Step 13: Create Your Long-Form Content

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Requirements: Draft of your article (from step 12)

In this step, you will finalise the draft you created previously, into a full-fledged article.

Step 13.1: Structure Your Content

There are several frameworks about how content should be structured, depending on the context and goals. One of the most famous ones is AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Below, we explain the same embedded in the classical structure three-tier structure for long-form content.

• Introduction

  • Attention: 

    • In your introduction you need to be able to get the reader's attention so that they read your content. 

    • What is going to get your reader’s attention? (What is their pain point or need?)

• Main Body

  • You need to keep the reader interested and attend to/invoke their desires.

  • Interest:

    • How can you generate interest? (Will facts and figures make them curious?)

    • How can you maintain interest?

  • Desire:

    • What can you provide that they desire? (What is the solution to their pain point?)

• Conclusion

  • Summarise the content.

  • Action:

    • Always end with the action - What action should they take? (Encourage them to take the next step - whatever that is according to your goals)

Step 13.2: Measure and Improve the Readability of Your Article

One of the most important proven factors of success is the readability of your article. Better readability means more people have access to the content in it, and they're able to read it easily and fast.

How to Measure Readability 

Readability is very easy to measure using the inbuilt tools within word. All that you need to do is select the sentence, para, section or the entire article for which you need to measure readability and press F7. Word will first check for spelling and gramattical errors, and then show you the 'Readability Stats' box.

Note: If the stats don't show up, the feature might be turned off. To turn it on, go to File >> Options >> Proofing >> When Correcting Spelling and Grammar in Word >> Show readability statistics (the box should be ticked).

The box will show the following:

1. Counts: of words, characters, paragraphs and sentences - these tell you about the length of your work. Please ensure the number of words is greater than 500 in your final submission to meet the deliverables criteria.

2. Averages: Including

   1. Sentences per paragraph: Try to keep the paragraphs to be about 3-4 sentences long.

   2. Words per sentence: Try to keep the sentences at about 15-20 words on average. Also, vary the lengths of the sentences to build tempo, and reduce monotony. Feel free to use both 1 word sentences and sentences longer than 20 words where required. 

   3. Characters per word: This indicates if you're using long (proxy for complex) words. Try to keep this around 3-4.

3. Readability:

   1. Flesch Reading Ease: This indicates how easy it is to read the text on a scale of 0-100. 100 is the easiest. You should target a score of above 80.

   2. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: This indicates the lowest grade (class) of students that will be able to comprehend the text. For online content your target should be below 7. This is the measure you should focus on more than anything else, the rest complement it or contribute to it.

   3. Passive Sentences: This indicates the extent to which passive language has been used in the text as compared to active language. While doing awareness campaigns, you should be conversational and talk to the audience in an active voice. Your target should be 0, below 10 is acceptable.

How to Improve Readability

Once you've done the above analysis you will have an idea about the improvements you need to make. There are two ways to go about the process:

1. Manually: Just improve the measures in the 'Averages' section and you will automatically see improvements in the readability.

2. Using AI: Tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini can help you in the process with a simple prompt such as "Please simplify the following text to have a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level below 7: [paste your text in the next line]."

Please note: It is advisable to make the edits manually, at least when you're starting out in your content creation journey, for a number of reasons:

1. It will improve your authoring skills considerably as you will gradually internalise this reader-oriented approach.

2. Often there are creative spurts during the editing process that leads to significant improvement in the creation overall.

3. While paraphrasing the AI tools may distort the meanings of sentences, and even entire texts, and also remove that rare word which has been added intentionally.

Ofcourse, in the end, by the time you're an expert - you will find the balance between the two and figure how to use technology to improve and speed-up your work.

Step 13.3: Generate Your Meta Description

Meta description is the matter you provide to the search engine to understand your work better. It is also shown as text when you share the content on social media. 

Your meta-description should be strictly between 140-150 characters (including spaces) - anything beyond will be automatically truncated.

You can generate it using automated tools such as AHREFS Meta-Description Generator.

Step 13.4: Submit Your Content to the Editing Team

Note: You may choose to do this after discussing your draft with the editing team.

Once you're done, fill the Submission Form:

• • Open the submission form

  • Fill the details:

    • Content Type = "Article"

    • Content Title = Your Content's Title (not the campaign's title)

    • Meta-Description = Your Content's Meta Description from Step 13.3 above.

    • Paste Your Article Below = Just paste your Article here. You may also paste the Google Docs, or other cloud based service, link if you have written the article using one of these.

  • Submit the form

That's it. You're done!