You put a ton of effort into your content writing. But how do you make sure you get a big return on all that sweat and time?

A recent study by respected web-metrics company BuzzSumo took a look at the web's most shared articles. In fact, 10,000 of them got mapped to a specific emotional appeal. (As you who follow us know, we believe emotion is the foundation for any great piece of content writing.)

The emotions included joy, anger, sadness and so forth. Here's how those emotions ranked when put into a pie chart:

You see that easily the most popular emotions injected into these highly shared articles were:

-- Awe at 25%

-- Laughter at 17%

-- Amusement at 15%

The unpopular emotions in the chart? Sadness and anger.

There's a simple lesson in all this.

If your content is boring, you're not going to grow your audience.

So make sure it is entertaining.

David Ogilvy, my favorite ad guru, famously said in the 1960s:

"You cannot bore people into buying your product."

- David Ogilvy

If he were with us today, I'm certain he would say that applies to content as well.

~HCollaborative.com~