Does your content have your users seeing stars (and stripes)? In the spirit of Independence Day, here are five tips for incendiary content, inspired by the Founding Fathers of the United States.
1. Have a strategy
You can’t go into battle without a plan, right? George Washington strategically crossed the Delaware River in a surprise attack that resulted in the capture of almost 1,000 enemy forces and the positioning of his army to succeed in future battles. Before you write your piece of content, make sure you have a goal in mind and a strategy to achieve it. What are you hoping to accomplish? How will you know if the goal has been met?
Another strategy is to know your competition. Before the revolution, Washington was part of the British military. He learned their battle plans, their strengths and weaknesses, and their training methods, which served him well when he began to fight for the United States. By having a clear understanding of your competitors, you can use your content to highlight how your company’s product or service differs from all the rest.
2. Do your research
Education was valued by the Founding Fathers, through higher education, advanced degrees, apprenticeships, and lifelong learning. When preparing content, such as a blog post, be educated on your topic and conduct research to provide another perspective, learn more about a new subject, or make sure your idea is timely and relevant. Research can also help you with the next lesson of being original. Before writing your content, do some research to see if your topic has been written about before. If it has, how can you reframe the topic or build off of what others have written?
When writing product descriptions, look at other successful companies and see if there are any approaches you can implement on your site. You can also perform research on your own company. For example, which of your email campaigns or product pages have been the most successful and why? These internal achievements can help you form your next piece of effective content.
3. Be original
The Founding Fathers are perhaps the best source inspiration for original ideas, considering they created a new country and a new system of government. Alexander Hamilton founded the national financial system, the Federalist party, and the US Coast Guard. Benjamin Franklin pursued a diverse range of interests and demonstrated a relentless curiosity about the world around him, resulting in numerous inventions of his own making.
You can produce amazing content by being relentlessly curious about your industry and catering to the interests of your customers. Creating revolutionary content will delight your readers and help your business stand out. By sharing original ideas and providing information that can’t be found anywhere else, you will drive users to your site and increase your chances of conversion.
4. Write often
Many of the founding fathers, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin, wrote about a variety of topics through an array of mediums. They sent correspondence letters to their friends, their wives, and each other. They wrote books, diaries, satirical pieces, letters to newspapers, and political musings, not to mention these little things called the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
One of the best ways to become a better writer is to actually write, and to write often. This can be 10 minutes a day and doesn’t always have to be your next post – just put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and say something. Even if you only post to a blog once a week, for example, writing every day will make those posts better and will help you brainstorm new ideas. It is always better to have more ideas than you have time to write.
5. Be persistent
Although George Washington is often remembered for his military prowess, he lost many battles and it took two years after combat had ended for the Treaty of Paris to be signed and the British to leave. Benjamin Franklin created a list of 13 Virtues to live by, which he pursued throughout his life but admitted to often falling short of. If your content does not seem to be reaching your target audience the way you had hoped, keep trying.
If a blog post did not generate many views, try rewriting the headline, promoting it on social media, and encouraging other sites or bloggers to link it. If a product is not performing well, try writing a new description and monitoring the results with analytics. As an ecommerce company, you must always be striving to develop great content for your customers.
Of course, ParadoxLabs is here to help your business meet and exceed its goals, so give us a call or shoot us an email to learn more. We wish you a happy Independence Day and a sparkling summer of content!