headlines

Why your headlines are worth almost all your content marketing efforts (and how to improve them)

There was a part of me that used to think that people cared deeply about how good a piece of content looked, how it was written and what it had to say. I’m sure some people still do care about these things, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a majority. 

My experience at various publishers is that, increasingly, people are looking less at what is contained within a piece of content and reacting more to the limited information that is shown around it. 

How to optimise headlines using the 65 character rule

I’m currently developing some wireframes as we pave the way for a revamp of this blog later this year. There are lots of things to think about. One of those things is typography. Closely related to that is optimal headline length. 

I always try to write headlines that fit on one line, though I don’t always succeed. Nevertheless, short headlines beat longer ones for lots of reasons. As such I’d like to introduce the 65 character rule. Actually it’s 65 or less, to be precise. 

Here’s why…

Five core elements of audience building content strategy

At a publisher, you normally think about content strategy in a way that delivers growth, engaged audience kind of growth.

Content strategy is about more than that, but I want to address the issue of building audience, since that’s what a lot of people will be aiming to do with their content strategy during 2013.

I’ve worked on a number of large sites, and I normally see the same issues to begin with – get these issues right, and engaged audiences often grow.

What I’ve learned from writing 2,000 blog posts

Since this is my 2,000th article on Econsultancy, I thought it was an opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the past five or six years writing for this blog. 

I started out as a relative novice, but I’ve learned a lot along the way, and hopefully my 2,000th post is much better than my first.

Here are 20 tips for other bloggers…

How to extract meaning from retweets

Everybody loves to be retweeted, unless they’ve completely messed up, but it’s worth noting that retweets aren’t created equally.

Speaking from the perspective of a publisher, we love it when our links are shared. But what I really look for is the buzz surrounding an article, rather than the sheer volume of retweets a post generates.

The background chatter is more important to me than counting up the retweets. The problem is, some retweets contain little or no additional information from the retweeter.