I sometimes get asked the question, “How do bloggers create the perfect content for their audiences?” People also want to know how to create viral content and so forth. Well, the thing is, you can never be entirely sure that something is going to go viral or even appeal to your audience. Even after over three years, we here at Bit Rebels are still not 100% sure what will work and what won’t when writing our articles. I don’t know if there is such a thing as perfect content at all actually. Sure, there is content that you can kind of know ahead of time will do well, but how well is impossible to say. A much more fitting term would be to call it “smart content.” That way, you always know that what you are putting together will at least fit the taste of your average visitor.
It sounds so boring though to call someone an average visitor. We call all our visitors friends, whether you like it or not. We see our work here at Bit Rebels as something important since we know many of you come back over and over again to find inspiration, knowledge and to charge up your energy to keep working on a slow day, even if it is just from a simple laugh.
When we create our smart content, as it is so cleverly called, we usually look at what’s hot at the moment, what content is doing well that we have already written about, and of course also what our audience expects us to write about. It can be seriously challenging sometimes when the inspiration is not entirely there, if there is a lack of cool stuff being uploaded to the Internet, or when stuff suggested to us doesn’t seem to fit our audience at the moment we are about to start writing. It’s a fun job that I don’t think I will ever get tired of, but what is smart content, and how do you create it?
I managed to find an infographic presented by Patricia Redsicker for Word View Editing called The 7 Elements Of Smart Content. It takes you through some of the most vital, however basic elements of smart content. We usually say that writing is the easy part. It’s finding or coming up with stuff that will appeal to our audience and finding the angle that is the very best one that is the hard part. Sometimes the least expected stuff goes viral for us, and that’s when we stand back and take a look at just why that happened. It’s a constant learning experience that I don’t think any writer will ever graduate from.
One thing that sticks out to me on this infographic is tip number 4 – Smart content should be able to spread quickly and easily. That’s anything but easy to accomplish. So much of that depends not only on the actual topic or subject you have chosen, but also on the title and the number of social sharing buttons you have made available. Of course, the heaviest factor of them all is who actually visits your smart content. If the right person sees it and shares it with their following, you can be sure it will go viral, if only for a couple of hours. Sometimes a 2 hour virility can direct thousands of new visitors to your website. Those are visitors who could potentially come back to your site over and over again if they like the experience. A simple piece of advice, apart from all this, is to always stay focused, write about stuff you like, and of course always have fun when you’re writing.
Patricia Redsicker’s Smart Content Creation Guide
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