How to Use Metaphors to Create Irresistible Content

Hopefully I’ve sold you on the benefits of using metaphors when creating compelling content, and you know the differences between metaphors, similes, and analogies.

Now let’s take a look at five examples of how you can use metaphorical expressions to spice up your writing.

Metaphors can turbo-charge just about any element of an article, from the title down to the close. You might even design an entire piece of content around an ongoing metaphorical theme.

1. Headlines

Imagine yourself blazing quickly through your news app or email inbox.

Article titles and subject lines whiz by in a blur of mundane language, until you hit a heading that stops you dead in your tracks and plants a visual in your brain that prompts you to investigate further.

That’s the power of metaphor in a headline.

For examples of titles that employ both metaphor and descriptive beneficial copy, one only has to look at best-selling business books:

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

2. Openings

Perhaps you avoided metaphor in your headline, but want to open strong by creating an engaging visual representation in the reader’s mind. Use a metaphor to suck people into the body of your content.

Here’s an example from Anne Miller’s Metaphorically Selling that begins an examination of the dot com bust and resulting economic downturn:

“In Arizona there’s an old graveyard known as Boot Hill where lots of slow-on-the-draw gunslingers are buried. One of the headstones reads ‘I knew this was going to happen, but not so soon.’

“The same could be said about the U.S. economy, which has gone through a wrenching contraction. I don’t know anyone who thought the hyperbole of 2000 could last, but no one thought things would drop as fast as they did.”

3. Themes

One might even make an entire post metaphorically themed, from the headline through the close.

In Stefanie’s post, How to Write 16 Knockout Articles When You Only Have One Wimpy Idea, she uses multiple metaphors to compare creating winning content over time to training to be a boxing champ.

You can see how a theme was created around a simile in Weak Email Marketing and Nickelback Have Less in Common than You Might Think.

4. Proof

You know that you should back up your beneficial promises and assertions with hard data and specific facts when attempting to persuade.

Nothing speaks louder than the numbers, and yet the full force and effect of those numbers is often lost on the reader. Metaphors make the numbers relevant, concrete, and memorable.

How much is a trillion dollars? It’s a stack of thousand dollar bills 67 miles high. (Ronald Reagan’s early 1980s illustration of the national debt — that stack is significantly higher today.)
We lose one acre of rainforest every second. Imagine a giant invader from space, clomping across the rainforests of the world with football-field-size feet — going boom, boom, boom every second — would we react? That’s essentially what’s going on right now. (Al Gore’s vivid characterization of rainforest loss.)

5. Closers

Metaphors make for great closers because, when well constructed, they provide powerful summaries and clear recommendations.

via 5 Smart Ways to Use Metaphors to Create Irresistible Content

Categories : Content Creation, content creation tools

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Aug

Social media content creation

Posted by: Carla McNeil | Comments (0)

Social media offers some of the most magnificent tools for promoting brands and for creating lasting relationships with different audiences. Far more important than just building a following is the importance of being able to consistently grab the attention of your specific audience, and keep them engaged by crafting perfect attention getting posts. Every social media platform is different, which means that content posted on each platform has to be every bit as different as the platform itself. In order to be able to connect with your audiences you cannot post identical information across each of the platforms, but rather must make your content unique and meaningful to each social media platform.

Indeed Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all very popular, highly trafficked social media platforms. However, each attracts and maintains their own separate audiences. To begin with, Facebook is a platform that primarily centers around people we already know – family, friends, and acquaintances. The primary objective of Facebook marketers is simply to further personal relationships we already have by way of sharing comments, photos, videos, likes, and outside links to other blogs. It is important not to post more than once every three to four hours on Facebook, and be sure to post interesting attention getting content in an effort to keep your personal audience engaged, and entice them to interact by sharing their thoughts, comments, or questions relating to your posts.

Twitter, on the other hand, is recognized more as a platform for sharing news or media announcements. Offering a quick and easy flow of information in all ranges and categories, posting constantly on Twitter is essential. Tweeting several times a day gets your tweets noticed and read. Since this platform is truly a river of flowing information with short lifespans, day after day, topic after topic, in order to successfully engage your audience and keep your content active, even with repeat tweets on the same topic, be certain that your copy looks and sounds different each time to avoid coming across as spam. Even if you elect to have multiple posts on the same topic or issue, be certain that you share new posts at least 3 or 4 times per day that contain different copy and different links. Repeating the same copy over and over again will result in a loss of followers who will find your content redundant and choose to unfollow your page. Keeping in mind that Tweets are limited to 140 characters only, you need to avoid excess words and filler content by being direct and to the point.

