OK, so maybe it’s not that sexy. But it’s more important than you might think, and it can definitely make your content more appealing.
In fact, formatting your content can be just as important as the substance of your content. It’s something that generally only comes to mind as an afterthought, but the format of your content can have a significant impact on how well people read, respond, and retain what you have to say.
If you count the number of online news sources, blogs, emails, instant messaging conversations and so on that the average person reads every day, it amounts to a massive amount of textual information. So no matter how great the substance of your content, you are going to be subjected to the 10 second rule.
Let me explain. Essentially, by the time you finish this article, you’ll know how to write in a clearer manner so that the average reader can understand the gist of your content in 10 seconds or less.
When writing headlines for an article there are three different kinds of readers that you can optimize for:
In an ideal situation you would be able to write a title that fits all three categories but that is rarely the case. There is a marked difference between the different kinds of readers and that’s why you need to market your content to them in different ways.
This is the first post from Digg power user Muhammad Saleem, who will be offering tips about creating content that appeals to users of social media news sites.
Back in January, Ethan Kaplan proposed a new term to describe certain sites:
Made for Digg (MFD), just like Made for Adsense sites, these are sites that are specifically formatted as Digg bait…
While people often argue that there is something inherently wrong with content that is specifically designed to be consumed by socially driven sites, I was probably one of the first people to go on the record arguing to the contrary, and the reasoning behind my stance is simple. For content to be successful on Digg, i.e. for it to be classified as “Digg bait,” it really has to appeal to the community and it has to incite a passionate response from the users, whether the response be good or bad.
