THINKing

Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content

I have been thinking a lot recently about creating compelling blog content, and at first blush, there seem to be a lot of barriers. But like getting over a barbed wire fence, you just have to step back for a minute and think through your approach so that you don’t catch something important on a barb.

The primary reason I have been pondering the topic is purely selfish.

This blog once had great traffic, but it has fallen off recently due to spam attacks which hijacked my blog and took out my RSS feed. I had nearly 1,000 subscribers to that feed.  Not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but enough interested folk that we had some good conversations going. So, now I find myself trying to rebuild what I had originally built over a span of about five years.

Compelling content brought subscribers here in the first place, and it will bring them back.

I reached out to some of my Twitterati to ask them to define compelling content. Their input will be the basis for much of this series on compelling content. My friend Jim Dietzel from Rubbermaid was first to get back to me and he had a list of five key elements.

#1. Hire a good writer. Seriously.

#2. Write about what your audience cares about.

#3. Pictures are good.

#4. Make it easy to read/scan

#5. Look at what is working and do more of that.

That’s a pretty simple, but effective formula. We’ll explore these ideas in future posts.

I’d love to hear from you, as well. So, please comment on this post with your thoughts on creating compelling content, or take our poll.

More on developing compelling content:

How To Be A More Compelling Writer

Other Posts Of Interest

• Know Your Media – Newspapers
• Creativity 2011 – Week #21
• Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say
• Get Social Fresh
• Fusing New And Old Communication Technology