Tag: Lead Generation Campaigns

Outsource Content to Make Your Company’s Voice Ring

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

Keeping a company’s web content current, relevant, and thought-provoking to potential clients is a 24/7 job. The task is much simpler when you outsource it to a competent agency whose job is to create superb internet material for you.

Your web-based content is simply better, there is more of it, and it is up-to-the-minute. Outsourcing has advantages.

Still, important questions remain. Will an agency’s writers convey your company’s distinctive voice and style in all your content? How do aquality agency’s methods help it achieve that goal? And how can you help?

Hire a writing agency: content writers as partners

Before considering how to keep your branding consistent when using an agency, consider the size of the shift North American companies have made toward outsourcing content, and some of the rationale behind that shift.

According to a 2020 study conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, “50% of all [study] respondents outsource at least some of their content marketing, with content creation topping the list of outsourced content marketing activities for all respondents (84%).”

In a January 2021 article for Forbes, Amine Rahal touched on the thinking behind the trend:

To compete with the big dogs, your website needs a sound marketing strategy that involves a near-constant supply of high-quality, error-free, relevant, and search-engine-optimized content. If you’re running a website yourself, good luck managing all of that while also juggling all the other responsibilities of being a webmaster and business owner. Even with an in-house team of content creators, you might find that you’re too budget-constrained to rival the output of your competitors. Or your existing team simply isn’t producing the results necessary to hit your search engine optimization (SEO) targets.  

In effect, you expand and improve your capacities when you outsource content creation to a team of capable writers. (And you do so without paying salaries, benefits, and tax contributions for content writers, as you do for your employees.)

Your SMEs are great at what they do. After all, they’re your experts. But they may not be expert writers or have time to write web content.

An adept agency’s content writers will interact respectfully with the SMEs you choose to get the information they need to ace your content.

Its writers are good at asking the most pertinent questions and making those interactions pleasant and efficient.

They can do lots of research when it is needed, and they consistently meet deadlines. Even very large projects are not a problem for a well-staffed writing agency. Its staff will consult with your key employees to prioritize the pieces of your project, then bring in as many writers and editors as needed to complete them on deadline.

Your outsourced writers and editors will work with enthusiasm, making collaboration enjoyable. As in other businesses—like yours—a nimble agency’s content writers love what they do because it is what they do best.

Outsource content of many types

A competent agency’s writers deliberately maintain the look and sound of your company’s brand throughout all your content. (Or even help you change it up if that is your goal.) The agency will consult with you and your staff to identify your brand’s voice and then reproduce it in each of your content categories.

Your company’s website

Building or rebuilding your website is an enormous project. A sizeable writing agency with a process in place can handle any size corporate website construction or revision.

When you hire a writing agency with a diversity of expertise within its staff, it will assign writers and editors who already know or will quickly learn about your industry and your place in it.

They don’t mind doing all the reading it takes to get to know your company and the terms and lingo used to describe its products or services.

Many are trained journalists. They know the art of the interview; how to ask defining questions about your business, branding, customers, and your goals for your site.

Working with your departmental leaders and SMEs, agency writing teams create to-the-point content for your website’s pages, retaining your unique voice and style.

They also coordinate with your web designer on the structure of your site, choice of images, and the placement of all your content, so your customers can find what they came for and enjoy the experience.

These decisions are as important to your branding as word choice.

Blogs

In no place is your brand’s voice more important than in your company’s blog posts. They are a personal conversation with your customer.

When you hire a writing agency with a depth of experience to create them, you hire a team of writers that understands this and will work with you to ensure your blog speaks with your company’s voice to your target client.

As Entrepreneur contributor Bhavik Sarkhedi recently wrote, “The essence of a blog is very important for a company as it is the narrative of the product and serves as a testament of the quality and reliability of the brand.”

Scannable, visually captivating blogs will grab your readers’ attention. 

Before writing them, agency content writers will interview your SMEs, cull the highlights of what they learn to formulate headlines and subheads, and consult with your SMEs on images and graphics.

Social media campaigns

Creating and unifying your firm’s messaging across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and elsewhere in the social media universe requires time and talent. Making and remaking meaningful connections with your customers on these platforms often is vital to staying relevant in your market.

Hire a writing agency that prioritizes understanding your company and its voice, so your posts look and sound authentic. One whose writers and editors know social media well and are practiced in writing for each platform. Your messages need to be finessed to fit their locations.

