There are over 87 million blogs published on WordPress.com every month.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, your content has to be powerful. It has to drag people in, entertain them, and get them to take action.

If it isn’t, all your hard work will have been for nothing. Instead of making a big splash, it will be just another drop in the ocean.

So how do you make it more powerful? How do you take a piece of content and turn it into something that not only gets read but gets results as well?

That’s what this article is about. I’m going to show you 10 actionable copywriting tips you can use to turn a bland piece of content into a powerhouse of an article.

Let’s go.

1. Make them experience it
Ever seen master storytellers at work?

It’s amazing how they can capture your attention and make you forget what’s happening around you. When they’re telling a story, it feels like you’re in that story.

And the cool thing is: your brain thinks you are. When someone tells you a story, your brain couples itself to that of the person telling it. You don’t just imagine what they’re saying, you experience it as well.

It’s that ability to generate emotions within your reader that makes storytelling so powerful. If you can make people experience what you’re saying, your content will stand out head and shoulders above your competition.

Now, turning every article into a story that’s worth an Emmy nomination is going to be a challenge, to say the least. But there are a couple of ways you can add more storytelling elements to your content.

Use metaphors

Researchers in Spain found that when they gave test subjects metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice”, the subject’s sensory cortex – the part of the brain that is responsible for perceiving texture through touch – lit up.

Use strong verbs

Strong verbs can help you visualize an action. Saying someone “slammed his fist on the table” is a lot more powerful than saying someone “put his fist on the table”.

2. Use the power of open loops
In 1927, a Soviet psychologist by the name of Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a restaurant with her colleagues when she noticed something weird. When their waiter took their order, he remembered every single one without a problem.

But once they were done eating and everything was paid for, the waiter couldn’t remember what each of them had for dinner.

She decided to study this in greater detail and found out that people have a much easier time remembering unfinished tasks. In psychology, this became known as the Zeigarnik effect. In copywriting, it’s known as an open loop.

Open loops are everywhere. From advertisements to movies to blog posts. If you’ve ever watched or read any form of entertainment, you’ve encountered open loops.

They work incredibly well because they instill curiosity and create anticipation for what will come next. When someone opens a loop, we want to close it so it’s off our mind.

They aren’t hard to create. In fact, you’re doing it every time you write a headline. Headlines are the most basic form of an open loop.

Read More: 10 Actionable Copywriting Tips That Will Make Your Content More Powerful