Shareable Content 15 Ways to Create It That Will Explode Your Traffic

Shareable Content 15 Ways to Create It That Will Explode Your Traffic You see a piece of content and less than a day later it’s all over the web. It looks like its creators didn’t even try, and suddenly  as if by magic, thousands of people are sharing it. Then there’s your content. You’re sending it out everyone on social media and via email. Yet, you’re not gaining the traction that you want. There is a way to fix that. At least 15 of them, in fact, which were about to run through. In this blog post you’re going to learn: What  makes viral content so shareable? How can you replicate those shareable traits with your own content? What highly shared content really looks like. What are you waiting for? Check out our top tips for creating shareable content and  find success for yourself. 15 Ways To Create Shareable Content That Will Explode Your TrafficDownload Your Shareable Content Tips Infographic As a bonus, weve included this fact-packed infographic with interesting stats on shareable content. Download it and keep it on hand for any time you need a reminder about what makes shareable content so important. 1.  Do Competitive Research One of the easiest ways to create content people want to pass around is to look at what's worked for others. So, creep on your competitors! Looking at what your competitors are doing and what their audience is reacting to is a great way to find insights on the content your audience wants to see. Here’s a list of what you need to do to be a successful competitor-tracking Sherlock Holmes: Make a list of your top five competitors and the social media channels you both are on. Where are you competitors at online? If you’re on the same channels that means that you’re directly competing with them for traffic. Take a look at the last six months of content that they have published.  This will involve a lot of scrolling and note taking. Are they publishing blogs, videos, or some other type of content? What types of content are you publishing that are similar to theirs? Note content that has gotten high engagement on each channel. If videos are going over well for your competitor on Facebook take note of that. Then look at specifics, what are they doing in those videos that is causing a reaction from their audience? Use their high engagement content to inspire your own content.  By seeing what your intended audience is already reacting too you can take those conceptions and make them your own. Take what your competitors are writing about and make it 10x better. Make your audience see that you are the best option. Create content that shows your audience you're the best option.2. Tell A Story With Your Content Next, let's cover how to craft strong storytelling content. Why is storytelling an important part of creating shareable content? Because it allows your audience to see themselves in a given situation, making it more relatable to their day-to-day experience. So how can you make your content tell a story for your audience? Craft your content so it has a clear beginning, middle, and end. At the end of it you should be able to answer the question, â€Å"Did my content relate to my audience and get them from point A to point B clearly?† So let’s map that out. or each piece of content that you create, write down the following: The problem that your audience is experiencing. The solution that your product or company can provide. How are you going to tell a story that will take your audience from Point A to Point B? Think about the steps it takes for a consumer to start with a problem and arrive at a solution: How can you create storytelling content for social media? Take a look at this post from State Farm Insurance: Some surprises are bigger than others. No matter what, were here to help. Posted by State Farm on Monday, June 13, 2016 The video does a few things. First, it introduces a pair of common problems; one is that is a bit light-hearted and one more serious. Both of these problems or experiences people can relate to. The video continues and leads viewers from Point A (being able to buy products you love and possibly having them stolen) to Point B (learning that State Farm can protect you should the worst happen to your new purchase). The video resolves by showing the audience that no matter the situation, State Farm will be there in the good times to reward them and in the bad times to help them. The copy is short but the video still tells a story with a bit of humor.  And since it's on social media, it's naturally convenient to share. Recommended Reading: How to Write a Video Script That Will Make $100,000,000 (Free Kit) 3. Validate Your Audience’s Opinions Another way to create shareable content is to validate your audience’s opinions. Content that reinforces the opinions your audience holds is easy to share because they now have proof from a reliable source (you!) that their opinions are correct. So how do you create that content? You need to think back to your audience. What do they like and believe in? For example, if I was targeting marketers, I  could talk about topics I know the marketing community has polarizing opinions around. That might include something like hashtag usage on Facebook (don't do it) or using automated direct messages on Twitter (again, that's another one in the "don't" column). I know that people in my target audience care about these topics because they’re relevant to their jobs. There’s also the fact that people will have an opinion on whether or not my observations are correct. So how can you find that information? Think about your demographic, what are they interested in? What do people in your industry care about? What do they have differentiating opinions on? What are some of the opinions that you have already posted about? What did your audience have a positive reaction towards? If they feel a certain way about something, you can probably guess they have a certain belief. So what does this type of content look like in action? Take a look at this