Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
What if you created content so great that your audience wouldn't even know it was an experience?
This scenario can occur if you choose one or more of these ideas to pursue your content goals beyond simple consumption and clunky experiences.
1. Write with an inclusive heart
Anyone who constantly talks about themselves irritates the listener. Check your content to see how often the words “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us” are used. Now count how many times the word “you” appears. If first-person usage outweighs second-person usage, edit the text by deleting many of the first-person references and adding more second-person references to the text.
Let your audience know they are included in the conversation. I like this tip shared in “Take Binary Bias Out of Your Content Conversations” by Content Marketing World spokesperson Ruth Carter: Go through your text and replace negative terms like “he/him” and “she/ her” with the pronouns “they/them”.
2. Make your content shine with AI support
Content published online should look different than the research papers and essays you wrote in school. While you should stick to grammar rules and follow a style guide, you should also prioritize readability. This requires scannable and easy-to-understand text – headings, bulleted text, short sentences, short paragraphs, etc.
Use a copywriting tool like Hemingway Editor (free and paid versions) to reduce the weight of your writing. The color-coded review system identifies categorical problems and common solutions to them:
- Yellow – long, complex sentences and frequent errors
- Fix: Shorten or split sentences.
- Red – dense and complicated text
- Fix: Remove hurdles and guide your readers to an easier path.
- Pink – long words that could be shortened
- Solution: Hover your mouse over the problematic word to find possible replacement words.
- Blue – adverbs and mitigating phrases
- Solution: Delete it or find a better way to convey the thought.
- Green – Passive
- Fix: Rewrite for active voice.
The paid version of Grammarly also works well. It includes an AI-powered writing assistant, readability reports, a plagiarism checker, citation suggestions, and more than 400 additional grammar checkers.
In the image below, Grammarly suggests rephrasing this sentence: “It's no longer good enough to simply produce content like a media company would.” Instead, this version should read: “It's no longer good enough to produce content. “'Like a media company would do.'”
Much cleaner, right?
3. Ask questions
See what I did with the intro (and here)? I asked questions to address you. When someone asks something, even in writing, the listener or reader is likely to pause for a split second to consider their answer. You transform from passive to active participant.
This technique can also encourage readers to interact with the author by answering the questions in the comment section or sending an email.
4. Provide additional formats
Adding audio makes your website more accessible to a wider audience, allowing readers to consume your content on the go. This level of content experience is fairly easy to pull off once you find your tool. We use Everlit (free for content creators), but there are other tools available such as:
- Play.ht (limited free and paid versions)
- BeyondWords (free and paid versions)
- Speechify (free with limited TTS features and paid versions)
If you're pressed for time, simply add and keep up to date a reliable audio plugin that requires minimal quality checks, advises Michelle Saunders, director of content at Convince & Convert.
Don't make automatic audio playback the default setting. “Not only does it take control away from users, it also uses unnecessary bandwidth, slows speeds, and negatively impacts search engine optimization,” she says.
However, if you can dedicate a person to quality control, a platform that allows for customization of the audio experience is the best option. The image below shows a custom audio player with a thumbnail of the cover image and article title.
Would you like to find out more? I wrote an article about different ways you can improve the text-to-audio experience for your content. Read it (or listen to it).
CMI also offers video and text versions of its weekly What's New? Special feature. Robert Rose records the video and then shares a transcript, which was converted into an article by the CMI team for the blog.
5. Insert links
Content marketers include internal and external links in their copy for SEO value. But you should also add links to help your readers. Links can help a reader who wants to learn more about the topic. You can do this in different ways:
- Link descriptive text in the article to content relevant to those words (like I did in this bullet point).
- List the headlines of related articles as a standalone feature (see the hand-picked related content at the end of this article).
You can also include on-page links or bookmarks at the beginning of a longer piece of content – a table of contents, so to speak – to give the reader quicker access to the content they are looking for. This technique allows visitors to stay on your website longer because they can find the information they want more quickly.
We've included a linked table of contents in CMI's annual B2B research report, listing 13 topics that readers can click on and go directly to.
6. Don’t forget the “invisible” text
Alt text is often an afterthought when even considered. Still, alt text for visuals is essential to a great content experience for people using text-to-speech readers. Although it doesn't take too much time, I find that it is better for the audience's understanding to customize the content of the image description instead of relying on the default text generated by the technology tool.
To create the alt text, first ask what a listener would miss if they couldn't see the image. If you're not missing any context, the image is decorative and probably doesn't need alt text. It could be used for aesthetic reasons, to break up a text-heavy page, or to repeat information already in the text (like I did in the Hemingway and Grammarly examples above). You also don't need alt text if you:
If a listener misses the context because they don't see the visuals, the image is informative and requires alternative text. General alt text guidelines recommend that up to 125 characters (including spaces) work best. This results in one or two short sentences to convey the message of the image. Don't forget to include punctuation marks.
For both decorative and informational images, include image credits, permissions, and copyright information in the caption section.
For example, if I were writing an article about Halloween costumes for cats, I would include a picture of my cat Milo in a costume.
If I were to rely on the AI tool or write non-descriptive alternative text, it might say: “An image showing a cat.”
A more valuable version of alt text – which doesn't waste valuable characters when “displaying an image” would be: “Brown tiger cat with white paws, mouth and nose wearing a light blue, red and white shark costume lying on a multi-colored carpet.”
The more descriptive text was only 124 characters, including spaces.
Improve your content and improve the experience
Do you think any of these suggestions are too difficult to implement? I hope not. No larger budget is required for implementation. No lengthy approval process is required for implementation. And they don't require much more time to produce.
You just have to remember to run it the next time you build it (and the time after that, and the time after that, and… well, you get the point).
If you have an easy-to-implement tip to improve the content experience, please email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I may add it in a future update.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you would like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
Register for Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use code BLOG100 to save $100. Can't attend in person this year? Check out the digital pass for access to on-demand session recordings of the live event through the end of the year.
Updated from a January 2023 article.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
