Share-Worthy Content Lasts Longer
Writing content for your site is still important. The amount of businesses that are running blogs on their websites fluctuates over the years, but as far as search engine rankings go, content will always be king. But when you write for your site, it only does a little bit of good if it’s just hanging out there on your website. Google will pick it up, rank it, and some traffic will come flowing your way. However, you need to give things a bit of a nudge. You need to create share-worthy content. Stuff that when you throw it out there, people say, “Ooh, imma click on that!” and then they do, and they’re so thoroughly impressed, they share it with their friends. Let’s look at the structure of what gets shared and how you can get maximum reach with your content.
Remember Your Target Audience
Long before you start writing, you should know who you are writing for. If you’re running a business, you should have your target audience defined – you do, right? That ideal customer avatar, that ideal market, that ideal client… that’s who you want to speak directly to when you’re writing your share-worthy content.
For example, you are my target audience. Those who want to do better with their writing. Business owners who want to set themselves apart from the competition by being a published author. The people who love elevating their badassery and want witty copy (with some incredibly snarky sarcasm so expertly woven in, most people don’t even realize it’s there).
So, who are you writing for? If you haven’t defined your ideal customer yet, think of who you have worked with in the past. Which client or customer was the most fun to work with? Which brought you the most money? These should be the same client or customer and you now know who you should be writing for when you’re pounding out some sick content that’s going to be shared more than the village bicycle.
Write About Topics that Are Highly Shareable
Do you want your stuff to be shared? Then you need to design it around stuff that’s more likely to be shared.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but it gets missed a lot. Remember sites like Buzzworth, Ranker, and similar ones? They wrote countless listicles, how-to’s, and things that were easy to read, interesting, and easy to share.
On my site, I have a few different things that are easy to share. One of my highest ranking pages is How to Climb Granite Peak. People want to read it, they find it on Google, and then they share it. I also have others like, How to Write a Book, and Developing Your Unique Selling Proposition. They’re designed to provide great value, easy to read, easy to skim.
Look at what you know, and think about how you learned it. Take all that knowledge, stuff that may have taken you years to accumulate, and create the quick guides and how-to’s. Give away some amazing information so people think, “That’s great, I’m going to share this with my friends so they get great information too!”
Structure for Easy Skimming and Sharing
When you’re writing online content you have to structure it differently than writing for print (I actually wrote about this recently, check it out). Attention spans on the internet are a whole lot shorter than when reading a magazine, newspaper, or book. Breaking your highly shareable content up using headings and subheadings lets the reader know what you’ll be talking about. So, if they already have their ideal audience defined, they can skip that section, but then read more about how to structure their content.
Other ways to make it easier to skim and share are things like bullet lists, bolded quotes, and set-aside blocks of text.
Using graphics on your page helps to improve readability, and can make the user experience that much better. Sometimes I’ll even summarize sections with something like:
Key Takeaway: Make it easy to read and skim – more people will see your stuff as share-worthy when the experience was pleasant.
Lean into Your Voice and Tone
When you were writing papers for your high school English class, you probably had feedback like, “Don’t use the words “you” or “I” those are too informal!” And your tone and voice were stifled, shoved into a little box, and you became a robot pounding out essays about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and modern-day implications and applications.
And you got really boring.
Keep it conversational (blogs are more conversational and less formal than, say, magazine articles). Throw in some humor, maybe invent a new word and ignore the red squiggly on your word document. The point is, be authentic. If you’re a weirdo, like me, let your freak flag fly.
On my homepage I try to avoid jargon (I use ghostwriter a lot because those who know what that is, know what that is and I need to capture their eyes), and I say things like “You have a sweet story, and you have an awesome brand that the world wants… nay… needs!” And then I talk about showing off just how badass you are.
The point is, be you.
Make it Easy to Share
Sometimes, it’s just hard to share stuff. If you have to copy the URL, go over to your favorite social media, paste it into the box, create some content to go with it… you’re going to lose people along the way. The easier it is for people, the more likely they will get it done.