Facebook post from Girl Develop It: .TechRepublic names their top 10 cities for #womenintech in the US. Nearly all of them have a local GDI chapter! http://tek.io/2nfsGWb Posted by Girl Develop It onTuesday, March 28, 2017 While Girl Develop It didn’t write the article that they shared (and that’s okay) this article would still appeal to the beliefs of their audience. Why? Because they are an organization focused on getting women involved in tech by teaching them how to code. So it would make sense that their audience would be excited about cities that higher a lot of women in the tech field. Encourage social shares by reaffirming your audience's beliefs, values, goals, and opinions.3. How Can You Use Controversy In Your Content? Why would you want to cause controversy with your content? That seems like the exact opposite of what you would want to do. Wouldn’t you rather have people agree with you? Not necessarily. You can actually cause your audience to become more certain in their opinions because they want to prove that they’re right. So how can you create the content that will play devil’s advocate to your audience’s opinions? Your exercise this time will be the reverse of the previous one. If your audience aligns their values on one side of an argument, how could you reintroduce the other side to encourage shares? So what does this content look like? Let’s go back to the marketer targeting example from earlier. Check out this tweet from Luis Costa: Will Writing That E-Book Really Boost Your Business? https://t.co/Vcouf7BKYD Luà ­s Costa (@luiscostainfo) July 6, 2017 Often times people hear â€Å"publish your content, establish yourself as an expert in the field.† One of the ways that marketers can do that is by publishing an e-book. It makes sense right? They’re easy to self-publish and you have a wealth of information to share. But what if that ebook isn’t necessarily your best option? That’s exactly what this article does. It takes a commonly held assumption, flips it on its head and plays devil’s advocate. Doing this causes one of two things to happen. Either: You’ll click the post because you want to see what this person is talking about. You know you’re right and you want to see where the author came to that conclusion so you can argue and reinforce your own ideas. Drive social shares by contradicting a widely held opinion.4. Create Incentives For Sharing Your Content Everybody likes free stuff right? Whether it’s a T-shirt or a strategy template, free stuff often equals content shares. People like getting a reward for the time it takes to do, well, anything, too. So, how does this relate to content? You can help increase your shares by incentivizing your audience to take action. So how can you find out what your audience likes? You guessed it, more exercises yay! Take a look at past giveaways, free downloads, and other incentives you’ve offered your audience. Did you incentivize anything there? If so, what did your audience respond well to? So what does incentivizing your content look like? Take a look at this tweet from Passion Planner: You can win this beautiful wall tapestry Undated Passion Planner by following 2 easy steps:😄1. Follow @passion_planner 2. RT this post pic.twitter.com/CqnRdwiSgo Passion Planner (@passion_planner) May 24, 2017 They encourage shares because it’s what will enter them to win a fun prize package. And entering to win is simple, all they have to do is click a button. So how can you do this for your own content? Decide what your giveaway or incentive for people to share your content will be. Set a date and time that their shares need to be done by. Remember to add CST, PST, especially if your fan base spans across the country. For Twitter, it’s relatively easy to track shares because all you have to do is count retweets. Facebook is a little more difficult to track shares because you won’t be able to see the actual shared post unless their post settings are set to public. Once your deadline has passed,  review your content shares and select a winner. Send out posts letting your fans know that a winner has been selected and tag them so they can claim their prize. For more information, this detailed guide on running social media contests  from Hubspot is a great resource. Shareable #content #tip: Give people an incentive to share your stuff.5. Appeal To Your Audience’s Values Another way to connect your audience to your content and encourage them to share it is to create content that revolves around their values. Your audience wants to know that the values of your company or product align with theirs. Connecting their values to your content is one way to show that you care. Okay, so that’s great advice but how do you implement it? We’re going back into your audience research. You know what your audience believes and some of the basic demographics of your target audience. You may have to generalize a bit, but what would your target demographic care about? For example, if you’re targeting new moms, maybe your content connects to a fundraiser for the March of Dimes. Or, maybe your audience cares about products that are made in the USA so you run a blog post on how the new line of products coming into your store Or, maybe your audience cares about products that are made in the USA, so you run a blog post on how the newest line of products coming into your store is made in the USA only. One way to figure out the values of your audience is to look to your past content. What values have you talked about before that your audience has made a connection with? Now, what does that content look like in action? Take the ASPCA for example. Everyone likes cute puppies and kitties, they tug at your heartstrings and make you feel. Here is a cute fluffy puppy to prove my point: The ASPCA does a great job creating content that encourages people to share content because who doesn’t want to see a tiny kitten get adopted? Meet our Pet of the Week, Bellona! Shes sweet, curious and attentive, help us find her a home please RT! https://t.co/jQyqRyqBrP pic.twitter.com/E00bFzg8kZ ASPCA (@ASPCA) June 20, 2017 It’s simple values and content that make it easy for your audience to want to share it.  