Click bait or helpful title?
See, even this blog title uses marketing’s vaunted tips for better SEO and viral potential. The title asks a question, setting up a desire to learn more. And, the title uses a provocative keyword.
So did it work? If you’re reading this sentence, you clicked and read. Which leads us to this question: should technical content even use content marketing strategies? Although you might feel a little slimy at first, using marketing strategies can mean your readers don’t skip essential information. Also with the rise of conversational style and the changing expectations for all types of content, we can consider making our content more engaging instead of solely dry and descriptive.
The following strategies come from some content marketing articles I’ve seen. These tools can punch up your writing and generate text for you. Have fun and try them out.
- Content idea and title generator by Portent
- Hemingway app: punch up your text, especially helpful for the brief style we like to use
- SavePublishing is a bookmarklet that looks at your text and decides which statements are tweetable.
- HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator is another idea generator for content topics. Enter up to three nouns, and receive a week’s worth of relevant titles in seconds.
- Interesting tool that gives you stats about how “effective” titles are. It gives you stats about whether you express a positive or negative sentiment, how many words, and several aspects of making your content more shareable. For technical content, you might disagree, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Even more tools are described in “The science behind viral content.”
