Let’s paint a picture. You just finished your magnum opus of a blog. It has the perfect word count, compelling content backed up by hours upon hours of research and you’ve optimized it to a pulp. It’s gone through five levels of revisions all the way up to the CEO. In terms of grammar, spelling and punctuation (GSP), it’s absolutely flawless. You are burning with excitement to just click the submit button and let the whole world see your masterpiece. Then it dawns on you, visually, it looks no different from the college term papers you used to systematically and thoughtlessly crank out every week to get a letter grade. There is nothing about it that draws attention or makes a reader want to indulge in your content.
Does this sound familiar? Don’t worry, we at KCD PR have encountered the same struggle a time or two. So what can you do to improve the shareability of your hand-crafted content and get more eyes on it? Here are a few simple design hacks that can improve the shareability of your blog content.
Typography
We can’t say it enough. The quality of the typography that’s part of your blog can make or break your content, seriously. It is definitely something that needs some tender love during the content creation process.
- Ensure that there is a visual hierarchy within your article. Take advance of the fact that you have multiple header levels, italics and bold for every font.
- Break your long, run-on sentences into multiple digestible ones.
- Make sure your lines are not too long. Most people are comfortable reading up to 20 words per line before getting eye strain.
If your content typography is programmed into your website style settings, it’s time to give your web designer a call to do a face lift.
Highlight the Most Important Content Above the Fold
You may have heard the term “above the fold” a lot. Simply, it just means any content that the users see on their screen when they first access your content before having to do any scrolling. A visitor will not continue reading your content if the content above the fold is not captivating. Of course, a visitor will not share your content if they themselves are not captivated by it. A simple hack to ensure the most compelling part of your blog is found above the fold is by featuring a snippet of your blog in your header image. Position your trophy text over a compelling image and you have yourself a share-machine.
Use Imagery that Play on Emotions
You don’t need to be a psych major to know that people respond positively to images that they can connect to emotionally. As you are writing a piece of content, start thinking about the type of emotions that are associated with your article. If you can nail down a few emotional descriptive words, it will be much easier for you to find imagery to match. Remember the first time you saw an Internet meme? Although it was just a simple image, the exaggerated facial expressions instantly captured your attention. Having a compelling image that ties in with the content can boost the effectiveness of your message exponentially.
The photos used in this blog are from http://www.gratisography.com/. They have a great selection of over-the-top, highly emotional stock photos completely free of charge for anyone to use in their online content. Admittedly, they can be a little eccentric, but they work well for capturing the attention of your audience.
Keep Up With Visual Trends
As the evolvement of the Internet has been kicked into overdrive, one of the biggest things we’ve noticed is an everlasting flow of visual style changes in web content. There’s no sure-fire way to pin point what the next visual trend is going to be. Simply said, the Internet likes what it likes. Unless you are on the front lines of the web frontier, it’s better just to sit back and try to keep up with visual trends as much as possible. So where should one look for insight on what the latest trends are? The best place, believe it or not, is on your favorite social media platform. By adding some popular designers to your feed you will begin to pick up on visual trends that you can then use to create imagery for your blog.
These are just a few simple tricks that we’ve discovered along the way that can help to increase the shareability of your content. If you have your own design secrets that you’d like to add, feel free to share them with us!
