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Creating content is popular. Anyone can do it. You probably can too. And these days AI can help you, including with storytelling techniques. But did you know? Compared with a year ago, creating content has become so commonplace that people are growing more and more numb to it.
8 out of 10 people read your header or headline, but only 2 out of 10 actually click through to your article.
That shows people are becoming increasingly numb to content. Creating content in particular is getting easier, think of AI tools. Which, by the way, is a great development.
I am sharing a number of techniques with you to make your content as readable as possible and keep it that way.
Keep it light and pretend you are talking to a real person. Write with the words "you" and "I". When you use these words, people sense that it is a conversation. When it feels like a conversation, they experience it as one, instead of as a lecture or a sales call where only the salesperson does the talking. And what do you do with a call like that? You hang up.
Have a conversation with people. Your audience will then be more inclined to read and respond.
Keep your paragraphs to 4 to 6 lines at most. Once you go past five or six lines, it quickly becomes too much. People don't take it in. If you look around zoekmachinespecialist.com, you will see that many paragraphs contain just a few lines.
Some of these paragraphs are even just 1 line long.
Use subheadings, conclude and cite.
Subheadings divide your blog post into sections, which makes it easier to scan. With subheadings, people grasp the core of your content without having to read the whole piece. Leave them out and you lose readers.
With subheadings, people can jump to the part of your blog post they want to read, read that section and keep scrolling from there.
Always include a conclusion or summary in your content. When you create a blog post, write a conclusion yourself or have an AI tool write one. And label it "conclusion" or "summary", or come up with something fun yourself.
That keeps things simple.
People can scroll down, read your conclusion, know what your content is about and decide whether they want to scroll back up and read the rest.
Sounds strange? That is the visitor / reader pattern, the way people move through your content and read it. What do many people do? They scroll down, read the conclusion and then go back up.
To make it easier for your audience, place a navigation menu within your content, like the one here on the left.
On top of that, always make sure you cite your sources in your content and blogs. Stick to real facts and figures. That said, you do not need to cite in every paragraph and every line.
Back up the most important figures.
Use photos.
“What do you mean, use photos? That goes without saying.”
Stop for a moment and decide how you use your photos. A picture is worth a thousand words. You have probably heard that one often enough.
If you use charts and images to explain the message you are trying to get across, people will be far more inclined to read it and stick around.
Here is a handy prompt for generating images for the message you want to put out. Paste it into ChatGPT or Gemini, for example, then copy the output into Midjourney (costs you about 8 euros a month) and voilà, wait for the end result.
I'd like you to act as a prompt engineer. You will help me write prompts for an AI art generator called Midjourney.
I will give you short content ideas and your task is to develop them into full, explicit, coherent prompts.
Prompts describe the content and style of images in concise, precise language. It helps to be explicit and to reference pop culture, artists and mediums. Focus on nouns and adjectives. I will give you some example prompts for reference. Please define the exact camera to be used.
Here is a formula for you to use (content, insert nouns here)(medium: insert artistic medium here)(style: insert references to genres, artists and pop culture here)(lighting, reference the lighting here)(colours, reference colour styles and palettes here)(composition: reference cameras, specific lenses, shot types and positional elements here)
when giving a prompt, remove the brackets, speak in natural language and be more specific, using precise, articulate language.
always deliver two complete prompt options that differ from each other
A personal favourite for generating a message, instead of hunting for the right stock photo and all the rights that come with it. Because you get those rights yourself when you generate photos like these.
Make sure your article is thorough and genuinely useful.
If someone starts reading your article and thinks: "Ah, I didn't know that" then that reader goes on to think: "Great, I'll read on."
I once searched Google for "how do I stick up a wall mirror", only to find an article that did not even teach me how to install a wall mirror myself. For that, I needed to book a fitter. Sure, with a fitter you know you are in good hands, but I clearly said “I” in my search.
There are better ways to convert people:
So how do you really tell a good story? Let's say there is a story. Today I'll let you in on three secrets on top of that.
When it comes to storytelling, one of the best ways to engage people is to go beyond saying: hey, you should do this, you should do that, you should listen to me and this is what you need to do.
A much more powerful, more persuasive way to do this is to share that same lesson with other people, but in the form of a story.
So, three key factors. The first secret is time and place. With every good story you'll notice that many fairy tales begin with: once upon a time... once upon a time there was this, once upon a time that happened.
Take your audience to a place, a time and a setting WHERE it all happens. Be very specific about it. Just saying 'okay, that happened so many years ago' falls flat.
Instead, you really want to take them to that place. You want to set the tone and set the stage. I once spoke at an internet marketing conference. So that is the mental picture I want to create for other people. You can picture it, imagine me standing on stage, speaking to a group of people, right?
That is setting the stage, time and place, for your audience.
Number 7 is about being very specific with your story. I like to use dialogue, because dialogue is so powerful in storytelling.
It draws your reader in. You place the reader right in the middle of the scene.
Dialogue puts your listener right in the middle of the action, which is a very powerful thing to do.
Finally, number 8: what is the moral of the story? Where is the transformation? What is the one message you want your reader to take away? In my case, that your content gets seen and read.
And that your content truly resonates with your audience.
Invest in your content, even when you don't strictly have to.
People who need information often seem not to look for it. And who are the ones who skip looking for information? The ones who fall behind. The ones who succeed, whether in Google or by other means, always invest in themselves.
That is the moral of the story.
Since we wrote down these techniques, AI has learned to type out a smooth story for you in seconds. And that is exactly why real storytelling matters more than ever. When everyone publishes the same polished AI copy, the only ones who stand out are those telling a story a machine cannot invent: your own experience, your clients, the mistake you made and what you learned from it. That is also exactly what Google's E-E-A-T rewards, with its emphasis on real experience and expertise.
So use AI as a helper for your outline or first draft, but always pour your own voice, examples and emotion over it. That works both ways: answer engines such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews prefer to cite content that is clear, original and authoritative. A strong, human story is therefore better remembered by your reader and also stands a better chance of being mentioned when AI summarises your topic.
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About the author
Dominic Pietersz
Your dedicated point of contact
Dominic helps SMEs grow through Google and other channels. With his international experience, he turns challenges into concrete growth.
Follow Dominic on LinkedInInspiration · When I read that eight out of ten people only read the headline, I was shocked. That evening I wrote these eight storytelling techniques that keep the rest reading.