Notice on my site, I have share buttons that follow you down the page (not on mobile though, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom to find those things). A simple click uploads it right to your social media, then you type in “wow, this is inspirational and amazing and well thought out!!!1!!one!!” and it zips off to you followers.
I used to include Tweet callout buttons, super simple to use, just click and it sends the tweet and the text… but I don’t use Twitter/X really anymore and barely have any followers or traction over there, so I’ve largely stopped doing that.
Most of your shares, though, will be through social media. Where you create the content, promote it on your social media accounts, and your followers like, comment, and share. When you get that fan base going, they’re happy to do you a solid and promote you to their network as well.
Repurpose Content for Different Platforms
Writing a long ass blog, like this one, is great when you’re trying to drive traffic to your website. You want people to stick around, read a little bit more, and if you can get over that 2,000ish word hump, the search engine overlords smile benevolently upon you. But long ass content isn’t great on most platforms. In fact, some, like that dreaded X/Twitter thingy hate long form content.
Which is why your blogs need to be broken into bite-sized chunks. Just like this one. Each of these sections, and the corresponding image, can be taken and used on LinkedIn or Facebook. I could even turn the images into a carousel on LinkedIn and in theory get more reach.
I could repurpose these sections into videos and slap them up on TikTok, or I could chop it all up and use some crappy AI program to make videos without me even lifting a finger. I likely won’t do that because that’s a really lazy way to repurpose your share-worthy content.
Nearly all my blogs are designed this way to ideally use the same content over and over.
Encourage Interaction and Sharing
Aside from making it easy to share using those buttons, there are other ways to encourage sharing. Most of it involves simply asking for that share.
Inside of your content, you can ask questions. Something like, “Do you use questions inside of your blogs? Leave me a comment down below – let me know how well it works!” Then, when you’re done reading, you can scroll down to the bottom of this blog and do the simple math problem (sorry, without it there’s just way to o much spammy spam) and tell me the answer.
On social media it’s a little easier. I could put my headings with numbers turning this blog into sort of a listicle. Then, when I share it on social, I could posit a question like, “How do you deal with number 7?” Of course you run the risk of being click-baity, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
If you have something really heavy hitting that you would really like to see shared a lot, direct message some friends and say, “Can you help me spread the word? Comment on my latest post and then share it to your network?”
Optimize for the Search Engines
This one is a no-brainer and you should be doing this anyway. Write for people, first, then write for the search engines. There are plenty of ways to research your keywords (Answer the Public is a good one to find out what people are actually asking surrounding your chosen topics). When you have your keywords homed in, you can write content for the people with SEO woven in.
Catchy headlines and meta descriptions help to entice people to click, even if they’re not actively searching for exactly that topic.
On my own website, I want the search engines to bring me traffic for people searching, “How to write a book.” It’s fairly competitive, so I have my work cut out for me. But the more shareable content I get that subtly weaves in that keyword phrase, the more likely I will be to rank highly.
Know Your Analytics
It’s great to write stuff that you are passionate about and that you believe will get shared a lot. But do you know how many people are actually checking it out? Are you getting the eyes on your content, or is it just festering somewhere on your site never to be read by a human and only scanned here and there by the Google spiders?
You should have Google analytics set up, and you should be at least giving a cursory look at the insights that social media platforms give you. After you generate enough content, you’ll start to notice trends of what is working and what isn’t. Lean into the stuff that works, reshape your content to follow that lead, and your share-worthy content will get even better.
When you do find something that performs well, put it on the list to be re-shared down the road. Most social media platforms only show your content to a meager percentage of your followers, so re-sharing means you’ll hit an entirely new demographic without even trying.
No Time to Write? Hire a Writer!
Ooh, wee! That’s a lot to take in and consider as you’re busy running a business, dealing with sick children, making dinner, cleaning the house, planning vacations, and the like. It’s one mess that you probably don’t even want to tackle.
Fortunately, I have an answer on how you can get this done with less effort.
You hire a writer! Finding an expert blogger, a professional ghostwriter, or a badass copywriter is actually really easy. Because you’ve already found him. The next step is to simply book some time to go over what you need, then watch as he weaves the magic and helps you create share-worthy content.