The easiest way to do this is to create posts that state the values of your company. You could format them like: You care about [Value]. At [Brand name] we do to! At [Insert Brand Name] we’re constantly looking forward which is why we believe in [Value]. Our customers believe in [Value], [Value] and [Value]. At [Brand Name] we do too. Recommended Reading: How to Write for Social Media to Create the Best Posts 6. Make Your Content Useful In order to encourage shares, your content needs to be useful to your audience. This is so important that the New York Times did a study  and found that 90% of users will assess the usefulness of the content before sharing it. So how do you ensure the content you’re creating is useful to your audience? First, think about the question or problem that your content is addressing. What are you trying to help your audience solve? Then your content needs to provide step by step information on how to solve the problem or answer the question. These steps can include your product or exclude it, depending on what you’re looking to do. Your final step will include some sort of CTA. This could be as simple as a click-to-tweet button or an encouragement to share this post with someone else who would gain more by seeing the information you provide. So what does that content look like in real life? Content that is useful to our audience is something that we strive to create at every day. We want our content to be actionable and help our readers, help themselves: Our blog posts tell our reader exactly what they’re going to learn when they take the time to read our content, letting them decide if it’s useful to them or not. Our social posts will also carry out the same tone that our audience is going to be getting useful information out of our blog posts that they could then share with their colleagues: With a solid strategy in place, you can (as we say at ), plan your work, and then work your plan with this guide: http://cos.sc/2tJzguK Posted by onWednesday, July 5, 2017 7. Keep Your Content Simple Another tip for creating shareable content is to keep it simple. Your audience should be able to get the entire idea out of an article without having to read the whole thing. More often than not your audience is in a hurry and you need to be able to capture their attention in a short amount of time. In fact, Hubspot published  a whole infographic on how our attention span today is shorter than a goldfish- it’s 8.5 seconds long. TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) is a real thing. So, how do you create simple content that gets the entirely of your point across fast? First, you need a solid introduction. At we aim to have our blog introductions to be about a 100 words or so and follow the format of: Introduction to problem audience is experiencing. Show that there is a better process that they could use to the fix problem. Create a bulleted list of three points that summarize what they are going to gain or learn from reading the blog post. It’s those three main bullet points are key to use creating a successful introduction because our audience can skim down and know if they article contains the right information that they are looking for. You can also simplify your content by breaking up it up into short skim-worthy lists by: Sticking to two to three sentences per paragraph. Using multiple headers. Breaking up text or translating it to images or infographics. 8. Establish Trust And Credibility With Your Content Your content will pick up more shares when you can establish trust and credibility. Random websites that claim the world is going to end tomorrow probably aren’t going to pick up a lot of traffic because there is no trust there. However, content that is thoroughly back by other credible sources suddenly seems more trustworthy. So how can you create a credible piece of content?

A Guide to Renaissance Humanism

A Guide to Renaissance Humanism Renaissance Humanism- named to differentiate it from the Humanism that came later- was an intellectual movement that originated in the 13th century and came to dominate European thought during the Renaissance, which it played a considerable role in creating. At the core of Renaissance Humanism was using the study of classical texts to alter contemporary thinking, breaking with the medieval mindset and creating something new. What Is Renaissance Humanism? One mode of thinking came to typify Renaissance ideas: Humanism. The term derived from a program of studies called the studia humanitatis, but the idea of calling this Humanism really arose in the 19th century. There remains a question over what exactly Renaissance Humanism was. Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal 1860 work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, solidified the definition of humanism into the study of classical- Greek and Roman- texts to affect how you viewed your world, taking from the ancient world to reform the modern and giving a worldlier, human outlook focusing on the ability of humans to act and not blindly follow a religious plan. Humanists believed God had given humanity options and potential, and humanist thinkers had to act to make the most of this. That definition is still useful, but historians increasingly fear that the tag Renaissance Humanism pushes a large range of thought and writing into one term that doesn’t adequately explain subtleties or variations. Origins of Humanism Renaissance Humanism began in the later 13th century when Europeans hunger for studying classical texts coincided with a desire to imitate those authors in style. They weren’t to be direct copies but drew on old models, picking up vocabulary, styles, intentions, and form. Each half needed the other: You had to understand the texts to take part in the fashion, and doing so drew you back to Greece and Rome. But what developed wasnt a set of second-generation mimics; Renaissance Humanism began