11 Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content

Short URLs (especially those with your keyword embedded) can convey to a potential visitor about what your page is about. According to MarketingSherpa, short URLs get clicked 2.5x as much as long URLs.

Another study on on-page SEO factors by Ahrefs found that short URLs tend to rank better in SERPs.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - short urls

For example, look at this URL by Backlinko:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Backlinko short urls

Even if you use longer URLs inside folders (such as “/blog/”), it’s a good idea to make the URLs short and easy to read.

For example, look at the URL for Core dna’s post titled “11 Deadliest Content Marketing Mistakes I See People Make”:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Core dna short urls

2. Use “Power Words” in Your Headline AND Writing

Usefulness is an important criteria for long-form content success, but that doesn’t mean your content has to be dry and emotionless.

In one study by CoSchedule, emotion-rich headlines get significantly more shares on social media.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Coschedule power words

Let me put chart that into words; there is a direct link between the number of emotional words used in a headline and the likelihood it will be shared more than 1,000 times.

This shouldn’t be surprising – human brains are hard-wired to respond to emotions.

When it comes to getting more shares, however, not all emotions are made equally. According to Buzzsumo, content that evokes “Awe”, “Amusement” and “Joy” lead to higher shares.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Popular emotions

So how can you make your writing more emotion-rich without adding superfluous content?

Easy: through power words.

In copywriting, power words or “trigger words” are emotion-rich words that evoke specific emotions. These are usually words you don’t use often in everyday speech (such as “devastating” or “mind-numbing”). This is why they grab the reader’s attention in any long-form content piece.

For example, take a look at this article introduction from Jon Morrow of SmartBlogger. Notice the underlined words:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - power words

These are all emotion-rich words that amplify the impact of the content.

Here’s a massive list of power words to get you started. Try using them in your headlines as well as your content body to increase the emotional impact of your writing.

3. Use (Odd) Numbers in Headlines

Your readers are always looking efficient ways to do things.

Appease to this instinct by using numbers in your headlines. This communicates that content is organized in a logical order, and if they want, they can skip it after reading a few points.

We’ve already seen that listicles are among the most shared content-types on social media.

According to a research by Conductor, headlines with numbers get far more shares than any other headline-type.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - odd numbers in headline

The effect is even more pronounced for female readers:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Headline preferences by gender

Surprisingly, headlines with odd numbers perform 20% better.

Check out the amount of odd-numbered headlines on BuzzFeed’s page:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Buzzfeed odd headlines

In fact, one researcher analyzed Buzzfeed’s headlines and found that most of Buzzfeed’s best performing headlines included odd numbers.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Odd number audience scores

The takeaway: if possible, use numbers in your headlines, and if using numbers, make sure to use odd numbers.

4. Follow Through on What You Promise in Your Headline

“24 Melbourne is The WORST City in The World; #7 is The Absolute Worst”

And the piece goes on and talk about something like this

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Buzzfeed doesnt follow through headlines

Damn you, Buzzfeed!

Here’s a stat for you:

23% of consumers are likely to cease engagement with a brand after being misled by the headline and the actual content delivered.

So, if you’re going to make a claim in a headline, you better follow through that claim.

Jason Quey says it best:

Jason Quey:

“Being in a constant state of anxiety, anticipation, disgust, …. can be crippling. Mind numbing, even.

Headlines and the copy can do that to people. How do you want to treat your readers?

More importantly… Is burning your reader’s trust really worth that extra click?”

[via The Storyteller Marketer]

5. Use Floating Share Buttons

If you want your content to be successful, you need more eyes on it.

One way to achieve that is to get more people to share it through social media. The easy way to do so is through easy to use social sharing buttons.

Floating share buttons that scroll as your visitors browse increases social traffic by 27%

Here’s how we use floating share buttons:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Core dna social share buttons

6. Use an Attention-Grabbing Introduction

Keep your introductory sentences short and to the point. This is the first thing readers will see when they land on your page; bombarding them with dense paragraphs will just overwhelm them.

