5 “Hooks” to keep your site content engaging

Today I was reading an article WebsiteMagazine.com about “Linkbait” and found this great little section on Hooks. As a designer, I often turn to (and highly recommend) professional writers to do the master work of creating great content for sites I create. Writers know how to be economical yet super engaging in how they say what might otherwise be boring technical drivel or purely informational and hard to digest.

What’s great about this bit on Linkbait Hooks is the listing of ways to POSITION your web content.

Full article here on WebsiteMagazine.com >

—

Linkbait Hooks
A hook is a strategic approach to entice people not only to link to your content, but to click through and vote on it when promoting the link via social media or other means. Remember, the most valuable links do not come from the social media sites themselves. They come from journalists, bloggers and other publishers who were exposed to the content and, in-turn, write about it or republish it with a link back to the original source. These are also the same people who stay longer on your site, subscribe to feeds and provide additional page views.

People are more likely to believe, vote, and spread messages that reinforce their personal views. Tailoring content to those people is a surefire way to get more links and votes.

Essentially, the content should give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or an issue they feel deserves attention. This can be done in numerous ways — being controversial, contrarian, spinning an opinion on recent events, or providing a resource.

Some hooks that draw people in the most are:

News Hooks — Breaking a hot news story on your site will all but guarantee a large amount of traffic and keen interest from the social news communities. However, news hooks are not the most linkable. Once the story becomes old news, it’s no longer a valuable resource to link to.

Contrary Hooks — Playing devil’s advocate is a good way to get attention, traffic, and links. Contrary content must be created with great caution, however. Unpopular opinions can cause damage in the form of down votes on social sites and unsubscribes from your content.

Resource Hooks — Creating a great resource of links, tutorials, information, and more are some of the best ways to attract a large amount of links. The great thing about resources is they rarely go stale. You can always go back and update them, if needed.

Humor Hooks — Next to news, funny and offbeat content is one of the most popular to share. The advantage humor has over news is its great longevity.

Ego Hooks — Appealing to prominent community members’ egos will entice them to help promote the content with their honorable mention. This can be done in the form of interviews, spotlights and lists. Ego-based content has a high success rate of obtaining links from those people featured in your content, as well as their entire personal and professional networks….