing your content into small, easily digestible blocks. This can be done with the help of lists, but also by dividing your text with useful subheadings. This way it is easier for readers to read even the longest text, no matter if the goldfish-brain theory is true or not.
2. Be trustworthy
In recent years, journalists and journalistic products have repeatedly fallen into disrepute (often wrongly). According to data from the Pew Research Center, only 21% of Americans would claim to have “A Lot of trust” in the media. This trend is transnational; even in Germany, one in three people distrust what is said by the media.
The reason for this is fake news, which especially in recent years has flooded social media sites and blogs.
Your task now is to gain your readers trust. Feed your articles with numbers, quotes and study results and indicate the sources for it. Check your information carefully and check each source as well. If certain statements seem odd to you, but you want to use them nonetheless, you should really state that the source could not be confirmed. This creates transparency.
Frequently, “fake news” allegations are not based on facts, but on opinions. Of course, as a content creator you are allowed to express your opinion. Make sure, however, that you clearly separate facts and opinions as well as explicitly label opinions.
3. Be a translator
That doesn’t mean that you have to speak different languages. Rather, your task is to translate events into news. Many things that happen are not even known by the recipients without news. They also have little or no prior knowledge about many topics. Complicated and detailed topic have to be broken down by you for your audience. Good content creators always act as “explainers”. They take the content consumers by the hand and illustrate all important aspects of the topic they are covering.
It is also important to pay attention to a simple and understandable language. Use short and clear sentences and only few foreign or complicated words. If certain technical terms cannot be avoided, explain them.
Often a visual preparation of the contents also helps. Graphics and diagrams often make it easier to present complex facts. This is due to the fact that almost 50% of our brain is involved in visual processing (https://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/).
The end result is always the same: reduce complexity without patronizing.
4. Find the right way to publish your content
Even the most interesting and best articles are worth little if nobody reads them. Content creators create content for readers and it is therefore that their article is seen.
Here there are different approaches. You can publish your content yourself. This can be done for example via your own WordPress blog or via platforms like Medium. You can even monetize your content on these platforms. On your own blog via advertising, on medium via the partner program. However, it is questionable whether you will be able to live from these revenues. The advertising revenues on WordPress blogs are usually not very high and only 9.2% of the active authors on Medium have earned over $100, through the medium partner program so far.
Another way of getting your content published is by selling your own content to news portals. From a monetary point of view, this is usually more useful, but there are restrictions here too. Often you are forced to serve the current demand of the specific news portal with your articles. In addition, it depends on your personal contacts to whom you can sell. Of course, you can also pitch your content to magazines where you have no contacts. However, such a content pitch is usually extremely time-consuming and not always crowned with success.
One possible solution to these problems is crumbl. Crumbl is an online marketplace that brings together content creators, news portals and advertisers. Content creators can post their articles (but also other digital content such as videos or recordings) there and sell them to a variety of news portals.
Crumbl will support free content, where the price of the article is directly linked to the advertising revenue it generates, as well as paid content, where the user pays an upfront fee to access the content.
Not only will Content Creators be able to earn directly from the success of their article, but also easily market and distribute to an audience they did not have access to before.
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