What do you find is the most important thing about a blog post? What makes you read? Mark Schaefer over at {grow} blog asked this question and gives his opinion.
Here are the choices:
Take a few minutes to decide, then leave a comment about the top blogging elements that get you to read a post.
Here is an excerpt of Mark’s opinions, using a rating of 1-5 with 5 being most important, from his post A Scorecard of 7 Blogging Essentials. I highly value what he says:
1. Great headline (Rating: 5.0) — You are fighting through a lot of noise, a ton of competing content and SEO tricksters trying to push you to the bottom of the reading list. Sometimes the only thing that will save a blog post is a great headline. Bloggers agonize over headlines and still rarely get them right. They have to be accurate, descriptive, attention-grabbing, and short enough to tweet. Many people will never get to your content unless you grab them by the throat with your headline.
2. Insanely great content (5.0) – You want people to return to your blog over and over. Fight to never disappoint them. Being original, consistent, and compelling is hard work. An acronym I use with students is RITE — Your blog posts should be Relevant, Interesting, Timely and Entertaining.
3. Social sharing (4.0) — I know this will surprise a lot of people, but hear me out! After the headline, the next thing that usually grabs attention is the number of times it has been tweeted. So of course having a sharing option is important if you want your post to be read widely, but the social validation of having a few tweets at the top is also a crucial psychological reinforcement that says: “this is a post that should be read!”
What’s your opinion about this? What grabs you and compels you to read a post through?
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