If your nonprofit or your charity has any online presence at all, you want readers to engage your content, click through the link(s), visit the site, and get involved with money and/or time. If you are a blog writer, you want pretty much the same, though gifts might also/instead mean advertising dollars because so many people come to your site. And, of course, no reason a nonprofit can’t have a blog that carries those ambitions for the blog and the site that hosts it.
The million-dollar question is: “How do I get people to move from scanning the headline to clicking on it and getting engaged?”
The answer can be deceptively, irritatingly, simple: write a headline that captures people’s imaginations and gives them what they want. The concept is universally understood as KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). But as the North Korean space agency, Wile E. Coyote, and the House Republicans have demonstrated time-and-again, keeping things simple is one of the trickiest skills to master.
The headline serves as the first and final enticement to buy into the information below or behind it. Advice from the folks at ‘Manage WP’ (WordPress) on this issue offer a useful analogy for any of us who has perused a bookstore on a holiday afternoon: “Consider this – have you ever found yourself in an airport bookshop, trying to pick something out to read on your flight? How many books did you look at, and how many did you buy?”
And you want people to buy (read: to read, to donate, to share…). Which also means you should also have developed a strategy for listening to what your community is talking about, what concerns them, what information they are searching for. As you become sharper with your listening, you will improve your chances to write the headline that goes viral with the story/video/appeal that goes with it. You can’t control whether any particular headline goes viral, but you can strive to give each story a chance of going so. People catch that virus through the headline.
Finally, MKCREATIVEmedia wishes our brave veterans, their families, and the families who have lost loved ones in the armed forces a peaceful and fulfilling Memorial Day. Whatever one’s political position on the recent wars in American history, we should never forget or take for granted those willing to risk their lives in the hopes that they are helping to make this country a more perfect union governed by the people for the people.
Related articles
- Blogging Tips: Growing a Readership (katyarichkitchen.com)
- Headings That Rock -Engaging Your Readership with Creative Titles (homebiz.bukiki.com)
