Giving your content more personality

Giving your content more personality

It’s right – more than a million contents are composed each day. The challenge however is how do you involve the audience to keep their focus on your content during this period of information overload and limited attention span? Giving your content personality; is just by adequately making your content more engaging, remarkable, and unique. Generating content to keep your readers engaged can be difficult particularly with all the distractions in the digital marketing industry yet giving your content more personality has been proven to be one of the surest ways to make your content stand out.

The question has been asked, “is any content truly unique in this day and age?”

Almost every subject has been covered under the sun and for that matter reinventing the wheel on particular subjects may not be necessary however having a unique perspective on a topic can stand out in the way you structure and present your content. This is what brings out the personality of your content.

Indeed, composing content in a voice that is fascinating and unique can put a new turn on even the most ordinary points. A couple of tips to help you out

Act it out, don’t just write.

Don’t get confused yet. Content creation has one primary reason to engage with the audience. In all honesty, it is probably the least difficult approach to ensure your content has personality. Rather than going into default mode to begin creating your content, a simple strategy is to envision your reader standing before you and having a discussion with them on the subject. The words will be straightforward and direct. This brings out clarity and accuracy in your communication and brings out the practical relevance of your content in a regular way. In this way, your content is naturally filled with personality.

Formatting, Formatting and Formatting

As important as real words are, the format of the content is equally important. Most people generally scan through content, hence formatting your content to make them effectively readable is key. Utilizing the correct formatting; italicized fonts, bold type and effective use of bullets or numbering makes your content stand out. Content readers don’t engage properly with your content when it is not effectively laid out and formatted well. Additionally, keep your paragraphs and sentences short to increase readability and understanding of your content.

Effective Use of italics helps to add more weight to keywords, particularly when drawing a difference between two words. Similarly making your keywords bold, is an incredible way of emphasizing what you want your readers to know. Note that overusing these formatting options can be disruptive so aside uncommon occurrences, keep bold font style for headings and subheadings.

You can also make use of pictures and symbols where possible to make your content appealing and engaging with the audience.

Emotions Count! Draw on it.

Out of over 7000 articles from the New York Times accessed by Jonah Berger to make sense of what made a specific piece of content engaging, He found out that articles with “uplifting news” stories were shared more frequently than “terrible news” stories, It was also quite evident that Stories that evoked a passionate reaction – regardless of whether satisfaction, sympathy, outrage, dissatisfaction, or uneasiness – are bound to be shared than content that didn’t connect with the reader’s emotions.

Thinking about how to cause your content to bring out a passionate reaction? simply consider it from the readers’ perspective. What specific pain points of theirs would you say you are speaking to with this piece? For what reason will they add value to what you are saying? When you make sense of this, the outcome won’t just be a piece stuffed with greater personality but one that readers are more likely to re-share with others.

Make it worth the read! Make it Educative.

When writing, it’s a very smart thought to give your audience something to take away from content, something that adds on to their perspective on a subject if they do not already know about it. The content should be generally useful to your audience. Do not let them leave without picking up anything to reflect on. Sometimes you can be both educational and entertaining; they can go together.

For each article you write about, make it a practice to extensively research on the topic before you start writing. Try to get a viewpoint across in your writing rather than simply filling the whitespace. this will help give your content personality and give you credibility

Let your Enthusiasm show!

Not all topics you write about may be your specialty and hence you may not necessarily be able to deal with it excitingly and fascinatingly as you would deal with a subject within your comfort zone. However, be that as it may, you need to move past that limitation. Your audience is always the focal point and the reason why you’re writing that content is that it will enhance or add value to somebody who’s going to read it. To help you approach any topic with a positive attitude you need to present it with your audience in mind in that way you dissociate your biases and limitations and come at it with an open mind and with more interest. Your audience cannot be interested in your writing if you are not enthused about your content. Your content is greatly enriched if you are passionate about what you are writing and have taken your time to research the topic.

Rhetorical questions can work some magic too!

Just as asking questions in regular verbal communication increases your appreciation and understanding of the topic under discussion, the use of rhetorical questions can help shape your audience’s interest and increase their appreciation of your points of view in your content.

To bring out the key parts of your content you can sparingly use rhetorical questions in your content. Littering your content with facetious inquiries can draw your audience into the content in a way that picks their interest and allows you to structure your content logically.

These strategies are generally easy to execute and can truly transform your content if you let them. Which of these strategies have you used in your writing? Which worked best for you? Do you have different techniques for making your content additionally captivating? Comment and share with us