How to Create Engaging Content

I think in the beginning of your quest for great content, the most helpful thing is to get into an engagement mindset and start looking at your everyday life in terms of engagement. When something "catches" you in some way, ask yourself why.

As for specifics, you can start by identifying the market leaders in your niche and watching carefully how they're doing it. You can identify market leaders in many ways. You can see who is getting the most re-tweets in your market and you can analyse the tweets themselves to find out why that particular message is getting attention. You can read forums in your niche and see who is delivering good stuff and who is just babbling. You start to follow the leaders.

You can ask. For example, in this forum you could say something like, "I'm new to internet marketing and I don't know who the real movers and shakers are. Besides The Challenge team,  can you suggest some people I should be following on Twitter? People who you follow and who you think really know their stuff or have an interesting point of view, or are really good at digging up good stuff."

You can search blogs in your niche and see which posts get the most comments and try to figure out why. You can see who is making the most engaging comments and start to follow them.

You can search press releases and news stories for clues about who is the most active in your market. You can look for good stuff in RSS feeds via Google Reader and see where it is coming from and who is saying it. Again, if it grabs you or it grabs a lot of other people, ask yourself why and try to use the same principals.

Think about "popularity" in terms of engagement. Why was Britney Spears the most popular search on Google for so many years? It's because people love gossip. People love to know what other people are doing. Tell people about the features and benefits of purple widgets and nobody cares. Tell a story about how your love of purple widgets got you a raise, or almost got you fired, or best of all, got you a date with Britney Spears and then you're on the road to engagement.

Think about how popular the word "New" is in advertising. New is a popular word in advertising because human beings are curious by nature. If something is "new" or "fresh" or even just different, we want to know about it. Offering a new point of view can be very engaging. Spotting new trends in the market place and letting people know about them can be engaging.

Another thing people love is to be social. To feel included. To let people know, "I'm like you" is engaging. To validate people's feelings is engaging because it creates rapport and trust. Speaking to people's emotions at the same time as speaking to their intellect is engaging.

Humor is monumentally engaging.

So this whole "engagement" deal is all around you and that's why developing the mindset of looking for it is so useful. And when you couple that with examples of the most engaging content being created in your market right now, then you've got a solid base to build on.

When it comes to creating content, I never start with a blank page.