In my day to day life, I am usually approaching Persuasive Content from a tools perspective – talking to organisations about understanding and engaging with their audience and enabling the folks with the knowledge and information to translate that into published content. The Persuasive Content architecture as Forrester refer to it. But, of course all this is all for nought, if the currency of this transaction – the content – is not engaging, educational or persuasive and does nothing to further the objectives of your website.
I have previously talked about the value of well written content in my original Persuasive Content article – but today I came across an excellent article if you are looking for a good place to start.
In this article, writing for a user experience website I’ve not read before, Colleen Jones details “Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content” – it’s well written and has advice ranging from talking like a person, in an appropriate tone for your brand, service and audience, to establishing credibility, to tips on the sort of content to include.
Update: 29th Jan – You might also want to consider having a look at this article by Richard Skaare. I have blogged on one of his articles before, they appear in the Content Wrangler LinkedIn group discussions. In this he discusses finding your voice and some simple tecniques for doing so.
While on the subject of content, a critical bit of content that is often neglected is the snippet that attracts people to read your persuasive article, to give you that opportunity. If you are active in the blogging community, that that could be your comments on other blogs, maybe the summary text you choose for your post – but it’s more likely to be the few lines that appear under your link in a set of search results.
People talking about page “meta tags”, the description that you can add to your web page, normally added by a techie or by the tool that you use to create content. This isn’t the complete picture, not all search engines will display the content of this tag in full – but you should pay attention to how your website looks to a potential visitor when you crop up in their search results.
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
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