How to make your original articles full of useful information?

"Write articles with more substantive content ." As an operator , you may have heard this sentence countless times, but there is no way to change it. Users really prefer articles with useful information!

I think the main purpose of useful articles is to help users find the most valuable knowledge points and then extract them. But even if it is not original, it can make users feel the pleasure of "acquired new skills" every time they listen to it.

So how should such an article be written?

An article with valuable information cannot be created overnight. Instead, it requires continuous intake of knowledge in the early stages to have a qualitative breakthrough in the later stages!

1. Input is for better output

Our knowledge intake comes from nothing more than what we see and hear. What we hear is audio knowledge, and what we see is nothing more than text, pictures or animations in videos, etc. Among these three, reading is undoubtedly the best way to acquire knowledge. Because reading is an active behavior of acquiring knowledge, when a person is in an active state, it is equivalent to taking a sip from the vast expanse of water without any unnecessary movement or waste.

For example, people who are used to reading text and are good at reading can often capture the key points of knowledge quickly. They can scan a page of paper and identify the key points of knowledge or their own focus at a glance. Therefore, he only needs to extract the necessary points, and he does not actually need those preparatory expressions. In this way, he doesn't have to spend energy and time reading the parts that he doesn't need, and can only focus his attention on the parts that he is interested in.

Some text expressions are prone to ambiguity, or require readers to convert them into graphic images for comprehension. It may be better to look at the picture directly. Sometimes just one glance may be better than the content conveyed by several pages of text. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

One of the biggest advantages of learning knowledge through audio is that it frees your eyes and you only need to use your ears to hear the knowledge you want. However, one disadvantage of only acquiring knowledge by listening to audio is that the knowledge learned is often fragmented. Nowadays, we listen to audio while taking the subway, bus, high-speed rail, driving, etc., and these scenarios often have many uncertain factors, so it is often difficult for you to fully learn a knowledge point. Audio producers often know the scene requirements for us to listen to audio, so the content they produce is also formulated according to fragmented scenes. The knowledge of audio is the essence, not the whole of one knowledge point. For example, the audios in the Get APP are very short, and the content is all key points without any nonsense. So some people say that the contents in it are all secondary productions, and many of them are obtained through sorting.

By the same token, video learning requires a whole block of your time, and your time is fragmented, so video learning takes up your time. Secondly, listening to audio and watching videos are both "passive learning".

For example:

For example, if the author speaks for 90 minutes, the fresh content (that is, the content you don’t know) may only account for 10% to 20%. When he can’t get to the point, you can’t hear the point. You can only wait for him to finish speaking, and then distinguish and extract the 10% to 20% of the content you need from what he has said. This is equivalent to wasting 80% to 90% more time learning content that you don’t need.

So you can only listen in the order presented by the author or lecturer. And because it is spoken, and because of the characteristics of auditory knowledge acquisition, it often needs to be expressed step by step. The person speaking may talk about a lot of knowledge and information that you already know. Even if you don’t need this information, you cannot skip it like reading text, and can only listen to it all passively.

Sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood. When acquiring knowledge, you need to organize and precipitate the knowledge. At this time, you need to use third-party tools to organize the knowledge so that you can retrieve and use it better next time.

Baidu Netdisk can store your files and data to the maximum extent. Let me give you an example: I now save almost all larger videos, tools, and data packages to my Baidu Netdisk. Since Baidu Netdisk has enough free space, you can just fill it with data. It can also achieve remote synchronization. If you are worried about data leakage, you can buy a hard drive.

Evernote mainly stores pictures and articles, and its principle is the same as Baidu Netdisk. It is also for the convenience of sharing.

Shouqu is a collection tool that is easy to use on both PC and mobile devices. I now have a lot of articles collected on PC , so I can directly collect the articles and classify them by right-clicking on them, so that I can quickly retrieve the information next time I need it.

I don’t know if you have noticed a phenomenon in life: many people have read a lot of books and many works by famous people, but they just can’t write an article. The reasons for feedback are mostly “I don’t know where to start” and “I don’t know what to say”. In fact, this type of people are typical people who only read books but do not summarize. Summarizing can help you to solidify the knowledge you have absorbed and make your memory more profound. It’s like when you’re working, you need to make a daily summary! Only in this way can you have a clearer understanding of the work you do every day, how to arrange these tasks, make the work more organized, improve work efficiency, summarize your experience in doing these tasks, and analyze the difficulties encountered in doing this work, what are the solutions, etc., so that you know what areas of your work need improvement, what areas are worth continuing to maintain, and constantly improve yourself. This is the benefit of summarizing!

2. What characteristics do articles of practical content need to be liked by readers?

We have already said in the previous part of the article: which articles help users find the most valuable knowledge points and then extract them. But even if it is not original, it can make users feel the pleasure of "acquired new skills" every time they listen to it.

This type of useful articles is very popular among users. You can imagine that every time you see new knowledge that you have never seen before and that can double your work efficiency, you may immediately choose to collect it, like it, or forward it to your circle of friends .

It is like getting the knowledge inside, although a lot of the content inside is sorted and selected. However, the topics selected are new knowledge for many users, which is a great experience for users because users are naturally only interested in new things and those outdated content will be automatically blocked as soon as they enter their eyes. In the current environment, any good article may be repeated hundreds of times. For example, we see articles every day that teach you how to plan events and how to plan hit events. Perhaps you have become immune to it because it has been talked about from the year before last to now, so you will get annoyed after seeing it several times in a row. But if you compare them again, you will find that the knowledge that comes out every day is different, and the topics are never repeated, so you will always receive some surprises when you listen.

