What content is popular?

Like any product on the market, a good piece of content delivers on a promise, in combination with a bit of marketing.

Pursue a niche

This is perhaps easier said than done, but if you are writing about something that is unique, interesting and new to the web, people should take notice. Think about what you are passionate about in Japan, what people have already written about (on Japan Travel but also other media sites), and what particular topics might be popular. Japan is very good for unique subject matter, but even then many topics have already been covered. This is also where curation can come into play, by using your experience to gather recommendations and share that as a new piece of content, like a Top 10 list.

Address a genuine user need

Ask yourself whether your article is helping the end reader, e.g. helping discover something new or helping solve a user need for travellers. If it does, you should find that people respond well and medium- to long-term end up linking to it, further increasing the hits you can expect on your article (and who doesn't want their article to be seen by more and more people?)

Quality and accessibility

This comes down to several things:

  • Spend time on research to get the facts right, add insights not necessarily reflected in similar pieces already online, include metrics/case studies to give your content the edge.
  • Create catchy headlines and headings to keep users engaged and increase the chance of them reading your article — you don't want to have the perfect article harmed by a generic, unenticing headline. On the other hand, you need to keep the article accessible and easy to read. Break your text down into sections and use interesting sub-headings to help readers skim your article (often web users are skimming at speed looking for specific information).
  • Good photos — consider putting a great photo front and center, but also embed them throughout your article, add captions, and reference them by making them part of the overall story. Photo embeds also aid readability because they can help break up a wall of text into something that is easier to skim and navigate.

Tell people about it

We do our best to share the best articles from the site across our channels, but if you are proud of a new article, don't forget to share it and tell people about it! This is also where accessible yet catchy headlines come into play, and a strong leading visual – at the end of the day you are competing for user's time so you need to catch their attention when they are browsing their favourite social channel.

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