Of course, you don’t just want readers of your social media posts, you want responders! Outsource your social media content writing to an agency that knows the art of getting visitors to respond to your posts and share them (free advertising!)

Wikipedia

Wikipedia gets a lot of traffic, often catching readers on the first page of their search results. Do you want your companyto contribute to its online topical library?

Do you know Wikipedia’s rules and what types of topics the site will accept? Savvy content writers do.

When you outsource content writing for your Wikipedia articles, you coordinate with agency writers to select topics. You also enlist their help with research, if needed. They work hard to integrate your voice, and you approve the finished product after they make any changes you request.

E-Books

To share your thoughts via an e-book and make creating one a painless—even pleasant—process, you and your SMEs first share your thoughts with content writers who will help you (if necessary) home in on a topic. In this process, you settle on a book that will attract your customers’ attention—one that answers their pressing questions and provides the solutions they need.

A crackerjack agency’s writing teams have worked across a spectrum of industries, so they easily adapt to your company’s specialties. They understand—or understand how to find—the kinds of specifics your e-book needs to include.

If you already have a manuscript for your e-book, hire a writing agency’s expert editors to perfect its grammar, spelling, and flow before it makes a public appearance on your website.  They also understand the use of graphics and are skilled at helping you choose or create images that support the book’s text.

These professionals ensure your e-book cuts to the chase with your message—as digital content needs to do—with headlines and subheads that keep potential clients’ interest while keeping your voice and style.

Traffic-Building

That is, of course, what you want all of your web content to do—bring traffic—the customer/client-type, to your site. And grab your visitors’ interest when they get there.

When you outsource content writing for each element of your web content to a talented writing agency, you hire a team of skilled writers and editors who share your goals. The team works with you to identify, reach, inform and impress your target readers.

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Outsourcing content: your part in the partnership

There are some practical steps you can take as a business owner or executive to get your partnership with a writing agency off to a great start and ensure its success.

Provide an outline

Writersmarketing.com suggests that business clients start a piece of writing by providing their ghostwriters (unnamed content writers) with an outline that will help clarify what they want to say.

This is a real option, either when getting started with an agency or as a consistent way of working with your agency’s writing teams.

Provide a guide

One of the greatest ways you can help your hired writing agency is by providing your outsourced content writers with a style guide, either one that exists or (preferably) one that you make up to suit your brand’s preferences. Your marketing department can write up a style sheet or guide to be used for each type of content.

Alternatively, you or your marketers can simply instruct the writing agency verbally on your guidelines and ask for a written copy of your instructions to be sure all is clear.

Your guide can specify elements that make your content scannable—such as short paragraphs, frequent subheads, and bullets.

It can stipulate the use or non-use of certain punctuation; a formal or informal tone; and slang words to use or avoid.

It can indicate the types and numbers of images writers should use for each type of content.

It can require frequent links or a specific number of links per section of copy.

As your outsourced content writers “get the hang” of writing in your style, they probably won’t often need to refer to the guidelines but establishing them is a good place to start your collaborative relationship.

Establish a system of communication

When you choose a writing agency for your large or small content writing projects, be sure it is one that communicates effectively, frequently, and precisely.

Once hired, depending on the size of your project, a writing agency may offer options from phone calls to Skype or Zoom sessions to project management software such as Wrike. This type of software allows for projects to be shared at various stages and lets you make changes or request changes at each stage.

Using a skilled team of outsourced content writers with whom you communicate well, your online content will grow in both volume and effectiveness, to accomplish its marketing mission.

Website Content Improvement Case Study

The Writers For Hire understands that a good website needs much more than keywords.

  • Content development Do you want Google to be your friend? Stop worrying about getting the right keywords on your website and focus on getting quality information there. We’ve written enough websites to know the kind of content that Google, and most visitors, expect to find on a company website. We’ll produce copy that’s concise, well-written, and developed with your target audience’s needs in mind.
  • Reader resources Show people it’s worth their time to visit your website: we’re talking about expert-level content – from whitepapers to blogs to newsletters – that addresses your clients’ needs and interests. The resources will bolster your searchability while building your value and credibility in the eyes of potential customers. It’s a win-win.
  • Email campaigns Whenever you develop a new reader resource, or you simply want to offer a coupon or end-of-the-season special, we can craft compelling emails — and subject lines — that recipients will want to open, read, and click on.
  • Landing pages Our certified landing page writers know how to develop creative, effective landing pages that – paired with targeted pay-per-click campaigns – consistently achieve conversion. Gated content. Capture potential leads’ contact info by offering up a particularly meaty eBook or whitepaper, “gated” behind a simple form.
  • Social campaigns . Done well, these campaigns work hand-in-hand with your web content to build your search ratings, link people to your website, and strengthen your brand’s authority. We can help.

