Four things readers want

by Mark Tosczak on March 4, 2010 · 0 comments

in Blogging,Content marketing,Social media,Writing

Publishing news about your niche or topic area is one sure-fire way to attract and retain an audience. (Photo: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/106233)

What do readers want? And not just readers, but viewers, listeners – audiences for all media. If creating content is part of your marketing strategy then you’ve got to figure out what content your audience wants. What kind of blog posts, ebooks, podcasts or videos will attract the most people, get shared most often and keep your brand uppermost in people’s minds?

What they want is likely to boil down to four kinds of content.

How To

How to be wealthier, how to be sexier, how to be slimmer. How to do something — create a great Facebook fan page, sell more life insurance or bake the perfect cake.

Bookstores and libraries are full of how-to books. Magazine covers are scribbled over with how-to headlines – “How to get your guy to ____” screams Cosmo. And the Internet has become a treasure house of how-to content of every type.

People want to know how to do things. They want to know how to do things because they think that being able to do those things will get them something they want — a better sex life, more money, less stress. How to content appeals to a fundamental human desire for empowerment. Help fulfill this desire, and your content will be successful.

Examples: Lifehacker, eHow

News

The conversations around the water cooler used to be about what happened the day before, what was on the news last night and the paper this morning. Now those conversations (which are perhaps more likely to occur on Twitter or Facebook) are about what happened today at lunch time, the announcement made an hour ago, or even the big press conference that’s taking place right now.

People want to know what’s new and different. We’re hardwired to constantly scan our environment (that’s why we’re so easily distractible). In the today’s world scanning our environment means monitoring the news. Providing relevant, up-to-date news can be difficult (I used to make a living doing this), but it can also attract massive audiences and attention.

If you can provide the latest updates in your niche or industry you can quickly establish your content as authoritative and worth revisiting frequently.

Examples: CNN, Mashable

Emotional Experiences

Make them laugh, make them angry, make them cry. Whatever you do, make them feel something. If you provoke emotion in your audience, chances are they will stick around. Emotional experiences are the foundation of all good entertainment, and it can be the foundation of all sorts of compelling online content.

Fundraising appeals, for example, often seek to tap our empathy and inborn desire to help other people. Every funny TV commercial you’ve ever seen uses the same principle — it makes you laugh, giving the company a chance to deliver a sales message to you while you’re paying attention and feeling good.

Examples: Gary Vaynerchuk, Dooce

Secrets

Everybody wants to be part of the in-crowd. Letting your audience in on something that very few people know is a great way to keep them coming back for more. This is more than just a desire to know what’s going on in the world. People like secrets (or what they think are secrets) because knowing someone’s secrets makes them feel special.

If you want to quickly establish powerful ties to an audience, try giving them some secrets. Of course, the problem is that as soon as you tell them the secret, it’s not a secret anymore. So for most of us, this is probably only going to work a few times, at most. That doesn’t stop advertisers form trying to tap into this, however. Over the next few days, notice how many times the word “secrets” appears in ads that you see.

Examples: Post Secret, Penelope Trunk

As you might guess, you don’t have to restrict yourself to just one of these categories. A single blog post or video can combine, for instance, how-to content with secrets. And the content still has to be relevant to your niche. Mashable attracts readers interested in news about the latest in social media, not readers who want to know about the latest news in home improvement.

What category or categories does your content usually fall in? Please share your thoughts in the comments.Four things readers want