Table of Contents

share button

Is your content shareworthy? That's a term I use in Content Marketing for Dummies to describe content that is so useful, meaningful, and interesting to a target audience that they want to talk about it and share it with their own audiences.Creating content that adds value to your audience's lives and motivates them to discuss is and share it is critical to increasing traffic to it, expanding your reach, and growing your audience. But how do you do it?Following are five of the primary steps you need to follow to create shareworthy content:

1. Create Useful Content

If your content isn't useful in some way, few people are likely to read it. Remember, usefulness comes in many different forms. Even content that is intended for entertainment purposes only can be useful if it successfully provides the entertainment the audience wants and needs. Always ask yourself if the content you create is useful before you hit the publish button.

2. Create Relevant Content

If your content isn't useful, meaningful, or interesting to your target audience, then they'll think it's irrelevant and won't bother to consume it. That means they won't share it either. It's essential that you understand who your target audience is and what they want and need from you, so you can consistently meet those expectations.

3. Create Appealing Content

Your content and the online destination where that content is found has to be visually appealing and user-friendly or few people will stick around long enough to read, watch, or listen to all of it. Don't clutter your site with so much text, colors, or ads that it's overwhelming to visitors. Similarly, write in a web-friendly format with short paragraphs, headings, and lists. Simpler is always better in web design because it lets your amazing, shareworthy content take center stage.

4. Create Search-Friendly Content

Make sure people can find your content by leveraging search engine optimization techniques without prioritizing those tactics over your efforts to publish high quality, authoritative content. Research and use keywords, use heading tags, alt tags, image descriptions, internal linking, and so on to enhance the search-friendliness of your content, but never sacrifice content quality for SEO tricks.

5. Create Shareable Content

This is the final step to ensuring your content is shareworthy -- make sure it's extremely easy for people to share it with their own audiences. That means you should have social sharing links, plugins, and icons included with all of your online content, so one-click sharing is instant. Write headlines that are intriguing and motivate people to click on them whether those headlines are seen in an email message, a tweet, a Facebook update, or anywhere else.Of course, you can get more details in my book, but Ahava Leibtag of Aha Media Group shared a great checklist for creating valuable content on the Content Marketing Institute blog along with lots of details that can help you create more valuable content. Most of the suggestions in her handy checklist mirror my own, so check it out!Image: miamiamia