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Website Content Improvement Case Study

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The Metropolis Model: How to Use the Sharing Economy to Create Standout Thought Leadership Content

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

“It’s easy to admire a thought leader; it’s much harder to become one.”

—Adam Grant, Wharton professor and author of Give and Take

Content creation in the sharing economy

The sharing economy continues to transform nearly every sector of the global economy.  A recent McKinsey report projects that sharing economy revenues will reach $335 billion globally by 2025.

Wikipedia defines the sharing economy as “peer-to-peer based sharing of access to goods and services.” Another definition describes it as “a socio-economic ecosystem built around the sharing of human, physical and intellectual resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organizations.”

As its impact continues to grow, what does it mean for content creation?

Content creation is a challenge for marketers. Statistics from Kapost show that 39% of marketers indicate coming up with ideas is difficult, and that 1 in 2 marketers say they don’t have enough ideas to fuel their content operations.

The sharing economy is good news for content creation, offering rich new opportunities for engagement, dialogue, and creative insight. For marketers, the collaborative model is a content strategy resource for generating and developing genuine thought leadership.

It takes a metropolis

The term crowdsourcing first appeared in 2006 to reference an organization looking outside its own resources and employees for ideas and problem solving. The title of Hillary Clinton’s famous book, published ten years earlier in 1996, offers a useful metaphor for crowdsourcing: It Takes a Village.

In 2016, however, it takes a metropolis. The metropolis model is a shared production model that leverages your entire peer community. In the sharing economy era, optimizing your resources and harnessing the power of your entire “metropolis” to generate thought leadership content is a key strategy for success.

Applied to content creation, the metropolis model is a roadmap for utilizing the collective wisdom of your entire ecosystem—in-house resources, customer feedback, subject-matter expertise, and industry influencers—to develop standout thought leadership content.

Revisiting thought leadership & why it matters

While thought leadership has become a marketing buzzword, it’s essential for brands whose strategy includes establishing and maintaining a thought leadership role. 43% of marketers identified thought leadership as one of the top three goals of content marketing, along with lead generation and brand awareness, in a recent LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community survey.

Although it’s been said that the first rule of thought leadership is not to call it thought leadership, it’s worth revisiting the definition of the term. In their book #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign, Liz Alexander and Craig Badings offer a useful definition:

“Thought leaders advance the marketplace of ideas by positing actionable, commercially relevant, research-backed, new points of view. They engage in “blue ocean strategy” thinking on behalf of themselves and their clients, as opposed to simply churning out product-focused, brand-centric white papers or curated content that shares or mimics others’ ideas.”

In a conversation with Curtis Kroeker, CEO of Scripted, an online marketplace that connects businesses with writers, he defined thought leadership as “content that’s thought-provoking to people who already know a lot about that particular topic. So it’s a pretty high bar.”

With the increasing importance of thought leadership as a content marketing strategy, how can you effectively meet this standard? How can you create content that offers genuinely new ideas, insight, and solutions?

“

Using the metropolis model to develop thought leadership content

The metropolis model is an effective way to tap into your entire community of talent and resources to develop thought leadership content. Using the metropolis model, you can crowdsource and collaborate with your network of in-house teams, customers, SMEs, and influencers to generate content that meets thought leadership standards.

Here’s how.

1. Know the defining issues and trends

Author and marketing strategy consultant Dorie Clark recommends immersing yourself in the existing industry conversation as the first step toward breaking new ground. Become conversant with the culture and current thought leadership in your industry. Be familiar with the topics, issues, research, and perspectives other experts are presenting.

Armed with that knowledge, you can then start to identify what’s missing from the dialogue and where there are opportunities to contribute new thinking.

 2. Crowdsource for new ideas

During the ideation phase of thought leadership content creation, your best resources are the citizens of your metropolis: your in-house teams and your customers.

Kroeker says crowdsourcing is key for effective content development, and for thought leadership content in particular. “If you’re not tapping into the crowd, you’re going to miss out on perspective, expertise, and ideas,” he told us. “Even if someone is particularly well-versed in a certain area, it’s only going to be one person’s opinion. Crowdsourcing lets you tap into multiple perspectives and make for a much richer conversation and richer content creation.”

