City of Desire

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The Formula to Earn More Links and Social Shares

What if there was an actual formula for content marketing success? It’d be the best thing for marketers since Google invented the search algorithm. The crew at Fractl set out to not only create that formula but also share it with the world. And we’re sharing it with our world (you guys, ’cause you’re our world <3) right here.

Fractl started by analyzing 759 content marketing campaigns. They grouped those campaigns into three buckets:

• High success: more than 100 media placements and/or 20,000 social shares
• Moderate success: Between 20–100 media placements and/or between 1,000 and 20,000 social shares
• Low success: Fewer than 20 media placements and/or fewer than 1,000 social shares

After bucketing those campaigns, they noticed that their top campaigns had at least one of three things:

• They built an emotional connection with their audience
• They had an element of surprise
• Top campaigns appealed to a broad audience

And it wasn’t a small difference either. Campaigns with an emotional hook earned 70% more media pickups and 127% more social shares than campaigns that lacked that emotion. Campaigns with an element of surprise earned 39% more media pickups and 108% more social shares than campaigns without surprise.

Here’s the secret sauce, though. When all three of those things were combined, their results were crazy huge! Campaigns that had all three of those had an average of 207 media pickups and 25,017 social shares. DAAAAAANG!

Having trouble thinking of a piece of content that hits all three of those? No worries, here are some examples:

• Drinking from a refillable water bottle could be worse than licking a dog toy
• More American high school students smoke pot than binge drink, report says
• Here’s which states post the nastiest tweets
• Online fast food calculator reveals how long you need to run or swim to be guilt-free (and it’s more than you think)

Runningoutofroomhere, but we have to note that without exceptional media outreach, your campaigns will probs just fail before they get anywhere.

If you couldn’t tell, this is one in-depth article, so keep on readin’ for way more knowledge.

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5 Tools to Improve Your Copywriting the Pros Love

Legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz might have put it best when he said,

“If anyone tells you ‘you write copy’, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in.”

Okay, we don’t suggest sneering at people (most of the time), but there is so much more to copy than writing. It’s a combination of creativity, science, and architecture—hey, just like content marketing! 

The tools in this article will help you build your city of desire by improving the quality of your writing and writing strategy. That way, not only will your readers be hooked, but Google will hook you up in the rankings. That means more traffic, more engagement, and more leads. We like all those things. 

Here are 3 to kick things off:

1. Hemingway Editor is a free tool you can use online or on desktop. You enter your text and format it exactly as you would online and it’ll flag all the areas where your writing can be improved. It even flags phrases that have simpler alternatives that can lower the reading level.
2. Word Counter is another free tool you can access online. It has a bunch of cool features like, counting words and character, showing up to 10 keywords they’d recommend, and demonstrating keyword density. (But, for serious keyword help, Yoast should be your go-to.)
3. Unsuck It is pretty basic, but a great place to start when you have obscure business jargon you want to write in a way everyday readers will understand. Simply enter the jargon that you need to be translated and Unsuck It will either define the jargon or offer synonyms. (It also comes with a side of jokes.)

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Guilty Pleasures

We’ve all seen those commercials of a woman lounging in a bubble bath while she enjoys something decadent—chocolate, wine, whatever. The vibe is universal: it’s all about “alone time.”

Pepperidge Farms remembers those kinds of commercials, and the company just released an ad with its own take on the cliché. As one would expect, it stars a woman relaxing in the bathroom eating an ever-classic Milano cookie.

We don’t want to ruin the twist for you because it’s cute and funny, but it ends with the tagline “Save something for yourself.” It’s a phrase Pepperidge Farms has been using since 2013, proving that alone time is timeless.

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