Listening For links

I love this shot.  

It says everything you need to know about listening.

Look at the body posture, the size of the eyes - she’s laser locked and her entire attention is focused.

When done right, listening is an all encompassing behavior.

Good Listening Equals Links

The way to get people to notice your content is to interact with them in the digital world.  

• Interact with the wrong people and nothing happens as they don’t care about your content.
• Interact poorly with the right people and still nothing happens because now they don’t care about you.
• Interact well with the right people and your content gets shared.

The trick to identifying the right people AND finding the right way to interact,  is to be a great listener.

You Know How To Do This

Here’s the screen-cast from January:

4 minutes on how to listen strategically.

In the ideal world you would spend as much time listening as you spend on content creation and publishing.  

Imagine If You:

• Allocated time every day to listen
• Added “Hours spent listening” to your KPIs
• Set a quarterly target for listening

How much further would your content reach?

Quick Caveat

This approach only works if:

• Your digital footprint is in order
• You have a regular content production cycle
• What you create is actually good

Written while listening to: The Bench 173 Bpm Flow - Session 1 | 1014 by music2work2

Image Credit: Listening by fs999 on Flickr

3 Things You’d Never Know Without Reading This

More data on how to get people to look at your content, this time focusing on the headline ( the title of your video, post or email subject line.)

Use Negative Superlatives to Drive Clicks

Apparently if your headline evokes something people can’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t do, they get curious and tend to click through more often.  Be aware though, while negative emotions drive clicks, they don’t drive shares.

If you want someone to share your content it’s best to make it positive and energizing.  People like to share things that make them feel good so they can pass that feeling onto others.

People Still Like Lists

Personally if I never see a list post again it’ll be too soon, but they’re still super popular.  Whether it’s the whole “bite size chunks” of information thing, people just dig having things broken out for them.

Just promise me that if you use a list you won’t write some banal nonsense just to flesh out the points.  Me, I say less is more, 5 is good, 9 is pushing it and if you’re into double figures then “Woah Nelly!” are you sure you need that many?

Use Title Case in Your Headlines

Lot’s of back and forth on this with people having their own preferences but apparently the data’s pretty clear.  When it comes to headlines and titles, don’t use all caps or sentence case, capitalize each word and your opening rate goes up.

Who knew!?

Further Reading

If you’re interested here’s a great article from Belle Beth Cooper that digs deeper into the science behind headlines.

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Written while listening to: The Bench Dev 5 by music2work2 - good music to work to!

Image credit: Three Sages by Michael Summers on Flickr