In my professional career I had once the chance to work in a company that was selling food supplements like vitamins. I was employed as texter and I was working on the packages of these products. Together with a designer and the product manager, we created the packages and believe me this was almost a scientific process.
The packaging is one of the most important marketing aspects of a product
We had the data of all the previous products that we sold and on this basis we were creating new packages. It wasn't just about what would be on the label. It was about the size and the form of the container, the colour of the bottle, the size and quality of the carton, the colors used on the label, the fonts, the font size, the illustrations and finally also about the textual content of the label.
Our objective was to design a packaging that would sell the best. The price of the product had a big impact on the packaging. Sometimes we had the same identical product but we made two different packagings. One would sell for a low price and one would sell for a high price. The only difference was the packaging...
The packaging of your product matters more than you think and this is especially true about content creation.
Your packaging should attract the eye
Let's do a little exercice together. Try to remember the last time that you went into a book store. You probably went to the section that you are interested in. When you looked around what do you see? I'm almost sure that the first things that came to your eyes were the titles and the covers of the books.
It is the same when you look through your feed here, you will see the cover image and the title of a post.
Together with your image, your title is the most important part of your packaging.
Images are attracting your eyes
Let's roll through your feed and let's try to figure out where your eyes are going? I did the exercise and I always looked first at the picture. If the picture catches my attention, I will have a look at the title and if my interest is still there, I will have a look at the post.
Keep in mind that this is for my feed and I will only see the posts on my feed. How you can get on the feed of other people will be the subject of another post.
From my experience, I can give some tips to create images for your posts:
- Always use an image to illustrate your post. Without image, your post will not be seen.
- Put the title of your post on the image. This will give much more information that the image alone.
- Avoid to put to many things on your image. If you put many logos, images and text, your eye won't be able to discern what the main message is and it will skip ahead.
- The image has the sole purpose to attract the interest of the reader.
Your title is the billboard of your product
The next most important aspect of your packaging is your title. The purpose of your title is to bring the reader to your post. The title should create curiosity in the mind of the reader. I see often people using a descriptive title for their post. Unfortunately this can sound a bit boring.
Here some tips and tricks about titles:
- Make the title not too long and not too short. Between 3 and 8 words
- Use questions
- Your title can be disturbing
- Your title can be intriguing
- Spend some time on your title and make the test on yourself. If you see the title that you have created, would you actually want to read the post?
The small details about your packaging that matter
Avoid text blocks
On a secondary level the look of your content matters very much. I believe there is nothing more discouraging when you have big blocks of text without paragraph separations or subtitles. This should be avoided at all cost.
Subtitles are a must
Most of the readers won't read the whole content. They will scroll through and subtitles function as ankers where you can catch the readers attention again. If you don't use subtitles, you loose this opportunity.
Using subtitles gives an additional structure to your content and makes it much more attractive to the eye.
Use quotes, tables and images to entertain the reader
Using stylistic tools like quotes, tables and images can bring a lot of colour to your content. Use them but not too much either. They should entertain and not disturb the reader. If from too many tables, quotes and images, you can't find the subtitles, then you there are definitely to many such items :-)
Use the tools at your disposition
Blockchains like hive, steem and also lbry support the markdown language. The editor provided by peakd.com is quite a great tool for this purpose. Check out this guide about all what is possible in this language: https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/
In the next post we will look at the marketing part of your content creation business...
This post is part of a series in which I want to rise the awarness that content creation is a business. The previous posts:
- Content Creation is a Business and you are the CEO
- The most important part of your content creation business: YOU
- Your content – The core of your business
Let's connect on Hive, Lbry or on Publish0x
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