So, you’ve created this extra long, information-filled article for your site. You thought it would be a great help to your audience and is very excited to get reads and shares. Alas! A few days later, all those research and typing go down the drain and you’d hear croaks of frogs and the buzzing of flies.

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So, what happens? What’s wrong? Why are you having trouble enticing your audience to your contents?

Here are 5 things you might have overlooked that you can redo in order to make your content more engaging.

1.     Use Visuals

When an audience clicks on your contents, you better show them what you want them to know, rather than just telling them. When a reader opens your article, what jumps out? Is it a seemingly endless sea of boring text?

If that is so, do you know where your audience eyes will go next?

The back button.

A long text with no imagery at all makes a boring, lifeless, dull content.

Several statistics suggest that all types of visual content are a sure-fire method in order to make an audience fall in love with your content. The Guardian, in one of its article, noted that many of these findings, including a Cisco research revealing that video will account for 69% of all consumer traffic by 2017, while YouTube already receives over a billion unique visitors every month.

So, try to include an image every couple of hundred words, or add tutorial videos whenever possible in order to reinforce information and keep your readers from getting bored. Another way is to use one of your existing content in a more visually-appealing and turn it into an infographic.

2.     Keep It Simple

I get it! You want to stock information on your readers’ head, so you create VERY informative articles. However, the best teachers will explain a very complicated subject in the simplest terms possible. This does not remove the complexity, however, it makes the content a lot easier to understand and digest— one concept at a time.

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According to Harvard Business Review, brands that make it easy for customers to understand information are 115% more likely to be recommended to others and 86% more likely to get a sale.

So, how do you explain something simply?

Step 1:            Break down your topic into subheadlines, steps, and lists

Step 2:            Keep it general and know which details you need to leave out

Step 3:            Encourage questions for a more in-depth learning

3.     Make It Interactive

Digital marketing is naturally interactive— an audience clicks, reads, fills out a form, replies, and asks. All of these actions are carried out through your marketing strategies. A blog post by Content Marketing Institute shows that interactive content averages a 50% click-through rate and a 40% conversion rate.

However, now that digital marketing is becoming the norm, how do you create an interactive content outside of the expected?

Step 1:            Think polls, quizzes, rewards, and comments

Step 2:            Offer a plenty of follow up material

Step 3:            Add links, graphics, animation and other visual contents

4.     Create A Readable, Fun Content

Want to know why some articles go viral? Well, BuzzSumo has analyzed a hundred million articles and came up with some of the attributes of articles that go viral:

• Appeals to emotion
• Includes images
• Usually 3,000 to 10,000 words
• A how-to article, infographic or a list
• Shared by at least one influencer
• Perceived trustworthy
• Promoted several days, months or weeks after it was originally written

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The bottom line is you need to stop using a third-person corporate gibberish. You do not have to sound like a cubicle automaton. You can write like a human being. Show some personality. Throw in some humor. Have an opinion. Give your content a fun theme.

Also, write long stuff— it is not boring. Rather it is shareable, valuable, trustworthy and engaging.

5.     Expand Your Publishing Options

In order to engage the audience with your contents, you need to find where they hang out. Whether it is their Facebook news feed or a trade publication they check, find your readers so you can directly speak to them.

Also, don’t make your content too hard to share. Add social media buttons to your website, so it would be easier for your audience to share your words with others.

Conclusion:

Contents come in all sizes, shapes, and topics. And the best content out there not only passes the basic standards of SEO but is also informative, interesting and fun. You want people to not only like your content but to love it enough that they share it with others and trust your services and products.