How to Write Content that Promotes Itself

Are you spending many hours in promoting your newly published blog posts and website articles on the social networks, bookmarking sites, blogosphere, RSS directories and other places on the web where you can get the attention of potential visitors to your site? Are you investing money on advertising and SEO software that can generate traffic to your site? Self promotion is good – we really need to present what we got so that the world may accept it. However, too much promotion can be a symptom of “lack of quality”. Internet marketing success is not only achieved through promotion, but it is more importantly achieved through providing quality, useful and satisfactory contents to readers and users. If you want to attain cost-effective yet lasting success on your online business, you need to learn how to write content that promotes itself. Here are some tips and ways on how you can do it.

 

1. Make a catchy headline or title

Although judging a book by its cover is not wise, many people still do it. It’s also true when it comes to judging an article by its title, a lot of people judge the quality of an article through its title. Your headline or title is the first thing that will be seen by potential readers. Thus, you’ve got to make it as appealing and as interesting as possible. When it comes to composing a title that gets the attention and curiosity of people, remember the 3 Cs (Controversial, Communicative and Connected). Firstly, controversial titles catch the people’s attention because we usually want something that is hotly served; we want to hear and know the talk of the town. Secondly, your title must also be communicative. It must contain a message that talks with the readers, whether it’s a direct or an indirect message. In this article I used a direct title using “how to” type of title. Thirdly, your headline must be connected – it must be totally connected with your description and the body of your content. As a reader myself, I hate titles and headlines that deceive me. Headlines must provide what they promise to offer.  They must satisfy the readers and never disappoint them.

 

2. Write an interesting description

Aside from a title, the summary or description of your content is also visible to search engines, to social network bookmarks and to your shares in Facebook and Google Plus. If you don’t want to beg many people to like and share your content, you should compose not only a catchy title, but also an engaging description. Many people go beyond reading headlines – they also check out the summary to judge the benefit they would get on a particular content. There are even those persons who are busy that only reads the summary of articles, rather than the article as a whole (count me in). However, if they find that the summary is something to be dug deeper, they go for the entire content. Hence, make sure that your catchy headline is backed up with an appealing description.

 

3. Create viral content

The whole story is in your main content or in the body of your article. Your headlines and descriptions are more on the promotional sides. They are the front liners of your content. But your main content serves as your main product. This is where all the things told in the title and summary is located, such as the answers to questions, the steps to “how to” article and other things that your headline and description have promised. This is where people’s questions will be answered, where their problems be solved, and where their satisfaction will be provided. If you want to create content that markets itself online or offline, you’ve got to produce viral content. Here are the qualities and F.U.E.L. of viral content.

a. Fresh – People want to be the first to know. Hence, new stories, discoveries and breakthroughs go viral.

b. Unique – In this world full of copycats, a genuine content is always in a high demand. People also want to be original and exceptional. Thus, unique ideas and information go viral.

c. Enlightening –Enlightening contents make a big impact on people’s minds. They answer our long-reigning questions and solve our persistent problems. Just like a light, people are attracted to the light. And when they have this light, they tend to share it to many people. This type of content also works better in the search engines because many people are searching on it. If you can check the most popular and most visited blog posts in this blog, which you can find at the widget in the sidebar, you will observe that most of them are “how to” or instructional articles.

c. Life-changing  – The contents that effectively go viral and spread like virus, are those that have the power to change people’s lives.  I can attest to this because most of the most-shared content and articles on this blog are my articles that have a personal development twist. Check out “100 ways to become a better business person”. Viral content make people lives better. Thus, they become thankful to these contents that they want to share and spread them to the world.

 

4. Promote yourself

Last but not the least, in order to create a powerful content that promotes itself, you’ve got to put yourself into it. Remember that the author is also a significant part of any content, blog post or article. Thus, if you have built a great reputation and authority as a content provider, writer, blogger or publisher, your content will have a big plus factor to become useful, worthy and reliable. Therefore, we should not only focus on creating our content, but also give attention to building our own brand and reputation. Every online marketer should also be helpful to his friends in Facebook, to his followers in Twitter, to his circles in Google Plus and to every people whom he builds relationships.

Finally, we can say that the combination of an appealing headline, interesting description, viral main content and reputable author can be a powerful mix of content that promotes itself. Thus, you might share it once and let the satisfied people spread it in their own. You can expect the marketing power of the word of mouth, word of mouse or word of link and share. Success is in your hands!