How share-worthy is your content?

byKettei

1.4K followers

Updated 6 years ago

When we're busy writing the 1000+ words for each post we publish, it's easy to get so obsessed with content and reviews and affiliate links that we fail to ask ourselves one important question: How shareworthy is the post that I've just written?

Organic reach is good

We've been taught how to leverage low-hanging fruit to create posts that Google will show people that use the right combination of words and more sophisticated key-word selections to compete in the big leagues and try to out-rank established competitors.

It's fantastic if somebody searching for a review to make a buying decision lands on our page and clicks that exit link to our affiliate partner - that is, after all, what we're trying to achieve.

Somebody that sees our landing page link in their search results is sub-conciously thinking, "Google thinks this page is worth visiting."

Because of the trust that Google has built as a reliable search engine and the efforts they've gone to, tweaking the algorithms to weed out spammers, black-hat SEO crooks and charlatans, people trust that what they see in their search results are worth clicking and possibly buying from.

But the problem is... many people don't even realise they're in a buying-kind-of-place.

If you haven't read it already, I recommend you take a look at Kyle's guide to the customer purchase life-cycle.

Social reach is better

Many potential customers aren't on the Internet to buy something. They're there to interact with their social media accounts; Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and occasionally Google+.

Because each social media platform have heavily pushed their own apps for interacting with their platforms, many of these customers won't even be using a browser so they're not going to suddenly search for something on Google because they're trapped in their platform's walled garden.

Suddenly they see that their Uncle Bob has liked a page about wooden watches. His birthday is coming up. Maybe he'd like one? Maybe a quick look at the liked page wouldn't hurt.... oh wow - the page is reviewing so many wooden watches and Uncle Bob has commented that he really likes one.... they click on the review, like what they see and click the Buy Now button.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, someone else is browsing Facebook and they see a video autoplay in their feed showing how to draw a butterfly. They love butterflies. It would be cool to learn how to draw one... there's a link to an eBook AND they can pay by PayPal. Well, that was easy.

The beauty of social media is that its users are usually already relaxed and receptive to things that interest them. They are already taking in other people's opinions and they are more likely to trust the like / +1 / share created by someone they sort-of-know than a random site that they find via a Google search.

Pinterest is of course, a slightly different beast. People enjoy pinning boards of pretty things. If they find a big graphic that looks pretty or says something in creative type that they can relate to, they'll pin that to the board for their followers to see.

The social generation express themselves through the posts, likes, shares and pins of other people. The majority of interactions on social media are with existing content rather than the creation of new content.

Are your posts worth sharing?

I recently ran a Facebook ad campaign as an experiment (it finishes tomorrow). I have been underwhelmed by the results thus far. At first, I blamed Facebook for lying to me about the expected reach of my campaign but over time, it started to occur to me that the post I'd shared just wasn't that share-worthy.

The image was okay but not exciting. There was no call to action type on the image and the introduction to the post that was displayed as a text snippet below the image was hardly compelling.

The lack of tangible results for my campaign are probably down to the fact that nobody really cared that much about the image that popped up in their feed.

I'm not going to be much more mindful about how I write my posts. On my list of goals for this week, I already have the task of creating of investigating what makes a good pinnable image to place in my posts so that people can more easily share my content on Pinterest.

By making our posts worth sharing we have the massively expand our reach and get eyes on our content that weren't necessarily looking for it in the first place.

Keywords versus social-media engagement

I'm not for a second suggesting that using Jaaxy to carefully research your keywords is dead. It's vital that someone that is already in buying mode can search for what you're promoting and hopefully find you on page one of Google's results. The point of keywords is to help people that are looking for products in your niche to find you first and buy from your affiliate links.

What I am suggesting is that we can massively increase the engagement with our content by building a following on social media. Social media is about tribes following what they like and we want them to know that we're creating content that they'll love.

A following will see every new post you publish on your social media account... and will hopefully become a regular visitor to your website because they trust you... and trust increases conversions.