Fascinating headline selection process that will take your blog to the top.

Establish Trust with supporting facts and figures, or maintain a consistent (yet engaging) style your readers can count on.

When you have a solid structure, it’s easy to include fascination triggers and connect with your audience emotionally.

A focused strategy for your first 50 words and a cohesive outline for the rest of your content will not only make it easier for you to write, they’ll help you create engaging content that’s easy to read.

Humans are drawn to problems. They attract our attention, but they also produce stress and anxiety. That’s an important benefit for you when you develop your content because it positions you to present a solution.

But, you need to go beyond identifying a problem and get your readers to connect to the emotions behind the problem.

Brian Clark demonstrates this with his post, Site Sensor: Website Monitoring for Content Marketers and Online Entrepreneurs.

The problem of “website downtime,” by itself, isn’t so compelling, but he agitates the problem by demonstrating that website downtime leads to lost sales and cranky customers calling you out on Twitter and Facebook.

What’s the emotional focal point? Alarm, fear of conflict, and loss. The emotional connection is the trigger.

Our emotions are fluid. Robert Plutchik’s famous wheel of emotion shows us how multi-faceted emotion really is. Alarm may simply start as apprehension. As the emotion intensifies, it leads to fear and then terror.

You don’t usually admire others unless you already accept and trust them.

First, you accept their opinions are valuable. Then you trust them as an authority, which leads you to admire them for their accomplishments.

It’s no different if we’re talking about developing trust in a product or service. I accept that your product or service will help me with my needs, I trust you to provide a useful product or service, and I admire you or your business when you meet my expectations.

As you create content that matches the problem with the emotion, you trigger interest through fascination cues and build a relationship through emotional connection in your writing.

Each emotional step your audience takes with you is a little “yes.” This is essential in the process of building any relationship.

So, how do you find the emotional trigger behind the problem? Look at the feelings the problem produces:

Alarm: You’re afraid of losing customers.
Prestige and Alarm: You’re afraid of losing a coveted award.
Trust: You want to convince your customers with stats and social proof.

Once you’ve identified the emotional focal points behind your problem, you’re ready to write a compelling headline that will tap into the appropriate fascination trigger.

the solution mirrors and resolves the problem.

If your content doesn’t deliver the solution and resolve the problem you present, you’ll start to fascinate but end up falling short and frustrating your audience by not completely resolving the problem. the solution mirrors and resolves the problem.

If your content doesn’t fully deliver the solution and resolve the problem you initially present, you’ll start to fascinate but end up falling short and frustrating your audience by not completely fixing the problem.

Let’s take another look at Brian’s Site Sensor example:

The problem: Your site has been down.
The agitator: More than an hour has passed, and you don’t have a clue until you hear from cranky people on Twitter and Facebook.
The solution: When your site is down, you’ll get an instant notification via email, SMS, or iPhone app.

Even if you’re a customer, you may not be familiar with the extent of potential website hosting issues. You know sites go down sometimes, but Brian shows you just how bad it can get.

Once you’re aware of the danger and seriousness of the problem, he swoops in with the solution, relieving your fear, stress, and anxiety.

If the solution doesn’t mirror the problem, there’s no stress relief.

You can test your content to see if the solution you offer matches the problem. It’s as simple as holding them side-by-side and asking yourself, “Do they match? Does this solution directly resolve this problem?”