These are the things we need to bear in mind in order to maximise our written content’s performance

Please feel free to share any relevant tips and additions to the list in the comments.

Don’t get bogged down

Never a great idea to waste time and energy trying to make it work if it doesn’t. If you can’t think of a way to finish a sentence, move on and write the rest. You can always go back later and review what you’ve written and change things around.

Also, keep it simple. If the story is about ‘Elon Musk launching SpaceX rocket’, then lead with that. Don’t beat around the bush too much.

It’s counterproductive, especially because the average attention span on the internet is limited.

Mind the SEO

If you’re writing content online, SEO (Search Optimization Engine) is your best friend. It is also your boss. You work for the SEO. In the same way that you work for the YouTube algorithm if you post videos on YouTube.

Doing the SEO is like having a meal. You can have a sandwich and call it a day or you can have a five-meal course, but a meal is a meal. And you always need food.

The SEO is exactly the same thing.

With that in mind, the bare minimum, ie the sandwich, is the following:

pick a keyword or a key phrase and make sure it appears two or three times throughout the story, possibly including in the very first line of text
include images, and make sure your images are saved on your computer (and therefore uploaded) with a name that reflects the key phrase
remember that Google likes captions, excerpts and URLs that reflect the content

Headline Strategy

Believe it or not this is a job title, too. There are people that are paid literally only to come up with interesting headlines. It is *that* important.

We should always ask ourselves, why would readers click on this?

I’m not gonna name names but yesterday I found a good example of a bad headline from a crypto magazine.

The story was about a crypto company, let’s call it COMPANY A, buying COMPANY B, for an undisclosed fee.

The headline was “Company A acquires Company B for an undisclosed fee”

So I thought. “Cool!” And I ignored it. Why would I? All the relevant bits of information were revealed to me in the headline.

Always make sure you’re teasing and leaving more for later. Make sure the audience is engaged.

Quality is art, quantity is science

This isn’t my quote. It’s a quote from a YouTuber who says he doesn’t know where he got it from. But no matter, it says it all, doesn’t it?

When it comes to online content, quality is art, but quantity is 100% science.

In other words, it takes skills and experience and talent to learn what works and what doesn’t in term of content.

It terms of how often you have to upload content, that’s easy, and the answer is “as often as you can”.

This article was crossposted on Publish0x.

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