How to write an addictive article

A 4-step process borrowed from habit-building tricks

You may be surprised that a good blog post is more than the sum of the quality and quantity of a page’s content.

After reading Addicted from Nir Eyal I realized that a good article should be psychologically rewarding, such as B. How pleased you feel after trying new and delicious food for the first time.

So with these ideas I incorporated habit building ideas to create an article template that will get your audience hooked. I wrote such an article myself and here is what I can share.

For this article, I’m using a top-to-bottom approach, which means we’ll look at what tools are used from the title and down to the call-to-action at the bottom of a post.

1. Notify your audience

When your readers have an itch, you want them to know that going to you is the answer.

But guess what?

Itch comes randomly and isn’t reliable, especially when you want people to become your usual readers.

The better way to do this is to get a lot of followers and email subscribers.

No, I’m not telling you to be narcissistic and amass millions of followers for your ego, but I’m telling you that the only way to send people automated notifications is for them to follow you in some way.

I do this the old fashioned way. Write follow-worthy content (e.g., well-researched stories) and have a call-to-action asking for email signups.

Here’s an analogy on how important it is to get followers and emails. If you’re on Twitter, you’re more likely to read a tweet the moment you get a notification from a specific person. You’re less likely to read tweets spontaneously unless you’re nudged in some way.

So, your goal here is to get on any type of content creation platform that has automatic notifications and gets as many followers and emails as possible. The reason you need a lot of followers is that only a small percentage will be triggered by your notification. The more followers you have, the more likely it is that more people will read your content.

2. Offer your first reward

The first treat you give your audience should be a solid title and image.

You may be wondering how do you even write a worthwhile title? It just means a track sounds interesting and borderline as clickbait. You can see from the title of this article that I’m trying to offer a title that might convince content creators, but is borderline overpromising to some degree.

So why is this worthwhile? A title that might answer burning questions leads to a release of dopamine in the expectation that reading the blog will solve a life problem. Scientifically, it is this release of the hormone dopamine that brings happiness, addiction, and pain relief.

And to seal the deal even more, you should present your audience with a novel image. New and exciting things bring out dopamine, as does the anticipation of solving a problem.

Usually this means using underused stock photos or even using your own. But I went to the next level. I believe it’s writing your own AI images that will get you there. I use DALLE and Stable Diffusion as my favorite AI art generators.

The takeaway point is that your article title and image must reward your readers. The title should be interesting and answer a broad and burning question. The image should be new and fun in some way. Both will feel rewarding to your potential readers.

3. Deliver what you said, but make your audience work for it

This might be counterintuitive, but you don’t want your article to be too easy to read. By that I mean that your article shouldn’t just be a bunch of good ideas that are easily forgotten.

You want your article to include some step-by-step instructions so your readers need to read what you write and emulate your success should they do what you say.

Why are you even doing this?

Scientifically, this is called the endowment progress effect. If you give people an artificial goal and follow it up with rewards, people will find that the time invested in your article is well worth it.

I do it by numbering my points so readers have a sense of progress and can offer an interesting picture as a reward at each point. I’ve littered this article with such examples to demonstrate the point.

After all, you should do as you say. For example, in the article of this title I said that I am going to show you how to write an article that will get people hooked and I mean that by using psychological methods. Of course, this has nothing to do with creative writing.

The takeaway point is, first, to stick to your word when you promise something, and then make sure you keep it. This shows not only authenticity, but also authority. Second, write in a way that makes readers feel like they’re progressing through your article, and often offer rewards like interesting quotes, quirky images, or compelling statistics to make the read worthwhile.

4. End with a call to action that will keep readers coming back

As mentioned in point one, you want your readers to be triggered every time you post something. And the only way to do that is through followers and emails.

So that’s what you do. Ask people to follow you and include their email address. As long as people feel that what you wrote was worth their time, they will reciprocate.

It’s like someone buying coffee for you. At first you accept the coffee, but you will develop this inner nudge that next time you want to buy a coffee for her.

An example of a call-to-action aimed at reciprocity can be found at the bottom of this article.

So the key here is to always ask your readers to do something simple, e.g. B. to follow you. Yes, this might be a bit manipulative, but people don’t naturally take certain actions unless told to do so. Most of the time you have to push them.

Conclusions: Now you have a recipe for an article to get people hooked

I think as long as you can take the four steps above and repeat them consistently, people will be coming back to your work in no time.

Here is a summary of the four steps.

• When publishing, make sure your audience knows. This can be done through app notifications or email marketing.
• Your cover and cover photo must be interesting to your target audience. The title should answer a question your audience might have. Basically, when an app lets your viewers know that you’ve published, you want to make sure their effort to verify it was worth it.
• Write in a way that makes your audience feel like their time is paying off, and frame the article so that progress is measurable.
• Finally, don’t be afraid to ask your audience for something. What you want are followers and email signups as that is the most realistic way to get people coming back.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed this article. To be true to my words, please feel free to follow me and better yet, join my email list.

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