Every morning in the context of the @ourpick curation project, my job is to find one post worth reading and to curate it manually. You would think that this is an easy exercise. I thought so too but it isn't.
When I curate, I try really to find picks that are from authors that I don't know. What matters in my search is not so much the author but the content. So I go through the feed of all the posts sorted according to the most recent posts. Like that I see everything that has been posted on Hive for the past hours.
What I look at first
To find my daily post, I really scan the feed for things to stand out. There are two things that have the chance to attract my eyes: The image and the title. Only if one of them catches my attention, do I read the smaller print.
Find a title that would make you want to read your post
It's pretty frustrating to see what kind of titles most hive users chose for their posts. Here a list of titles that I randomly picked of posts today. This list comes from the feed of all hive posts sorted according to time of publication. So these posts actually follow each other in the timeline:
- Effort and passion
- The charm of mushrooms on rotten oil palm trees
- Coffee photography
- 31 May 2024: Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2389: Players of games
- Vibes Web3 Music Competition Week 12 Original Song
- Jazz avant-garde Nigerian Juju Hilife y Origin
- A swan in the shallows
- Heraklion Port morning views
I'm sorry to say but I wouldn't want to read a single of these posts just because of the titles that were chosen. Would you?
If you want people to curate and upvote your posts, you need to find a title that sells your content as well as possible. It should incite to read your post and also rise curiosity. Or at least it should incite people to come to the post because what they can learn from your content.
The image is the billboard of your post
You should consider your post to be like a product that you want people to consume. There won't be any comments or upvotes if people don't come to your post in the first place. So you need to attract the readers and curators and to do that, the image that you chose is your best marketing tool.
Some tips regarding that:
- Always use an image to illustrate your post
- There are plenty of free images available on different sites that you can use
- Use a platform like Canva to give a style to your images.
- If you use a similar style on all your posts, people will recognize your „brand“
- It can be a good idea to use text on your post images. I always repeat the title of my post on my images. That's how I think the billboard works best.
I just took a random series of posts on peakd, again sorted according to the time of publication. There aren't really many images here that attract my attention.
source: https://peakd.com/created
Here a screenshot of somebody who I believe sells his posts very well and creates a brand around his content (feed of @bitcoinflood)
source: @bitcoinflood/posts
Work on your titles and your images to get more readers and more upvotes
I've been researching content to curate for about 3 years now and maybe I'm a bit too demanding but I want to find the little pearls on hive that are worth reading and feature them over @ourpick. I believe that if we support really good content, then others will be inspired to create good posts as well. This is important for the people's career on hive and also for the blockchain in general. We will attract people from the outside only if they find an added value in the content that we create.
So when you create content, make sure that you don't undersell yourself. Put a lot of effort into choosing a good title and spend some time to find a nice illustration for your post. If you create great content, I want to be sure not to miss it. With a good title and a nice image you can help me find it!
Title image: made in https://www.canva.com/
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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