So I conclude that a good article of practical content needs to have two characteristics: the first is knowledge points that others don’t know; the second is that this knowledge point can promote your work or study.

Well, since it is useful to users and some new knowledge points give users relatively large feedback, what should we do in the article to make it more "full of dry goods"?

1. Display the chart data

Whenever you see some articles interspersed with some charts, you may have two thoughts in your mind. One is that the person who wrote this article is quite awesome, and the second is whether these charts are credible? So when you have these questions, the author's purpose has actually been achieved. The purpose of presenting the charts and data is to make you believe in the credibility of the article. Or if you think it is not credible, do you have other ideas? If not, then don't talk nonsense here!

2. Clear structure

Everyone likes an article with a clear structure. The main title, sub-title and main text are all neatly arranged, which makes it more comfortable for us to read and greatly reduces the reading bounce rate.

3. A good summary at the end of the article

An article often ends with a summary of the entire article. Many readers also want to know what the author thinks about this issue, and this summary will help readers understand the article better.

4. Screenshots can enhance the sense of reality

According to the data, the average forwarding rate of articles with pictures is nearly 40% higher than those without pictures, which shows that vision is very important when users read an article. And if you add some screenshots, it will enhance the realism of the article, because the screenshots are from what you really see, not just what you say.

3. After talking about how to absorb knowledge and which articles are more popular with readers, you can then write your articles based on these.

Collect materials:

At the beginning of the article, I have said that you need to absorb more knowledge and be good at using various tools to organize and collect knowledge. This will come in handy when you start writing an article. If the materials collected before are not enough to support the article you want to write, you need to collect more materials. So besides daily reading and accumulation, are there any other ways to collect materials quickly?

This quick collection of materials actually means collecting them today and maybe starting writing tomorrow. At this time, you can use the search functions of platforms such as Baidu, Zhihu, Jianshu , Toutiao , etc., enter words related to the topic you want, and then find the material you want. For example, if I want to write an article about user retention rate , I may need to use platforms such as Baidu, Renrenshishipinmiaomanager , Zhihu, etc., and input related words such as user operation , retention rate , activity, etc. to investigate how many people are writing such articles now? And whether there are any earlier articles written by others that I can learn from and whether they have written them completely.

The materials cannot be too much, 10-15 will be enough. Our current mobile phone materials may be concentrated in articles written by others. So is it better to collect more articles written by others? Obviously not. When you collect too much material, you may not use it at all later. In other words, the material you collected later is a waste of time. Therefore, before we start creating, we must know when to stop collecting materials.

Set the outline:

When setting the outline, you need to pay attention to three points that need to be made clear: clarify the topic and clarify the argument.

Clarify the topic: Before you start writing, make sure you have decided on the topic. Are you sure you want to write about it? Can you really write it? A practical article is equivalent to writing an argumentative essay, which analyzes and comments on a certain issue or event, and expresses one's own views, positions, and attitudes.

Clarify the argument: To explain your argument, you can use the pyramid principle . Of course you need to be clear about what the central argument of the article is? What sub-arguments support the central argument of the article? Is each argument independent of the others and are they progressive?

The main purpose of using the pyramid principle to explain is to make the content of your text clearer and the structure more distinct.

Start creating:

Rearrange the materials to form your own style

You have collected so much material before, and I don’t want you to copy it directly. Instead, you should learn from other people’s articles and learn the best essence. You need to learn from others, but learning does not mean plagiarism. Even if the meaning you want to express is similar to that written by others, you still need to organize it and form your own style, and write useful articles in your own style. There are many useful articles on the same topic, but the writing style and form are completely different. This is because each author has a different style.

The key points should be highlighted and the primary and secondary points should be clearly distinguished.

The reason why many people cannot write articles well is that the article does not have a theme that can expand the entire article, that is, the focus of the article. Some articles will have a theme in each paragraph, resulting in multiple themes in one article, which makes many users confused after reading it. The purpose of writing articles is to share our every bit , joy , anger, sorrow and happiness with readers. Only by showing sincerity in return can you gain the love of readers. No matter what your original purpose is, even if you want to gain readers' recognition through the article, you must think from the readers' perspective.

Real content is more valuable

Many people write articles with only one purpose: to attract traffic . Using false article content to win users' favor, users may like this kind of article once or twice, but if they read it too many times, users will develop a psychological feeling that why are all the articles on this website like this, and every article seems to be made up. There is no authenticity at all. Therefore, when we write article content, we should pay special attention to the authenticity of the content. Even if you cannot guarantee that the entire text is true, then 90% of it is true plus some modifying words and the like, users will be happy to accept it, because only such a distribution ratio can make an article not so false, and not so boring.

Infuse soul into the content of the article

When you express your own argument, you can also cite experts and data. You can also cite real-life examples. For example, when I write some operational articles, I often give examples of some problems I have encountered and re-interpret them. Even if it is not your own case, you can use cases around you as examples. People are lazy and unwilling to change easily. At the beginning, no one is willing to accept new knowledge and skills. Only if you start with the most common ones and resonate with readers, will they be willing to learn your written ideas.

Re-polishing:

An article may not be published after it is written, and there may be many parts in it that you are not satisfied with. You need to polish the details. Only by constantly modifying some of the details and even punctuation marks in it can the article continue to reach new levels.

Since ancient times, most of the articles in the world have been copied. Those authors who write beautifully and inspiringly must have brought readers an empathetic textual experience. Just like in a market economy, best-selling items must solve the current market needs in order to get the best feedback.

The author of this article @艺林小宇 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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