Mobilize in-house teams

Explain your thought leadership mission to your internal colleagues and solicit their input to develop new topics and ideas. Involve your entire team including IT, developers, analysts, designers, sales, and customer service.

SMEs are another important resource for ideation. One strategy for soliciting input from SMEs is to simply ask them, “What did you do today?” Their day-to-day roles and processes involve the key issues that directly affect your customers, whether it’s technology, sales, customer service, research, or product development. Almost everything they do is content.

Walk through their daily activities and the various components of their jobs to identify relevant topics.

Let your team know why their participation is important. As valued in-house experts immersed in the daily workings of your business and customer interaction, their insights are essential.

Set up brainstorming or gamestorming sessions that make it fun and pressure-free for everyone to contribute ideas.

You can start the ideation with questions like the following:

  • What’s missing from the industry’s current conversation?
  • What areas are underrepresented in our current content strategy? What issues should we be covering?
  • What are your biggest challenges, and why?
  • What challenges and issues do you observe among our clients?
  • What new ideas and trends are emerging in our business?

You can also use tools like 15Five and Slack to help solicit relevant topics.

Your role is to direct the dialogue and provide moderation and feedback. Let participants know they don’t have to write anything—just contribute ideas. Assign a point person to keep track of the dialogue and take notes.

Solicit feedback from customers and users

Metropolis2

Next, reach out to your users for feedback. Your online community is one of the best sources of intelligence. Customer feedback is an essential means of surfacing new business challenges and issues for your content strategy.

Polls, surveys, and incentives are ideal ways to engage with your community. Services like Polldaddy can help you create simple surveys.

Begin identifying new content opportunities by generating dialogue with your users around the following types of questions:

  • What’s your biggest business challenge?
  • What question do you most need answered? What information do you need that is not available?
  • What’s the most pressing issue in your business?
  • How could we improve our product or service?

Be responsive and stay actively engaged with your community to monitor the discussion. Solicit and leverage comments to create and maintain a topic- and issue-oriented dialogue. Encourage debate around contrasting viewpoints.

Engaging in a dialogue with your audience will help you generate useful data that can be developed into content. By asking your users about their needs and showing you care about their challenges and their opinions, you invest in them as co-creators.

3. Engage with experts and influencers

Tap SMEs for knowledge and expertise

Subject-matter experts are critical allies in your thought leadership strategy. They can contribute the deep technical, practical, or instructional expertise you need in specific topic areas. Develop a set of targeted questions for them to respond to in writing or in an interview.

Depending on the business area you’re focused on and the type of expertise required, you may also want to interview outside SMEs.

Leverage the power of influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the top marketing trends of 2016.

Engaging with influencers not only gives you access to authoritative insights and opinions from people your customers trust. It dramatically scales the visibility, reach, and engagement of your content.

New research from Twitter shows consumers now trust influencers nearly as much as their friends. And with a new study by Tapinfluence showing an 11X higher return from influencer marketing campaigns compared to other digital marketing channels, engaging influencers in your content marketing efforts is essential.

Find out who’s driving the conversation and who your users are listening to. It could be a highly visible blogger, leader, executive, or industry expert—a recognized name with authority, influence, and a following.

LinkedIn can help you identify people of influence who are already in your network. There are also web services that will help you find and engage the right influencers for your business, including InNetwork and Traackr.

Reach out to the influencers you’ve identified and begin cultivating relationships. Be familiar with their work—read their book and follow their blog, for example—and ask them to participate in your thought leadership initiative.

Invite them to contribute their perspective, analysis, and insight. Explain how you’ve identified this issue and why you believe they’re uniquely qualified to contribute fresh thinking.

Thought leadership partnerships should be mutually beneficial. When you approach an influencer, be prepared to offer something of value in return. Maybe you can offer publicity. Or maybe your offer can be tied directly to the product or service you provide—a membership, free trial, or special access of some kind. In essence, be prepared to answer the question: what’s in it for me?

If your influencer is a blogger, he or she may be willing to write something on the topic themselves. Alternatively, working with your team and/or a writer, you can craft questions, interview the influencer, and create the content yourself based on his or her input.

