Tips from the Beatles: Making Good Content Great

  • June 20, 2019

Good content is not good enough. We firmly believe that here at Daily Posts. Content should be inspiring, thought provoking, even awe-inspiring. Bringing content to life takes time and effort, but, as we will see, it also takes a great imagination.

In Hey Jude by The Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney challenge Jude to take a sad song and make it better. How is Jude supposed to achieve this? They tell him: “Remember to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”. Lennon and McCartney are some of the best songwriters the world has seen. From them we learn that success in converting ordinary stuff into great content begins with taking the content to the heart. If it doesn’t come from the heart, the chances are that it will only be good enough, but not great. Below are five top content tips to help you to tell your story with passion.

5. Build Trust in Your Information

If you can tell a story truthfully, citing your sources and including links to websites that your readers can click on for further research, you become a credible source of information. Your audience will read and share your story with others via email and social media with full confidence that what you write is factual. For more information on how to authenticate your information, please click on this link: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ingredients-of-great-content/.

So, we are through our whistlestop tour of five expert tips to make web content great. Dream up different scenarios and perspectives and tell a story worth hearing. Imagine how great your content could be if you do that!

4. Illustrate Your Story

Bring your story to life with great images, videos and illustrations. If you’re writing about an obstacle in the decision-making process in an organisation, for example, use an illustration to show the reader just where the hitch is and the impact that this has on the other stakeholders in the process. Use graphs and tables to present statistical results, or throw in an illustration to show the queen’s beauty in a fairy tale story.

3. Engage Your Audience

Great writing appreciates the reader as an intelligent being with his own perspectives on the issues that you are writing about. Look for creative ways to encourage the reader to participate in the story. So, go ahead and pose some thought-provoking questions. Don’t be afraid of stating your opinion and challenging the reader to counter your arguments. Occasionally think about using the shock factor. Tell the story from an angle that the reader wasn’t expecting.

2, Create Catchy Headlines

How do you introduce your story? Statistics from various sources suggest that while 80 per cent of people will read your headlines in an article, only 20 per cent will proceed to read the actual story. If you want to boost your readership, then the headlines and sub-headings must be really enticing, impactful and brief. Another way to headline this story could have been:

 How to bait your readers, hook, line and sinker

1. Understand Your Audience

Different audiences require different approaches to communication. Imagine for a moment that you’re writing a web tutorial for beginners; you need to start the story in a way that welcomes the audience and promises to add value to their lives. You could thus start your tech blog by saying:

Coding is fun for beginners. Indeed, I still recall the excitement I got the moment I managed to get my first script to display the words: “Hello World” on the computer screen using C++. That was twenty years ago. I did it using close to ten lines of codes. However, I am amazed at how much I can do today with a similar number of lines of code in Visual Basic or JavaScript. This is thanks to Microsoft’s inclusion of a friendly user interphase that now ships with every version of Visual Studio.

Such an introduction creates interest in the topic and motivates the reader want to discover the power of Visual Basic and JavaScript. A great way to create and sustain reader interest in your article is to identify your target audience and speak directly to them at the beginning of the article.

Previous

Next

Most Read