When Interesting and Informative is Not Enough - Emotional Triggers in Blogging

I have seen bloggers out there that just integrate emotional triggers in blog post naturally, while others struggle and wonder why their blog post don’t seem to help their SEO campaign. Many of us already know the correlation and causation relationship of social media and SEO, it is one strong reason behind the drive to do inbound marketing. And if you think of it, it is not that hard to wrap your head around.
When more people find you easily in search results because of your good ranking and you have something of value to the user, the probability of them leading to talking about you in social media increases. Conversely, the more people that talk about you in social media, the probability increases of it ending on other websites like blogs, forums, news sites, etc. These sites would give natural links with higher CTRs on organic search results and higher mentions/citations, thus improving SEO.

• Panda is all about quality content. And low quality content does not get shared that much on social media sites.
• Penguin is all about natural links, and no matter what blog post, article, or press release you put out there on the internet, if nobody knows about it, no one links to it. A page that naturally attracts people to shares it, votes it, tweets it or bookmarks it in whatever way, it has a higher probability of reaching the right people who would be linking to it naturally.

What I will discuss is how emotional triggers help get your content out and shared more to other people; shared and liked on Facebook, tweeted and retweeted, +1’d, commented on, pinned and repinned, bookmarked, dugg, stumbled, voted, etc. The more it is shared, the more it is deemed to be of better quality (anti-Panda) and the more the links would be natural (anti-Penguin), just the way Google would want it.

Emotional Triggers in Sales is Very Similar to Emotional Triggers in Blog Post

There are many people that are emotional buyers than logical buyers, as Perry Marshall states on his site:

All people make buying decisions based on emotion; therefore your marketing must use emotion to sell what people want, not what you think they "need" or want them to need.

In sales you are selling a product or service for some monetary value. In blog post, you are selling the content, but not for money. You are selling the content and the person buying is the ones that decide to read it. What makes some blogs read and unread is highly influenced by the large amount of competing blog post on the internet. Going against several sites listed in a search engine results page, or going against multiple URLs shared on a friends wall on Facebook, list of shortened URLs on your twitter feed, or whatever similar situation, calling the attention of readers with these emotional triggers can help gain extra clickthroughs from these sites, making user buy into what you are offering.
These emotional triggers can be used in various areas of a blog post:

• The Blog Title
• The Title Tag
  In most cases this is the same as the blog title, but customizing the title tag to be different from the blog title may be ideal in some cases.
• Heading & Subheading
  Usability studies have shown that users scan before they read. They quickly gaze over headings to get an idea of what the blog post is all about. After briefly looking at the headings, this may help make a reader decide to read a blog post or not.
• Blockquotes
  These are specific quotes from other people, if the person is of some authority, or even perceived authority, it helps spark more interest and credibility in the blog post.
• Social Media Sharing Sites
• How things are shared by others, can help spread blog post more, depending on how it is shared.

Warning: Emotional Triggers on a Gun Don’t Fire Magic Bullets

Just because you came up with a good compelling headline, a highly clickable title, a good strong emotional call to action description, doesn’t mean you are all good to go and you will be out of your Panda and Penguin problems. Getting someone’s attention is just one piece of the puzzle, there are many other things that makes a blog post successful and this is just one piece of the pie.

Using emotional triggers in your title is like getting your readers through the door, and keeping readers reading and influencing them to share it to others is another story. Although the main use of these emotional triggers is to serve as a call-to-action on search engines results or on other social media sites where the site is bookmarked or shared and it is what pushes visibility to actual traffic, you can also use emotional triggers in helping to persuade people to read the rest of your content, or to share your content through the various channels online.
Often these emotional triggers will be used in bringing in traffic first and once you have brought someone in, it is not the ultimate solution to make your blog post popular. And the scope of this blog post will be more on using emotional triggers to bring in the traffic coming from search results and social sites where users can read the titles of the blog post or articles you create.

Theory + Learning by Example

We can go all day and create a whole book about this, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just talk about blog titles. I have seen some people pick this up easily, and some that know the concept in their head, but what they write still sounds boring from the very beginning. I have seen writers very good in grammar, finding spelling errors and integrating keywords in the content when needed, but still lack that emotional trigger when they write.
I have helped train several people on the SEO team at Internet Marketing Inc., and have written our main copywriting guidelines based on my own blogging experience back in 2006 to 2008. During those days, I was mainly concentrating on how to get to the homepage on Digg and Reddit where it was more of persuading more readers to read your blog post. Those practices still hold up for search results and other social media sites today. Many of the lessons I learned were through just observing other popular posts, doing trial and error on my own blog posts, and brainstorming with others for good ideas.
To explain these emotional triggers, I will use another website and teach by example. I will be calling out the work of an article writing service I found promoting itself on Facebook, and also asking for feedback within a closed Skype chat group that runs 24x7 all about SEO. And since he was asking for feedback, I gave him my feedback. I said his articles were somewhat boring and did not have the emotional triggers. He had four sample articles where I gave different suggested titles and from then, he told me they are now editing their site and improving their craft after I made the suggestions and are fully integrating it into their work.