The 6 Essential Qualities of Highly Compelling Content

There’s no denying the impact of high-quality content, but if you want that traffic to generate value, it needs to convert. Unsurprisingly, how you structure your content has a huge influence on how well it can drive a reader to act. Here are 6 proven qualities that are designed to entice, engage, and retain a reader. 

1. Have a Strong Headline and Introduction

No matter how long or short your content is, you need to ensure that the headline effectively grabs a reader and that your opening sentences are both strong and concise -- capturing the attention of the reader is critical. If a headline doesn't work to pull readers in, your content will have failed at its first test. Need some help with your headline? Try out CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer for inspiration.

2. Create an Emotional Impact

Unless you're operating in a very dry technical field, most conversions are driven to some extent by emotion. Your content should connect with people on a human level and not read like a college thesis. Use your content to tell a story or describe a relatable situation. Touch on worries or pain points, then offer solutions. Stimulate excitement or curiosity. 

Your exact approach will depend on your niche, but reaching prospects on an emotional level will always drive better results than any amount of uninspiring facts and figures. 

3. Inform Without Overwhelming

Remember that your content also needs to provide more than just sentiment or stimulation. It should describe your unique insights or opinion, providing the reader with relevant information without losing their attention.

Be straightforward, don’t use overly flowery language, and keep it simple when you can -- the goal here is to impart your perspective in a compelling but easy-to-understand way. 

4. Make it Digestible

As well as being concise and informative, your content should be formatted in a readable -- even skimmable -- way. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and helpful images where they're appropriate. If reading your content feels like hard work because it’s confusingly laid out, most readers will simply give up.

5. Be Authentic

I can’t stress this one enough. While it's important for your content to paint a positive picture of your perspective or company-related use cases you might be referring to, it's essential to be authentic.

No matter how great a product or service is that you’re behind, sounding overly commercial will simply turn people away -- readers want to learn from your experience and insights and can sense an agenda a mile away. If you make this mistake early on, you’ll lose the opportunity to connect with them because they won’t come back. 

6. Use the Right Call to Action (CTA)

Finally, your content should tell its readers what you want them to do next. A call to action (CTA) is an explicit instruction on the further action they need to take, ideally including a persuasive reason why they should take it -- and this will vary by the channel you publish on.

A simple 'click here' may be clear and direct, but it's unlikely to convert. You should always give a strong benefit and a picture of the results the action will generate instead of leaving the reader at a loose end once they're finished reading.

On LinkedIn, I prefer to ask the reader to comment on the article so we can continue a dialogue that addresses follow-on questions as a result of the article. 

There isn’t an ‘easy button’ when you commit to producing quality content, but by following a proven structure, your thought leadership content will reach more readers and positively influence them.  

I’m always looking for new ideas to add to this Executive Leadership Pulse series, so comment below if there’s a particular topic you’d like me to cover in a future piece.