High-Impact Posts
There’s isn’t a formula for writing a high-impact post, but here are some tips from what I’ve learned:
- Extremely useful. Be as useful as possible on a topic that people want to learn about.
- Complete guides. An extension of the above tip, but as complete as you can be — someone should be able to read the guide and do whatever it is you’re teaching.
- Great headlines. The headline should make people think, or curious, or promise to be really useful.
- Controversial. Don’t just say controversial things in order to get noticed, but if you can think beyond the conventional and say something different, or in a different way, you’ll get people thinking and talking.
- Short. Not all high-impact posts are short — in fact many aren’t — but if you have a post with one brilliant idea, written concisely and memorably, it’ll have a great chance of getting spread. See Seth Godin for some great examples.
- Memorable. Don’t ever be run-of-the-mill. Do something different, in a way that people will remember. Be bold!
- Consistent. One memorable post is good, but if you’re consistently useful and memorable, week in and week out, people will come to expect it of you and each post will have greater impact.
- Full of resources. Link to other guides or great blogs or books. Save people hours of time researching a topic by giving them the best resources.
- New ideas. Don’t repeat the same ideas — come up with some of your own.
- Looking at new angles. Even if you don’t cover every aspect of a topic on one post, you can go into a lot of depth if you consistently cover different angles of a topic. The more angles you can look at in different posts, the more completely you’ll cover a topic.
- Fewer posts. While the big blogs like Lifehacker and Gizmodo can put out a dozen posts a day, smaller blogs have to make their posts count. By reducing the number of posts you have, you are less likely to overwhelm the reader — and so the reader will be more likely to read your posts.
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