to use knowledge, love, and maybe even obsession with the past to change how they and others saw and thought about their own era. It was not a pastiche, but a new consciousness, including a new historical perspective giving a historically based alternative to medieval ways of thinking. Humanism began to affect culture and society and powered, in large part, what we now call the Renaissance. Humanists operating before Petrarch, called Proto-Humanists, were mainly in Italy. They included Lovato Dei Lovati (1240-1309), a Paduan judge who may have been the first to mix reading Latin poetry with writing modern classical poetry to major effect. Others tried, but Lovato achieved far more, recovering among other things Seneca’s tragedies. A hunger for bringing old texts back to the world was characteristic of Humanists. This searching was vital because much of the material was scattered and forgotten. But Lovato had limits, and his prose style stayed medieval. His pupil, Mussato, connected his studies of the past to contemporary issues and wrote in the classical style to comment on politics. He was the first to deliberately write ancient prose in centuries  and was attacked for liking pagans. Petrarch Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) has been called the Father of Italian Humanism, and while modern historiography plays down the role of individuals, his contribution was large. He firmly believed that classical writings were not just relevant to his own age  but saw in them moral guidance that could reform humanity, a key principle of Renaissance Humanism. Eloquence, which moved the soul, was the equal of cold logic. Humanism should be a doctor to human morals. Petrarch didn’t apply much of this thinking to the government  but worked at bringing together the classics and the Christians. The Proto-Humanists had been largely secular; Petrarch bought religion in, arguing that history can have a positive effect on a Christian soul. He has been said to have created the Humanist program, and he argued that each person should study the ancients and create their own style. Had Petrarch not lived, Humanism would have been seen as threatening Christianity. His actions allowed Humanism to spread more effectively in the late 14th century. Careers needing skills of reading and writing were soon dominated by Humanists. In the 15th century in Italy, Humanism once more became secular and the courts of Germany, France, and elsewhere turned away until a later movement brought it back to life. Between 1375 and 1406 Coluccio Salutati was chancellor in Florence, and he made the city the capital of Renaissance Humanism’s development. The 15th Century By 1400 Renaissance Humanism’s ideas had spread to allow speeches and other orations to become classicized: diffusion was needed so more people could understand. Humanism was becoming admired, and the upper classes were sending their sons to study for the kudos and career prospects. By the mid-15th century, Humanism education was normal in upper-class Italy. Cicero, the great Roman orator, became the core example for the Humanists. His adoption jibed with a turn back to the secular. Petrarch and company had been politically neutral, but now some Humanists argued for republics to be superior to the dominant monarchies. This wasn’t a new development, but it came to affect humanism. Greek also became more common among the humanists, even if it often stayed second to Latin and Rome. However, a huge amount of classical Greek knowledge was now worked in. Some groups wanted to adhere strictly to Ciceronian Latin as the model for languages; others wanted to write in a style of Latin they felt more contemporary. What they agreed on was a new form of education, which the rich were adopting. Modern historiography also began to emerge. The power of Humanism, with its textual criticism and study, was shown in 1440 when Lorenzo Valla proved The Donation of Constantine, ostensibly transferring much of the Roman Empire to the Pope, was a forgery. Valla and others pushed for Biblical Humanism- textual criticism and understanding of the Bible- to bring people closer to the word of God that had been corrupted. All this time Humanist commentaries and writings were growing in fame and number. Some Humanists began to turn away from reforming the world  and focused instead on a purer understanding of the past. But Humanist thinkers also began to consider humanity more: as creators, world-changers who made their own lives and who should not be trying to imitate Christ but finding themselves. Renaissance Humanism after 1500 By the 1500s, Humanism was the dominant form of education, so widespread that it was dividing into a range of sub-developments. As perfected texts passed to other specialists, such as mathematicians and scientists, the recipients also became Humanist thinkers. As these fields developed they split, and the overall Humanist program of reform fragmented. The ideas ceased to be the preserve of the rich, as printing had brought cheap written materials to a wider market, and now a mass audience was adopting, often unconsciously, humanist thinking. Humanism had spread across Europe, and while it split in Italy, the stable countries to the north fostered a return of the movement that began to have the same massive effect. Henry VIII encouraged Englishmen trained in Humanism to replace foreigners on his staff; in France Humanism was seen as the best way to study scripture. John Calvin agreed, starting a humanist school in Geneva. In Spain, Humanists clashed with the Church and Inquisition  and merged with surviving scholasticism as a way to survive. Erasmus, the 16th century’s leading Humanist, emerged in the German-speaking lands. The End of Renaissance Humanism By the mid-16th century, Humanism had lost much of its power. Europe was engaged in a war of words, ideas, and sometimes weapons over the nature of Christianity (the Reformation) and Humanist culture was overtaken by rival creeds, becoming semi-independent disciplines governed by the area’s faith.