14 Steps To Engaging Content: Giving Readers a Love at First Sight Experience
Falling in love with content and story
Imagine you’ve just met a guy.
He isn’t the typical guy though. He isn’t looking for a one night stand. He doesn’t ignore you when there’s a game on. He doesn’t drink himself into oblivion.
Instead, he pays attention to you.
He looks you in the eye, smiles warmly, and speaks softly. He’s one of those gentle souls who really cares. And shows it by being helpful, kind, and understanding.
He’s every girl’s dream.
Your heart flutters. Your pulse is racing. There’s butterflies in your stomach, even though you haven’t eaten anything all day.
For it’s love at first sight!
For he touches your soul. He makes you want to be the woman you always dreamed of being. The kind of woman a man named Phil would do anything for.
And, as hard as it is to believe, his name is PHIL
For PHIL’s Passionate Honesty Inspires Love.
Phil’s Engagement
Imagine Phil writes for a living.
Picture Phil’s audience of readers who love him so much they read everything he writes. They’re emotionally engaged with Phil’s writing. They are fascinated by his work. They can’t get enough. And they keep asking him, “How? How does he do it?”
How does he entrance readers so they follow his every word? How does he get readers to float from point to point down the page to the very last word?
In short, how does he get readers to adore him?
So, he’s decided to give his beloved audience his secrets for a sensational reading experience. Then they, too, can write content that gets their readers to fall in love with them.
In other words, he reveals how he gives his readers that ‘love at first sight’ feeling: by creating engaging content.
What Does Engagement Mean?
According to Michele Linn in Want to Develop Engaging Content? First Step: Understand What Engaging Means, engaging content is:
“a little bit like love at first sight.” She says it “is so attractive and appealing it disarms you from your very first encounter and makes you want to linger to learn more. When it really connects with you, it will take your breath away.”
But in today’s world, every girl, every woman, and even many men, know how hard it is to find that kind of love. That kind of man. Or even that kind of content.
For the odds are one in a million.
Maybe even one in a billion.
For there are billions of pieces of content published daily. And most are written by people who have no clue about how to inspire that “love at first sight” feeling.
So how does Phil do it?
What are the things that arouse a reader’s desire? How do you make readers fall in love with your words? What will arouse in readers that ‘lovin’ feeling ?
The Appeal of Engagement
Researchers at contentmarketinginstitute.com found that what is so appealing about engaging content is that it offers something new.
Much like a budding love affair, engaging content inspires a new perspective by being unexpectedly helpful and even extraordinarily entertaining.
It offers you new information that is often wrapped up in a surprising bit of humor.
According to their research,
“engaging content gives your reader a peek at something he or she hasn’t seen before, but can relate to in some way.” But , “It must be relevant to the reader at the moment.”
For, like love at first sight, that loving feeling comes over you in a flash. Like lightning. It’s electric. Its magnetic. It’s mysterious.
For you never know where it’s going to strike next.
Or who will experience its impact.’
So there’s not really any absolute thing that will ensure that your content will stimulate that instantaneous connection. It’s an intimate personal experience. And is a result of chance. Of mystery. Of luck.
Yet there are things you can do to put the odds in your favor that your content will inspire in readers that love at first sight experience. Learning to write engaging content by taking these 14 steps.
14 Steps To Engaging Content
Here are 14 steps to write compelling, engaging content:
1. Write an alluring, curiosity-arousing headline that makes a fantastic promise.
2. Choose an attractive, emotion-arousing cover image.
3. Write an unforgettable, dramatic opening.
4. Make your post scannable by using subheads that provide hints that something exciting is coming up later in your post.
5. Make sure the body of your post has a high rate of revelation by being precise and concise. (Don’t stretch out the posts’ body with unneeded sentences and paragraphs.)
6. Arouse excitement by using emotional power words that create pictures in readers’ minds.
7. Make it fresh by avoiding cliches and coming up with new and unexpected ways of saying things.
8. Make it personable by injecting your personality into your writing.
9. Structure sentences with the most important ideas either at the beginning of the sentence or at the end of the sentence.
10. Beguile your reader by planting ‘curiosity seeds’ throughout your entire post.
11.Enchant readers by providing them with a real experience using the power of sensory words.
12. Use short sentences with a punch in order to stop the reader from scanning and encourage readers to begin to actually read the post.
13. Use short paragraphs connected by transitional words like ‘therefore’, ‘before’, ‘yet’, ‘or ‘ ‘and‘… to give readers the feeling of floating from paragraph to paragraph. (The ‘honeymoon’ feeling.)
14. Make your closing memorable by revealing and delivering what your headline promised. .
Takeaway
If you really want readers to instantly fall in love with your stories, make sure you say what you want to say in the most concise way, without meandering and adding irrelevant ideas. And use power words, words that arouse readers emotionally, words that give readers that “WOW!” experience.
If more writers learned the lesson ‘PHIL’ taught, there would be more love, and more engagement, in today’s writing world.
