Content tips to boost your clicks
Catherine Bowden - 5 February 2015
If you are a regular on Facebook you will probably be familiar with the new viral posts that seem to be appearing everywhere and filling up your news feed. They usually have titles such as ‘This lady takes a jar of jam and some tea – you won’t believe what happens next…’ or ‘What this little boy does next will move you to tears…’. Whilst they can be annoying it is human nature to be tempted to click on them and once we do we then go through to the Buzzfeed site where they make their money from advertising – so the more clicks they get, the more revenue they make!
This new form of click boosting content marketing has proved really successful, and last year it was estimated that Buzzfeed attracted more than 10m users in a single day!
So what can you learn from these adverts to help get your website content read and shared in the same way? Here are our top tips for how to boost clicks to your site.
Get your headline right
With this style of marketing, the content of the article is less important than the headline. This is because it is the tantalising nature of the headline that really draws you in and encourages you to click. In fact the less the customer knows about the content matter the better.
For example a personal trainer might write an article about ‘The 5 fruits you should eat for better health’. However, using that title may make people less likely to click as they could feel they already know what foods are healthy, or maybe they don’t even like fruit so they won’t be interested in finding out about it.
A revamped headline using Buzzfeed’s method could be “These 5 tips will change your life and health forever”. This clever headline will pique people’s curiosity and it also promises the consumer a big revelation if they do click on the link, making it much more appealing.
Make the most of Facebook to share your links
We often feel that we need to get people liking and sharing Facebook content for it to spread so quickly. However the reason that these links spread so well on social media is that Facebook assigns a higher status to the posts that get the most clicks. This means that the more people that click on the links in the post, the more they are likely to feature in other people’s news feeds.
This shows that it is worth making the most of your social media sites to share your content, and it can be a good idea to share links with a specific call to action for customers to click on your post.
Keep articles short and sweet to keep customers clicking
The aim of these articles is to lure customers to click on them, so the content behind the headline is often short and not particularly detailed. The mantra of these sites is definitely quantity over quality and so they put out lots of short articles that grab people’s attention. They then keep people on their site by linking to other articles that the customer may find interesting so that they stay on their site for longer.
Linking to other articles that may be relevant to your customers is a great way to keep your customer on your website, and it encourages them to find out more about what you have to offer.
No one knows how long the success of these sites will last, but this trend of encouraging clicks with engaging headlines is certainly working its magic at the moment. Whilst most companies will still want to keep to the traditional content creation route it’s important to look at what you can learn from the success of this phenomenon, and take some of these ideas to help increase clicks to your own websites.
Find out more about Wagada’s content marketing service.