For example, take a look at this paragraph from Backlinko:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Backlinko introduction

There are three tactics Brian uses to grab attention:

● Bucket Brigades: A copywriting tactic to keep readers interested. Essentially, it involves breaking an argument into smaller points using a colon.

● Short sentences: Brian often uses one-sentence paragraphs. The sentences themselves are between 4-12 words in length.

● Rhetorical questions: Brian uses rhetorical questions frequently in his writing to guide readers and make the content feel more like a conversation.

7. Make Your Content Scannable

Readers don’t read online; they scan.

Eye-tracking studies by NNGroup prove this. Readers follow an ‘F-shaped’ pattern when looking at web pages, scanning down the page quickly.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - F pattern

No matter how good your content is, only 20% of your content will actually be read on average.

This is why you need to make your content concise and scannable to ensure readers get all the important information without having to read the entire thing.

This means:

● Short paragraphs

● Short sentences

● Bullet points

● Items in bold

To give you an example, check out an excerpt of this blog post from QuickSprout

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Quicksprout scannable content

8. Use High-Quality, Relevant Images

It’s not enough to tell people what they need to know. You also need to show them.

Your content needs supporting visuals whether they be images, graphics, or charts to perform better.

In fact, research by Backlinko shows that content on the first page of Google contains at least one visual.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - At least one image

If you want more shares – 121% more shares (on Facebook) – you need to make sure that your visuals are also high quality.

Check how Contently uses a striking image in its content:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Contently image focus

9. Link Out To Relevant Sources

The first rule of Essay Writing 101 is to never make a claim or assertion without backing it up with facts.

Any time you make a statement like “most people believe” or “studies show”, include links to data, studies or authoritative sources backing up your claims.

This does two things:

● Increases trustworthiness: Research shows that readers are more likely to trust web pages that reference sources.

● Better for SEO: Google uses the Hilltop algorithm to find relevant documents as part of a larger search algorithm. As per Hilltop, pages that act as “hubs” and link out to a lot of sources are given higher priority. While not significant by itself, linking out to sources can have an effect on your rankings.

10. Embed Interactive Content

One easy way to boost your engagement rate and increase average time on site is to embed interactive media into your content.

This can be anything – an embedded Tweet, YouTube video, Instagram post, poll, quiz, etc. Anything that gets the reader to press a button, click a link or perform an action will increase your engagement rate.

For example, Buzzfeed frequently embeds Instagram and Twitter updates in its posts, instead of using screenshots:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Buzzfeed interactive content

You can do something similar by finding YouTube videos supporting your argument or embedding tweets from influencers in your content.

This makes your content more interactive and encourages clicks – great for boosting your engagement rate. In fact, Demand Metric found interactive content drives 70% more conversions over ‘passive content’.

11. Close With a Clear CTA

Every piece of content you create should have a clear call to action.

This can be anything – a question that prompts discussion, a request to share the post, a link to download a file. You don’t want to write a 5,000-word post and then make readers wonder what’s expected of them.

For example, Backlinko includes a clear CTA with a “can’t-miss-it” content upgrade download button:

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Clear cta

On SmartBlogger, Marsha Stopa includes a clear CTA asking readers to “drop her a note”.

Key Ingredients of Successful Long-Form Content - Smartblogger clear CTA

As with most CTAs, make sure that your call to action is clear and highly specific.

For instance, if you want more comments, use a CTA like “what do you think? Let us know in the comments”. If you want readers to download a content upgrade, use a phrase like “download this cheat-sheet to boost your ROI by 20%”.

The good guys at Grow & Convert estimates conversion rates for certain CTA locations:

● Sidebar: 0.5 – 1.5%

● Generic, end-of-post: 0.5 – 1.5%

● Pop-ups: 1 – 8%

● Sliders and bars: 1 – 5%

● Welcome gates: 10 – 25%

● Feature-box: 3 – 9%

● Navbar: varies