How To Get People To (Actually) Read Your Content

How To Get People To (Actually) Read Your Content How do you make sure that people are actually reading your content? You may spend a lot of time making sure that your content is converting well and that your readers  are sharing it online, but is it actually being read?  How do you know? With all of the analytics and metrics at our disposal that tell us about  traffic, knowing if your content is being read is often a black hole for marketers. Thats a problem. Why You  Need To Make Sure That Your Content Is Being Read It can take a lot of time to produce great content, no matter how efficient your workflow is. As the old saying goes, time equals money, and it only makes sense to get as much out of your content as you can. After all, theres no ROI in  content that people arent  reading. Theres no ROI  on  content that  people arent  reading.  #ContentMarketingIn addition to driving traffic, content marketing is also about building your reputation as a thought leader in your field.  You need to establish yourself as someone your audience can trust for great advice and leadership. In order to make this happen,  you need to make sure that  you are writing highly-readable content. The other problem you may encounter is that content that is being created but not consumed is demoralizing. There is nothing more frustrating to a writer than content that doesnt seem to be going anywhere. Its up to you to make sure that doesnt happen. There are few things you need to consider about readable content. Consider How Visitors  Read Your Website In 2006, usability consultant Jakob Nielsen used eye tracking visualizations to observe how website visitors actually read your content. In short, his conclusion can be summarized as  F for  fast. His research found that: As readers, our eyes move incredibly fast across a  website. The pattern we use to view the page is not the typical left-to-right method that we learned in school. Rather, we typically read the page in a F-pattern that puts the most emphasis on the headline and the first few paragraphs of text. As readers scroll down the page, they tend to emphasize the left hand side of the page, skimming the remaining content rather than reading  it. Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didnt attract any fixations. Jakob Nielsen Nielsens  results feel frustrating, but they are probably accurate. At , we  recently began testing how our own readers consumed our content using  a free heatmap tool from SumoMe. This simple plugin allowed us to create  heatmaps of our very own, using our actual readers as the sampling. This is what we learned about our own blog using heatmaps: Our readers are highly focused on our content because we have a very clean page. This is good. Our content followed the fairly typical F-pattern similar to Nielsons findings. As readers moved down the page, they tended to focus more on the left side of the content. On some posts, many readers didn’t make it past reading 20-30% of our content. Based on clicks, most sharing took place at the pages 35%  mark. Highlighted text, links, and headlines drew  plenty of  attention. Only 10-20% of readers actually make it to the bottom of the post. These finding line up with some of the most popular conclusions and findings regarding content. The longer your content is, the less likely that everyone  will read it.  That said, there are also many benefits of  long-form content so you need to find the right balance. You should also test this out for yourself. Consider Where They  Read Your Content How many people read your blog on their phone or tablet? I bet its more that you think. Research frequently shows that  consuming email,  searching the internet, and using social networks  are some of  the  most popular activities  done on a handheld  device. Many of these activities are resulting in click-throughs that are coming to your site on a mobile device. Do you like what they are finding? After a quick glance in our Google Analytics account, we found that 15% of our total traffic is coming from a mobile device. This is a significant amount of traffic. This means that you need to have a great mobile website or a  responsive website design  that automatically scales your website to work on any screen size. If you are using WordPress, this can be easily solved with a plugin like WPTouch or Automattic’s Jetpack plugin  which  offers a free mobile module that works quite well.   At , weve opted for the responsive design option, which gives our readers the  best experience possible on any device. This option also allows us to keep our lead collection initiates at the forefront as well. Another place that visitors may be  reading your content is from their  RSS reader or social application, such as Feedly. This is a good reason to make sure that your entire article is being included in your RSS feed. While sharing only a portion of your content may help you get a few extra clicks, it wont  make your content  any more  likely to be  read. People are reading your content in RSS readers like Feedly. Another place that your readers may be finding your content is their  email inbox. This is especially true if you rely on an email marketing program to distribute your content. I began thinking about this more when one of my coworkers recently shared how they handled email. They have broken it down so that they only check their email 3 times per day. Each time, they allow for 10-20 minutes, and they take action on all email, meaning that they either reply to it,   archive it, or create a t0-do item or task around the email content.  Ã‚  This method is efficient,  but it is also bad news for your content as it leaves little room for reading and enjoying useful  material. This leads to something that I call the context problem,  which are the reading problems that arise from the context in which your readers are consuming your content. Consider That Visitors  Aren’t Just Reading Your Content The really bad news about your content is that your readers have a lot more going on than just reading what you have to say. Whens the last time you simply sat quietly reading on your couch? Probably not nearly as often as youd like. In addition to reading your content, your visitors are  also  cooking dinner, riding the subway, checking their email, watching a movie, and emailing their mother-in-law  Ã¢â‚¬â€œ at the same time! How are you going to  compete with all of that? 1. Allow Each Sentence To Lead To The Next One of the most basic ways to keep your readers attention is to simply ensure that each sentence you write  compels  your readers to move on to the next. For example, the purpose of your headline is to get your readers to move onto the first sentence. The purpose of the second sentence is to get them to move on to the third. You get the idea. Keep your content compelling all the way through. 2. Follow  The Inverted Pyramid Model When You Write The inverted pyramid is a great tool for structuring your content in a way that readers will appreciate and consume. This is a method that newspaper journalists have been using for years. It works well because it puts the most pertinent information first, essentially embracing the idea that nearly 60% of your readers will never make it the end of the article. This method can also work well for your blog content. 3. Use Images To Make Your Concepts Simple Images are great way to break-up your content and spare your users from a sea of text. By using images to illustrate the concepts you are writing about, you also make them easier to understand and engage with. This type of content is consistent with Nielsens research and focus on scannable text. In many ways, this type of visual content is becoming more important than ever in content marketing. 4. Focus On Easily Scannable  Text In addition to images, you can  break up your content by creating text that is easy to scan and consume. Nielsens study offered several extremely useful tips on this: highlighted  keywords  (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful  sub-headings  (not clever ones) bulleted  lists one idea  per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the  inverted pyramid  style, starting with the conclusion half the word count  (or less) than conventional writing In this chart, Nielsen gives us a great example of how different writing methods can be used to make text more readable. Source Jakob Nielson Warning: Youre Not Going To Read This, But You May Have Already Shared It We are now well past the 30% point of this post, which means that most of you are no longer reading this article. For those of you who are, heres another jaw-dropper for you to consider: recent research has shown  that there is no correlation between content that has been shared via social media and content that has been read.