4. Putting it all together: creating your content

When you’re ready to write and publish your content, ensure a professional, well-written presentation. While good writing alone doesn’t turn generic content into thought leadership, good writing skills are essential for clearly communicating new business insights.

In a recent LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community Survey, 57% of marketers said “engaging and compelling storytelling” was among the top three criteria that make content effective.

“Without good writing, you risk your insights being lost because they aren’t communicated effectively,” says Kroeker. “Good writing ensures that those powerful insights are communicated in a way that’s clear and that resonates with the target audience.”

Infographic by Kirsten Kohlhauff
Infographic by Kirsten Kohlhauff

Creating thought leadership content is a kind of alchemy. Done right, it:

  • Addresses new issues, ideas, and challenges
  • Provides context, analysis, and synthesis of multiple perspectives
  • Weaves a coherent, engaging narrative that offers new information and actionable solutions
  • Is well-written and tells a compelling story

“Being able to collaborate effectively and directly is critical to the creation of great thought leadership,” says Kroeker.

As a marketer, you’re at the center of your metropolis, collaborating with your community to generate meaningful thought leadership content worthy of the name.

Why Website Designers Don’t Need Differentiators

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

Or…How to Write Great Website Copy for Your Design Agency

This blog post was spurred by an answer I recently posted on LinkedIn to a website design agency. They were in the process of redesigning their website, and they wanted tips on what to do with their copy. This specific design agency was struggling a little because they kept falling into flowery high-handed words and phrases that ended up translating into…well, nothing.

Anyway, we’ve worked with well over a dozen design agencies over the years, as well as written copy for a few, so I started thinking about what I look for in a design agency, and I came up with a list of five criteria for my perfect website design agency website…

1. First, I always look at the design agency’s own design first. I’m one of those people on the side of less Flash. Although design websites are one of the few types (along with artists and musicians) that can get away with a really Flash-heavy website, I still don’t necessarily recommend it. Flash headers can fun, but if you design the whole website in Flash, it can often get cumbersome for people to navigate quickly to the information they want.

Oh, and please remember that most people do not have their screen resolution at like 1 million X 1 million pixels. I know designers love to have the biggest monitors and work on these ultra high resolutions – they should! That’s their job. But the rest of the world really does work on something less than a big-screen TV. So, please remember to check and see if your website has a horizontal scroll bar.

2. Next, I go to the portfolio. To me, this is the most important piece on a web agency’s website. I really recommend breaking your portfolio down by industry or some other groupings that make sense for you, like “social media sites,” “personal sites,” “B2B sites,” etc. And I suggest using some nice simple thumbnails that I can click on with a clear descriptive link.

3. Next, I’ll search for very, very specific information. So I suggest listing, very specifically, what capabilities you have. Use lots of bullets and choose clear, boring headers like “online shopping carts” rather than something like “actionable purchasing services.” You really don’t have to get all froo-froo with fancy sounding words. Clear and concise will get you farther than creative and murky. Depending on my client, I’ll want to know items such as:

a. Can you design social media sites?

b. What programming and technical capabilities, specifically, do you have? (Will you just hook up a contact form, or will you write custom code, integrate databases, and provide full hosting for a million-subscriber dating site?) If you have a lot of technical nitty-gritty stuff, then break up your services into clear sub pages.

c. What size websites are you used to dealing with? Do you design mostly brochure type websites? Or can you migrate massive amounts of data, efficiently, from a website such as Investopedia or Microsoft?

““

4. If I discover that you have the capabilities that I’m looking for, I’ll go through a few final criteria. Does the company look and feel approachable? Sometimes designers tend to be image-conscious. Who can blame them—that’s what they do, right? But sometimes they take that to such an extreme that their websites end up losing that personable edge that is able to make a sincere connection with the audience.

Don’t be afraid to put some real pictures of you and your staff up there – I know you may cringe at the thought, but the fact is, people want to connect with other people, not just with really awesome graphics. Along the same lines, testimonials are a great way to show that you’ve connected with your past clients, and that you could do the same for your new ones.

Finally, be yourself. Have a personality in your copy – and don’t make one up. If you’re funny, it’s OK to be humorous. If you’re kind of a geek, that’s OK too. Use some colloquialisms that you use in your unique speech. Let some of your company culture show through. Be who you are, and you’ll attract more clients who are the right match for you.

5. Finally, I’ll go to the contact page. If the website design agency site doesn’t have a real phone number, I’ll go someplace else. It’s very important to me that I know that I have a designer who will answer his or her phone. Sometimes my clients really start pushing on me for stuff, and I need to know that the designer will be around if I need something.

