Content Marketing: How to "Hook" Your Readers
Blog posts. Web pages. LinkedIn articles. The first challenge of creating great online content is capturing the reader's attention with a "hook."
For a piece of content, the hook is the first attention-grabbing moment of your piece, preferably found in the first sentence or two, or the first paragraph.
Think of the great hooks of literature. A great hook can introduce a scene--like Charles Dickens' hook in A Tale of Two Cities:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."
A great hook can introduce a voice--like the famous first line of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye:
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
Or a great hook can go for the jugular, catapulting you into the action--like Thomas Pynchon's famous first line in Gravity's Rainbow: "A screaming comes across the sky."
Each of these famed lines performs a slightly different function for the story. However, they all reveal the power of a great hook: They compel the reader to read on.
The Challenge: Content Glut, Bounce Rates, and Dwell Time
If a great hook is important for literature, its even more important for online content writing. It's 1:15 PM EST as I write this post, and already today the world has posted over 3,333,000 blog posts on WordPress alone.
Check it out: Worldometers Blog Posts Written Today
That's a lot of competition for clicks. No wonder content marketers are worried about content glut. As we've noted before on The Organic SEO Blog:
"Content creation is no small task. Many of the best writers spend hours, days, and weeks laboring over a single article or post. Unfortunately, the effort is often wasted. Most online content, even great content, attracts no organic audience. The simple truth hurts: The day-to-day online experience offers too much relevant, engaging, and truly informative content. And this so-called "content glut" is destroying engagement."
Beyond the competition for clicks, though, content writers must fight browser's perennial desire to "bounce", an SEO term otherwise known as "bounce rate": the percentage of visitors who visit one page of your site for a brief time before clicking away.
This clicking away phenomena, which we all know too well, was recently referred to as "pogo sticking" in a post by Rand Fishkin:
"One of the biggest goals of searcher satisfaction is to make sure that this scenario does not happen to you. You do not want to give searchers a reason to click that back button and choose someone else."
More to the point of the hook, though, content writers must also fight to increase "dwell time," another SEO metric that defines the amount of time a visitor spends on a page before bouncing away.
How do you fight the browser's tendency to bounce while increasing dwell time? The solution starts with a great hook.
Below, I offer a few simple tips and resources for creating a great hook for your next piece of online content.
How to Hook Your Readers: Five Tips
Get to the point
A great hook doesn't beat around the bush. A great hook states your fundamental point succinctly and clearly--like a "thesis," a great hook can (and often should) be a short summary of your entire piece.
Who? What? Where? When? You may not need to answer all of these questions with every article, but stating the essentials first is a great way to get to the point.
State the Value
Google's algorithms prefer content that offers true value to browsers. Satisfy your browsers and the algorithms by stating the value of your content upfront. Essentially, you need to tell your reader why they should care about your piece of content. The SEO world often calls this value "relevance." Neil Patel created a nifty graphic to illustrate its importance:
Read: "How to Write Relevant Content"
Appeal to Emotions
How is your piece of content related to the deep-seated human emotions within your target demographic?
Ask yourself: Who am I trying to attract? What sort of emotion do I want my customers to feel when thinking about my brand? Likely, your answer will be "a positive emotion," though you could also shoot for curiosity, amazement, interest, or astonishment. The key is to make sure your hook embodies the emotion.
Use Active Voice
Do you know the difference between active and passive voice? Writing in active voice is more direct and often simpler. When writing in active voice, the action of your sentence follows a straightforward structure: subject, verb, object. In the active sentence below, the subject is :"Alex," the verb "ate," and the object "oranges."
Alex ate an orange.
The passive version of this sentence will read backwards: object, verb, subject.
An orange was eaten by Alex.
Which sentence is more straightforward? The first, of course!
Read more on "Active vs. Passive Voice"
Proofread
Nothing kills a good hook like a misspelled word or grammar mistake. Proofread your work. Then proofread again.
Content Marketing with Stepman's SEO
If you're looking for an online marketing company that understands how to effectively promote websites with relevant content, call Stepman's SEO: 215-900-9398.
Stepman's SEO combines traditional marketing methods and organic SEO--with an emphasis on natural website optimization--to design thoughtful, inspiring, and effective content marketing campaigns.