You’ve probably heard the expression that content is king, and we couldn’t agree more. Not only have we devoted our career to the power of content, but the fact of the matter is that content is what the internet is made of. It’s why smartphones have become so popular, allowing us to consume internet content while we’re on the go. As well, there’s much more content available these days, which means that the content creators among us have more competition.
So how do you create compelling content for a specific audience like the recovery community? There’s actually a bit of a science or an art to creating great content, but that’s part of what makes it so fun!
As long as you have a content creation strategy, you’ll be able to create high-quality, viral-ready content. Today, we’re going to give you a sneak peek at our own content creation strategy, which can be used and adapted to help you achieve your own content and conversion goals. Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
What Information is Most Relevant to the Recovery Community?
Before you ever write – or, as it were, type – the first word on content, you have to identify your audience and determine what subjects are the most relevant to them. Although this may seem so obvious as to not warrant mentioning, there are major content issues that can result from not taking the time to figure out the audience. But it’s more than just determining who they are; you should also consider the type of information that’s more relevant to them.
As an example, consider the topic of alcoholism. If your audience consists of people who are suffering or who previously suffered from alcoholism, you’ll write with the addict’s perspective in mind. However, if you’re writing B2B, or business-to-business, content, you’d want to approach the topic of alcoholism completely different since you’d be addressing an audience consisting of people who are more likely to provide treatments or work at addiction treatment facilities.
In short, ask yourself this question: Who will be reading this content and what information will they hope to gain?
What Type of Content are You Writing?
Once you have your audience figured out, you should nail down what type of content you’ll be writing. Specifically, you’ll need to decide whether you want the content to be evergreen or viral, or perhaps a feature of some kind.
As we’ve mentioned previously, evergreen content is content that conveys only the cold, hard facts. Evergreen content will continue to drive web traffic to your website far beyond the time following its initial publication, driving conversions as well as admits. As you might expect, viral content is intended to be shared on social media, significantly growing awareness of your website. Knowing which you intend for your content to be will help with many of the journalistic decisions you make as you write the piece.
Make Sure Your Content Starts With a Bang
According to Hubspot, as many as 55 percent of all web users will leave a website after only 15 seconds. Some sources say that a significant portion of those people will actually leave after just 3 seconds. Whether it’s 3 seconds or 15, this gives you just the briefest amount of time to make an impression on visitors before they leave. The best way to deal with this is by writing a killer intro.
Writing a strong first paragraph is one of the most difficult aspects of content writing that there is to learn. Most of us can’t just throw down a few sentences and get a compelling intro. Instead, it requires some thought. There’s actually a copywriting formula that can be used to great effect when writing an intro paragraph, but one of the best tips we can offer is to find a way to establish some type of personal or emotional connection with the reader. Whether it’s through a personal anecdote or tugging at the readers’ heartstrings, something that quickly grabs their attention in the first few sentences will almost guarantee that they continue reading the rest of your content.
Organize Your Content With Headers and Subheaders
Another thing that’s helpful to readers is to make sure your content is well-organized. Specifically, using headers and subheaders helps to break down your content and make it easier to read. For one thing, your headers and subheaders serve as a sort of outline that offers a preview of what your content is about. Additionally, they help readers to keep their place as they progress through the content, which makes it flow a lot better, too.
Make Internal Linking a Priority
For most websites, search engines are a primary source of web traffic. However, just because a search engine directs a user to your website doesn’t mean the user will stay. As we mentioned above, a lot of users will leave a website within seconds of arriving, which makes it important to find ways to keep visitors engaged with our websites. Enter: Internal linking.
As its name suggests, internal linking refers to when you post links in your content that will take readers to content that’s posted elsewhere on your website. This increases a visitor’s interaction with your website, which significantly increases the chances of him or her converting into a repeat visitor or an admit. Another major benefit of internal linking is that when Google crawls your website and sees that there are links on your pages that point to your other content, it gives Google a better idea of how your content is related and results in improved search rankings.
A Final SEO Polish
Now that you’ve identified your audience, determined the type of content you’re writing, written a strong opening paragraph, split up your content into subsections, and incorporated internal links, you’re almost finished. At this point, you’ll want to do some final polishing and optimizing to ensure that your content is as visible to search engines as possible. One of the main ways to optimize your search engine visibility is with keywords; choose some important keywords and variants of those keywords that are relevant to your subject matter and place them throughout the page. There’s actually an art to keywording, so make sure you don’t overdo it as Google will actually punish you for “keyword stuffing”.
Once you’ve worked through each of these steps to creating content for the recovery community, you should be ready for publication. For additional content, rinse and repeat.