So…interestingly enough, there are only a couple of items on here that have much to do with copy. That’s not an oversight. I’m probably going to get yelled at here, but it’s my opinion that unlike other industries where my first advice is always: make sure you have a value proposition, a USP, a clear benefit that you can’t get somewhere else, etc., website designers don’t actually need this.

OK, so let me defend that statement before I get every copywriter out there up in arms: First, website designers are in a singularly unique position on the web in that they are selling what you are looking at. So, if you’ve already got the client in your “shop,” there isn’t such a pressing need for a USP. The potential clients are already there touching the wares and trying the product – so designers are one step closer than the rest of us to that potential sale.

Second, most website design agencies don’t have a fundamentally different service than most others. If they do, great, then by all means, have it up there as the first sentence. But for the most part, designers don’t, and trying to force them to have one ends up the equivalent of trying force a square peg into a round hole. For the most part, a website designer’s real differentiators come in the form of the items that are listed here:

a) their portfolio
b) their specific capabilities
c) their personality
d) their customer service

Or, I should say, it comes in the form of the unique mixture of these that the client is looking for. If a client can…

a) find a design similar to the one he is looking for,
b) discover that, yes, you have the specific technical qualifications he was looking for,
c) get the feeling that he’ll enjoy working with you, and
d) be assured that you will take care of him, personally,

… then, you are different than the other designers he or she has been considering. Because you (and probably only you), has that unique mixture of these qualities that makes you the right match for the client.

By the way, we’re always looking for great website designers to partner up with. So, if you’d like to be on our radar for some mutual outsourcing, email me at: [email protected].

Get More Click-Throughs by Writing Better Links

Posted on by The Writers For Hire, Inc.

Have you thought much about the links that you include on your webpage, newsletter, or online marketing materials? Before I started writing for the web, I never really realized how important they were. But those little guys have a lot more to say than you or I might have imagined.

For one, internet scanners might scroll down the page quickly, looking for a brightly colored link that directs them to what they want. Secondly, links let people browse your site at their convenience: You put just a blurb of your free article on your site; If people want to read more, they’ll click through and do it. If they don’t want to read it, then they’re not forced to scroll past your entire article, which didn’t interest them anyway.

So here’s the deal. Good links have a few characteristics in common:

• They’re short – keep them down to just a few words
• They’re descriptive – tell your reader exactly what you want them to do!
• They’re punchy – use action words, and keep those words at the front

As a general rule, you never want to use “Click Here” by itself: it’s not descriptive enough, and you’ve just wasted an opportunity to get your reader to click. Tell them why they’re clicking, such as “Click Here to Join Now” or “Click Here for More Information.”

What to Say?

Now, here comes the technical stuff. When using teasers – or just short blurbs that describe a longer article – there may be some science in how you link readers to new information. In a MarketingSherpa study, the online marketing gurus found that certain words in your links receive better click-through rates.

What is it, you ask? According to MarketingSherpa, “Click to Continue” had the highest click-through conversion – 8.53% — compared to “Continue to article” (3.3%) and “Read more” (1.8%). 

The guys at FutureNow’s blog seem to have their own theories. They don’t seem to think any of the above suggestions are very effective since there’s no call to action.
.
They suggest that your hyperlink should be persuasive. So instead of writing:

Donate to Save the Sea Turtles! Read More.

They suggest you sell a little harder in your links, like so:

Donate to Save the Sea Turtles! See how much your dollars mean to us.

““

Baiting the Reader

Now, I’ve saved the best tidbit for last. There is a little trick that you can use that normally piques your readers’ interest, compelling them to click through – I’d even say that this works regardless if you use “Click to continue,” “Read more,” or whatever else you can think of. It’s an old trick, just watch:

Steve had been taking the new trial medication for two weeks, but he still didn’t feel any better. After a quick Google search, he realized that he might be in the “placebo” control group. Read more.

That’s not bad, but watch this:

Steve had been taking the new trial medication for two weeks, but he still didn’t feel any better. After a quick Google search, he realized … Click to continue.

See what I did? By cutting off the text in the middle of the sentence, I’ve left the reader with a question: What did Steve realize? And it’s a pretty irresistible hook. Next time, give readers only a little of what they need to know – make them click through to satisfy their curiosity.

Now, you can take that information and do with it what you will.

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