How to Create Content That Converts in 6 Simple Steps

In this video, Jen from the WebFX Earned Media team walks through six basic tips for how to create content that converts.

Transcript:

Hello, friends! In today’s video, we’re going to look at how to create content that converts your audience into leads and customers.

Content is a huge part of any online marketing campaign. It’s what draws people in and compels them to engage with your business. That’s why they say content is king. And this is a piece of content, so… you should really be bowing right now.

But you can’t just throw something together and expect high-converting content. So, how can you drive content conversions? Well, that’s what I’m here to answer. Without further ado, let’s jump into these six tips on how to create content that converts.

1. Optimize for search intent

Before you even start creating your content, you need to think about what it is your audience is looking for. This is especially true if you’re creating a piece of written content and you want to include keywords that will get it ranking in Google.

Instead of just writing a blog post and then throwing in some keywords at the end, start with your keywords. Decide what terms you want to target, and then see what’s ranking for those keywords right now.

By analyzing whatever’s currently in the search results, you can see what users are looking for. Then you can tailor your content so it aims at that same intent. This is a crucial step because if you don’t do this, users won’t even bother checking out your content in the first place.

2. Craft a compelling lead-in

Even if your content checks all the right boxes, it won’t drive any clicks if you don’t grab people’s attention right away. You need a lead-in that makes people want to see more.

Firstly, you need a compelling title. One of the best ways to do that is to use more vivid words and phrases. So, instead of titling your page “How to Get Birds to Your Backyard,” maybe you call it “How to Turn Your Backyard into a Bird Paradise.”

This applies to more than just the title, though. Basically, anything that users can see when they first spot your content needs to be optimized to pull them in.

3. Keep things helpful and informational

Before we continue, let’s take a few minutes to talk about our sponsor, Nameless VPN provider.

… Just kidding. There’s no sponsor. But after you heard that, you were probably ready to start repeatedly hitting the “skip” button, right? Why is that? Probably because you’re here for informational content, not to listen to a sales pitch.

Well, it’s the same thing with your audience. If you put up a blog post with helpful tips or publish a video explaining a particular term, your audience doesn’t want you to hijack that content with a lengthy sales pitch for your company.

The benefit of this informational content is that it helps build relationships with your audience. That keeps them coming back so you can eventually get them to make a purchase.

Even for content that’s more on the sales-y side, you should still make sure that all the information you’re providing is helpful and informative. Don’t sit there throwing out meaningless adjectives about your business — list specific benefits of your product or service.

You want your audience to know how they can solve their problems or improve their businesses with your solutions. They don’t want to hear you brag about yourself, no matter how awesome you think you are.

Basically, stick to the content users are there for, or you’ll risk driving them away.

4. Make your content concise and easily digestible

The last thing you want is for your content to be dense and hard to get through. I mean, there’s a reason I could never finish reading Les Misérables.

Users aren’t going to stick around for one long paragraph after another. To keep their interest, try to break your content up into smaller pieces. Separate things into different headings, keep your paragraphs short, and use bulleted and numbered lists wherever you can.

If you’re making a YouTube video, you can achieve something similar by breaking the video up into chapters so people can see how the sections are divided up and easily skip around if they want.

5. Earn backlinks for your content

Imagine that you’re doing some research on a specific topic. Like, let’s say you’re interested in learning about elephants. Because, I mean, who wouldn’t be?

So, you’re researching elephants, and you find a page with some obscure elephant facts you’ve never heard before. You start wondering how reputable this page is. Should you believe what it’s saying?

But then you see that a science magazine actually cited that paper as a source. And you think, well, that magazine’s pretty reputable, right? So, since it linked to that page, I guess the page is legit.

Well, guess what — Google does the exact same thing. If it sees that a reputable website has linked to your content, it’ll assume your content is reputable too, and it’ll rank it higher in search results.

When another site links to your content, it’s called a backlink. Backlinks are a huge part of content marketing. Great content from reputable sites often earns backlinks automatically. But if you don’t yet have the reputation for that, you’ll want to perform manual outreach.

To do that, check out some reputable sites in your industry. Look on those websites for any content that could benefit from linking to your site. Maybe it has some broken or outdated links, or maybe it could be stronger by using your content as a source.

Then you can contact the site owner about addressing those opportunities by adding new backlinks to your content.

6. Wrap up with a call to action

There’s one more thing that every piece of content needs, and that’s a call to action (or CTA).

A CTA is basically where you tell your audience, straight-up, what you want them to do next. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? Follow you on social media? Buy your latest product? Whatever it is, they won’t know you want them to do it unless you tell them.

When possible, you should include a button or link they can follow to take the action you’re asking them to take. Also, be sure to only have one CTA. If you ask them to do 50 different things, they’ll be overwhelmed. And then they might not do any of them.

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See what I did there?

Well, that wraps up our list of tips on how to create content that converts. If you want to learn even more about digital marketing, subscribe to our email newsletter, Revenue Weekly, and also to our YouTube channel. I guess that’s two CTAs…

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time!