If you are somewhat new to the online world, you’ll find out in due time that online readers are very fickle.
People that visit websites and blogs can be very quick to get bored, and they can promptly abandon a website that does not look very engaging or interesting to them.
This can end up in an increased bounce rate, which itself is a bad sign for a website’s popularity.
That is pretty much why bloggers and webmasters have to make sure that the content they published on their website is rich and engaging. Just as having boring content can harm your website’s reputation and SEO health, having engaging content can be very beneficial instead.
In this post, we are going to be looking at how you can create content that engages your audience. We will also look at some tools that you can use for this process.
How to Create Content That Engages Your Audience?
Before we get to listing and discussing the tools that you can use for this purpose, let’s look at some general steps that you can take to make sure that the content you create is engaging and interesting to your audience.
> Writing a Snappy and Catchy Intro
The first and main element of engaging content is the introduction. As far as written content goes, the saying “The first impression is the last impression” is overwhelmingly true.
Basically, when you write any content – whatever type it may be –, you have to make sure that you start it off nicely. If you manage to hook the attention of your readers right from the start of the content, you will be able to retain it throughout the post.
Here are some things that you can add in your introduction to make it catchy:
- Start with a question or query that you think your readers will want to know the answer of.
- Keep it simple. Don’t show off your vocabulary right at the beginning.
- If you can, add a joke or something witty.
> Provide a Table of Contents Right at the Start
If the content that you are writing is long and extensive, you should make sure to provide a table right at the start. Adding a table basically helps the readers understand how long the content and where the various topics are being discussed. If, for example, a reader has to only read a specific part of your content, they can just go through the table and find where its located.
The reason why we’re mentioning this step as a way to ‘engage’ your audience is that by adding a table, you can help them not feel daunted. In other words, if your readers were to come to the content only to find it stretching down and down, they would get apprehensive and leave it rather than go through it.
But with a table, you can clearly tell your readers what the content contains. That way, they (the readers) won’t get scared off.
> Break Your Content into Headings and Sub-Headings
This is yet another very important step that you will have to take for making your content engaging.
If the content you publish does not have any sort of headings or sub-headings in it, it will just appear as a giant wall of text. No one will want to go through it.
On the other hand, if you break it up nicely using some H2s and H3s, it will look a lot more readable.
There are a lot of other steps that we can mention here as well, but if we were to go on, it would take up lot of space…as well as your time.
So, for now, let’s move on to discuss some online tools that can help you create engaging content for your audience.
3 Suggested Tools to Create Content That Engages Your Audience
1. Paraphraser
Paraphraser.io is, as the name says, a paraphrasing tool. Although there are some other content optimizations tools available on this platform as well, their main offering is the paraphraser.
Before we get to discussing the features of this tool, let’s take a look at how it can actually help you make your content engaging.
The main benefit in this regard that you can get by using Paraphraser.io is that you can remove boring and repetitive stuff from your content, and make it look fresh and interesting.
You could, for example, take some portion of your content and run it though a paraphrasing tool. The tool will replace some words with synonyms and shuffle the phrases as well. Due to this, the text will stop looking monotonous. It will look a little…diverse instead.
Moving on, let’s take a look at some of the features of this tool.
Paraphraser.io is free to start and it does not have any daily usage limits. If you want to use this tool for free, you will have to deal with a 500-word limit. You can increase this to 1,000 by shifting to the paid plan.
As for the working of this tool, there are three different modes that you can choose from.
The ‘Standard’ mode is the simplest one, and it only changes some words in the text with their synonyms. The ‘Fluency’ mode, on the other hand, takes things a little further and also changes the sentence structures and phrases as well.
The ‘Creative’ mode is available only for premium users, and it’s basically an advanced form of the ‘Fluency’ mode.
2. Hemingway Editor
As we mentioned somewhere earlier on in this post, keeping your content simple is key to increasing reader engagement.
While it feels good for the writer to flaunt their vocabulary and write really long sentences, it is not at all nice for the reader to go through. People like to read something that they can easily understand, not something that looks like it’s been written by a British gentleman from the 1800s.
So, to make sure that your content is simple and straightforward, you can take the help of Hemingway.
Hemingway is an online tool that evaluates the readability of the entered text, and grades it from a scale of 1 to ‘Post-Graduate’.
The tool basically spots things like long sentences, difficult words, passive voice usage and adverbs to evaluate the reading difficulty.
It’s free to use, and you can use it without signing up. The working is pretty straightforward as well. All you need to do is enter your content in the input field, and it will get analyzed in real-time.
3. Editpad’s.org (Text Summarizer)
This tool can help you create engaging content the same way as the Hemingway Editor i.e., by keeping things simple.
Let’s explain that a little.
If you find that you’ve elaborated on a specific point in your content way too much, you can shorten it up by using a text summarizer. Similarly, you can also generate a summary for your content to show as a snippet to your readers so that they can decide when they want to go through the whole thing or not.
Both these steps can help you make your content more engaging. By shortening long pieces of text, you will be able to retain the attention of your reader and lessen the chances for them to get bored out. And by providing a preview or snippet of your content, you will be able to intrigue the readers into going through the whole content.
Now, let’s move on to the tool itself.
When it comes to Editpad.org, the salient feature of this platform is the simplicity and easy-to-use interface. And with the text summarizer tool, the deal is no different.
To use the tool, all you need to do is enter your content in the left input box and click on the ‘Summarize’ button (you will have to complete the captcha). Within a matter of seconds, the summary will be shown in the output box. After the summary is generated, you will have to choice to either keep it in plain text, or you can show them as bullets instead.
You can also download the results to your device or copy them directly to your clipboard.
Conclusion
Creating engaging content is not a very task. But, if you follow the tips that we have given in this post, you’ll have a better chance of doing it.
You can also take some help from the three tools that we’ve listed above to make things a little easier for yourself.
If you don’t feel like using the ones we’ve recommended, you can also use some of your own choice as well.