Everyone wants to increase the number of clicks they get on their content. More clicks mean more visitors, resulting in a higher number of potential customers that you can convert into sales, higher advertisement revenue and greater brand awareness.
It is essential to fully understand the methods you can use to generate these additional clicks. While the internet is full of ‘how to guides’, many of these provide useless and even contradictory advice. Our experts have listed three proven tactics to boost clicks.
1. Intrigue Your Reader
Curiosity killed the cat, or so they say. It also helps to attract lots of new readers to a blog. Humans are naturally curious and therefore will look for any questions your content raises to be answered. By peaking your reader’s curiosity with a question, they are far more likely to click on your blog and search for the answer.
With curiosity, there are two main types: perceptual and epistemic. Perceptual curiosity is the desire to understand a visual thing that is confusing, such as a magic trick or an optical illusion. Epistemic curiosity comes from the innate desire to learn how something works and to gain new information. Of these, epistemic curiosity is proven to attract more attention, although both do generate more clicks and both can be used throughout your content marketing.
2. Hitting The ‘Scarcity Principle’
Human beings are inherently hardwired to want and value things that have a limited supply, or which they perceive to be rare – just look at the value of diamonds and gold compared to their relative utility. Economics and psychologists refer to this innate reaction as the ‘scarcity principle’, and have proven that people react to it. As such, you can use this principle throughout your content marketing.
By using titles that suggest a sense of limitation, rarity or uniqueness, you will generate more clicks on your content. People will be scared of missing out, and since this is a hardwired feature in the human psyche, we know it works.
3. Asking Questions That Cause The Reader To Look Inwards
While most content writers know that using questions as headlines will generate more clicks, which also connects with the epistemic curiosity principle, the best types of questions to ask are those that make the reader look inwards. Instead of asking obvious, closed questions which only require a yes or no answer, focus on questions that make the reader think about their everyday behaviour, and analyse it compared to a moral or objective answer.Therefore, questions such as ‘Am I guilty of procrastinating in the office?’ will generate a far better response than ‘Should I stop wasting time in the office?’ or even ‘How to stop wasting time in the office’.
People respond far better to answers and solutions if they feel they have come to seek that conclusion for themselves. So by asking a leading question that generates an inward response, you can quickly and easily boost clicks on your content.
While each of these techniques has been proven to boost clicks on your content marketing, you will generate the best results by using them in conjunction with each other. Remember as well, it’s not just your headlines that you need to focus on to generate more clicks - your taglines and images are just as important for boosting clicks!