LinkedIn has an entirely different audience comprised of business and employment colleagues whose topics are typically more business oriented. It is recognized as the most trusted social media platform whose source of information greatly contributes to decision making. Posting a new status update to your LinkedIn profile at least once per day is highly recommended, as is including a link within your daily posts, which serves to drive far more engagement than just typical content. In addition, statistics have proven that by linking You Tube videos to your LinkedIn posts as well, your audience is more apt to share posts thereby increasing traffic to your profile. It is also true that LinkedIn users are far more welcoming of lead generation content than any of the other social media sites as long as the content you are posting is beneficial to their own success.

When posting to multiple social media sites, be certain that your copy is always unique to all sites and caters to your specific social media audience. Researching platforms in advance to understand the type of content that will better engage your audiences is a valuable first step to take before posting to the varied social media platforms. Truly each of the platforms has its own individual strengths and weaknesses. There is so much that marketers can do to engage conversations on all these social media platforms and definitely keep their audiences intrigued and interactive on a daily basis by simply utilizing unique content that caters to each of the specific audiences.

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Jul

Content Creation Software, Is It for You? Absolutely!

Posted by: Carla McNeil | Comments Comments Off

As we all know, content creation is a truly manual job that requires a great deal of time and excessive research. There are abundant software on the market today to make creating your content much faster and easier. There are endless resources that help to not only write your content, but also to research, edit, and even design your content easily. Though creating the perfect flow of words is essential to successful content, creative and eye-catching visual content is every bit as important. The following resources/websites offer all the technique, style, and know how you need to create and enhance the perfect, attention getting content.

1. Canva.com is one of the most favored sites on the web for creating dynamic yet simple graphic designs. This state of the art software program provides everything you need to create and implement the most stunning designs right at your fingertips. The software is remarkably user friendly and makes designing all the fun it is meant to be. All the tools you need are easily accessible allowing you to put all your design ideas quickly into place. You simply search for photos, graphics, and fonts, and then rely upon the handy, easy to use, drag and drop feature Canva provides. This software package is available on the net and is completely free to use.

2. Grammarly.com is by far one of the most innovative tools on the web today for writing. This spectacular software product quickly corrects all your spelling and grammar mistakes in just a matter of seconds. Offering you a variety of word and vocabulary choices makes efficient and accurate content writing much easier. This product is ten times more efficient than the typical word processor and is completely compatible with Word. The use of this valuable tool is mandatory when creating content, and is sure to present you with top of the line correct content for your site.

3. Inboundwriter.com is a software package trusted by the masses that takes all the doubt out of your content writing by projecting, in advance, the success of your created content. Nobody wants to waste endless hours and excessive efforts writing content that will simply never finds its way to your target audience. Nor do we want to write content that fails to drive traffic to your personal or business website. With this amazing software package, as unbelievable as it may seem, you can learn and understand the success level of your anticipated content before you even begin to write. The procedure is rather simple in that when you indicate your writing topic preferences, the inboundwriter will inform you what level of performance you can expect with your desired topics. In addition, this software will suggest related topics for you to write about that are apt to be more successful and drive more traffic to your site. Further, the product offers you all the writing guidance you need to create content that will have a tremendous impact for you and your business. This incredible product simply helps to get your ideas flowing and fingers typing.

4. Feedly.com is a truly competent and powerful online tool that allows users to retrieve and organize all their important data and resources all in one place. This useful platform compiles all types of news feeds from endless online sources that users can then organize and customize to their own preferences. This certainly makes researching and acquiring pertinent data for writing content very fast and easy, and has proven to be one of the most valuable tools used by writers today.

5. Techsmith.com (Jing) is a skillful tool that allows users to quickly and easily capture and share images and videos. You can simply choose to capture an image that appears on your screen, caption your image, and share away. In addition, you can choose a window or area that you would like to record, and Jing will just record everything before you and everything you do, whether clicking a mouse or creating an entire tutorial with maximum recording time of five minutes. Once captured with Jing you are able to share and send your captured images and video content anywhere out on the web by way of uploading to the source provided on the site (screencast.com) and then sharing it through a number of avenues – IM messages, emails, or social media.

Though writing content can truly be a task and many times present us with challenges, the use of each of these informative and highly proficient tools and sites will certainly make content creation not only faster and easier, but surly more interesting and fun. These tools are sure to assist with the creation of content that is not only attention getting but sure to drive traffic to your site over and over again. Incorporate all of these innovative tools into your content creation and find yourself immersed in some of the most state of the art resources and tools available for writing today.