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How to write an engaging blog post

Use the Awwwww Factor to make content marketing pieces go viral

Have you seen the piece about the orphan baby kangaroo and wombat who become BFFs? They also have a baby wallaby friend. Because of course they do.

How to write an engaging blog post
Put on a happy face How can write blog content that gets readers to read your posts? Make messages positive and emotional.

Awwwww.

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It’s obvious why these bundles of joey are making the rounds on Facebook. But how can you use the same approaches to make your content marketing messages travel the world, while others just languish on the couch?

Write a blog post that’s positive and emotional, suggest Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Make messages positive, emotional.

Together, Berger and Milkman reviewed some 7,000 articles that appeared in The New York Times to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-mailed list. After controlling for placement, timing, author popularity and gender, and story length and complexity, they found that two features determined an article’s success:

The awesome twosome Why did the story of this orphan baby kangaroo and wombat travel the world, while your blog post stayed home on the couch? Write a great blog post that gets people to read your content and share it on their social networks with these tips.
  • How positive its message was. Positive messages are more viral than negative ones.
  • How much emotion it incites. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely it is to move people to act. Messages that make people angry, for instance, are more likely to be shared than those that make people sad.

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Articles that evoked emotion — “Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies” — got shared much more on social media than those that did not.

And happy emotions (“Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City”) outperformed sad ones (“Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again.”)

3 ways to write content marketing pieces that go viral. >>>

How can you write content readers want to read?

There’s a lot of ME in social MEdia. And there’s a great big I in TwItter. No wonder social media thought leader Brian Solis calls content marketing the egosystem.

Get Clicked, Liked & Shared, our content-writing workshop on April 18

Unfortunately, talking about yourself and your stuff on social channels works about as well as it does at a cocktail party. But watch your social media reach and influence grow when you deliver relevant, valuable, useful content.

Learn how to identify what content readers want to read at Get Clicked, Liked & Shared, our content-writing workshop on April 18-22.

You’ll learn to your company as the expert in the field. Find out how to make sure your posts are welcome guests and not intrusive pests. And discover the power of the most-retweeted word in the English language.

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Register for Get Clicked, Liked & Shared, our content-writing workshop on April 18