Admittedly, I’m not much of a chef or a foodie in the kitchen, but in the run-up to Christmas, one of the tasks our team was presented with was to make a Christmas style dish using a recipe by local celebrity Delia Smith. This was also to help boost our page views for the festive season and to expand the type of content we would produce on our site.

The dish I chose to make was sausage rolls, which is something I had never made before by scratch up until that point, so it was really pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Although the traditional British snack isn’t necessarily the most festive food offering, it is an incredibly popular one and something our readers likely consume on a regular basis, so we felt doing a story on this would help to capture their interest.

As part of our push for audio-visual content, I also thought it would be a good idea to take pictures of the step-by-step process, as well as filming footage to edit into a video to accompany the article. I used a tripod to attach my phone for filming so I could keep my hands free and captured multiple steps such as mixing the meat, shaping it, rolling out the pastry, cutting them and of course, cooking them.

The end result of the sausage rolls turned out to be pretty good, which definitely surprised me to say the least. During the actual writing and editing of the article and video, I had to put some serious thought, not only into what pictures I was going to use that would be eye-catching to our readers, but also the shots for my video as this is likely to be the first thing that they see when they click on the article, so it needed to be interesting and not put them off.

The article itself did around 4,000 views and an average engagement time of two minutes. On Facebook, the comments and reactions flooded in of people praising my efforts and also posting pictures showing their attempts at making the snack, which shows that, while not traditionally news-based, it is still important to do these types of stories as a way of boosting audience engagement as well as providing the right pictures and video to go along with it to grab their attention.