Writing is a never-ending learning process. To many writers, including myself, reading is an ideal activity to feed the brain in order to write. Who would disagree?
Reading is like a state of enchantment where you experience a dopamine rush in the brain as you digest information and story from what you read. It is a green ticket to dissociate freely and experience bliss through whatever your imagination conspires. Apart from entertainment, reading allows you to enhance content writing skills.
My favorite author, Stephen King, once said: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” This adage may sound absurd to some, but he made an excellent point. As a writer, I used to misuse adverbs frequently than the beanstalk overgrows.
Take a look at this example:
If you remove the adverb in this passage, “The shore waves instantly captivated my sight.” and use creative wordplay instead to paint vivid imagery, this might be the result. “The inviting shore waves captivated my sight.” or “The shore waves captivated me with its cold arms, with the aggression of warm intentions.”
As you can see, there is a drastic change of syntax in the passage. The logic of the subject remains; however, with the addition of the figurative expressions (metaphor and personification), the whole context became more refined and sophisticated. It sets the tone of the text to a whole new level. You may think this is trivial to the scope of content writing. Still, a touch of creative genius can make the body of work more compelling and exceptional.
But take note, overdoing it can make your writing inauthentic. Therefore, only incorporate stylistic devices in the proper context, so your write-ups remain sharp and readable.
Content Writing by the Rules of Search Engine
The rules for content writing can be tricky. Writing blogs for a website is relatively different from the standard executed by other publishing industries. Sometimes, being a journalist doesn’t make one a great content writer. There are specific rules, dynamics, and principles that come into play in web content writing. One of the most distinct specifications for content writing is the SEO best practices that allow the web content to generic traffic online.
They say the world wide web is a crowded space of digital competition. With millions of websites in existence, billions of regular search engine searches, and roughly 1.37 billion average logs onto Facebook daily, capturing the audience’s attention in this elaborate digital universe is dreadfully challenging.
Content is the most significant element of the website. A good website with excellent content can make the business brand stand out from the crowd. SEO-optimized content for the web can likely rake high engagement and crawl up to a more significant search result. Successful content writers can drive site visitors into possible conversion. A high-quality content must be pull through successfully to make the audience fall in love with the written words.
To help you produce remarkable content, here are some tips you can apply to reinvent your content writing game.
1. Write for the Audience, Not For Your Interest
Getting yourself to write something far from your likes is normal, but needs to be dealt with. To succeed, you have to study the business brand, the objective, goals, and target audience. Of course, writing an article for the brand must be tailored to the audience. Always think about what the target market wants and position your writing that would grab their interest. Otherwise stated, you have to provide value to your audience by writing about the possible solutions to their problem. If done correctly, you would be able to turn them into prospective customers or clients.
Performing market research can also help you identify the right audience and what information is relevant to them. Before setting your fingers to your keyboard, think about what and why you are trying to reach them out. After gathering collective data, start a draft while asking yourself how to influence the target audience. Additionally, do not generalize the purpose of your content; flesh it out and put things into detail.
Reaching your brand’s subsidiary is likely, but remember to focus on possible consumers as much as possible. Ultimately, highly optimized and well-written content will eventually come on top, resulting in audience traffic.
2. Keep it Simple yet Sophisticated
The prime purpose of your content is to inform a vast range of people across the internet about the business brand. Composing content with brevity is a must, but make sure to capture all the relevant details to keep on track of the writing. If your topic suggests straightforward information, do not beat around the bush; spill it. Explicate the point directly and provide the necessary solution. Nevertheless, writing concise content doesn’t mean letting your pet walk above your keyboard.
One of the essential elements in content development is nurturing quality style without losing the brand voice. However, always use familiar phrases and words on the crucial points to enhance readability. On the other hand, ego-tripping is intuitive for some writers while composing some content, but don’t overdo it. Just like what I have mentioned before, a creative genius can add flavor to the craft. It enhances the sophistication of the writing and makes it rich in style; however, don’t let it escalate to the point where readers have to grab a dictionary to scan for definitions.
Your content is being published online, thus consumed by a large-scale audience not limited by a group of academic experts. Although some corporate industries practice the academic language, always keep a conversational tone for everyone to comprehend. No one wants to exert effort in searching, especially if it prompts inconvenience.
For further comprehensibility, SEO-based sentences should have not more than 20 words with a limit of six sentences in a paragraph. Excessive subordinations in sentences are highly discouraged as the search engine might have a hard time understanding them.
3. Extensive Research for Superior Facts
Positioning credibility online is a long winding battle for some content writers. With the widespread propagation of erroneous and misleading information, it becomes extra challenging to solidify brand reliability, but it isn’t impossible.
Published articles must be remarkable for their integrity, not for controversy and shock value. Keeping oneself in a steadfast research mood can keep the queue filled with factual ideas, thus generating quality content. This goes to a handful of reading from credible source materials to keep the context substantial and well supported. If you develop a topic to be written, evaluate its purpose first before proceeding to research. With this, you can identify essential data and cite the sources through backlinking. Always remember to quote someone for reference to avoid copyright issues. You can either link a specific passage to the original story or directly quote it in the sentence.
This content writing practice will boost your credibility while providing your readers in-depth research to their needs. Delve into various industry experts to support your claims on the specific points. Put everything on the table for the audience to consume freely with a solid backbone to support the facts.
4. Incorporate Optimized Graphic/s
A compelling set of words can create vivid imagery, but a supporting header image can skyrocket several clicks. An enticing yet accurate image helps grab the attention of your readers. It’s like icing on an ice-cream cake — a prelude taste of what’s ahead.
A captivating photo allows your readers to think of a million possibilities of what your blog has to offer. It makes your content visually appealing and teases what’s ahead. Thereby, conceptualizing your following blog post header is essential.
However, always ensure to weigh in the graphics with the context to avoid producing click-baits instead of a relevant and valuable article. Both aspects must be related and somehow harmonious to their objective.
Nowadays, we all use related or latest posts with thumbnails in the sidebars of a blog. All of these posts preview use an image (typically the featured image on WordPress) to show the thumbnail. While properly optimized graphics grab traffics from the image search engine, the feature also helps you get a higher CTR and lower bounce rates.
For an apparent reason, a blog header is the prelude impression of your blog post. It sets the tone of the post aside from being the creative element of function.
As mentioned earlier, a highly optimized image is an integral aspect of content strategy. Consider stripping down the metadata and incorporate relevant tags and captions for meaningful optimization.
5. Proofread, Proofread and Proofread
It must come as a habit to proofread your content after completion. Taste your own recipe by going through the content strategically and identify overlooked errors.
Incorrect spelling, grammatical errors, style flaws, and typos can chase away your readers and question your credibility. Content flaws are considered marketing suicide and negligence to the body of work. Also, point out some details that need revision or think about the ideas you missed from the creative process.
An error-free content is a fundamental prerequisite of useful marketing content. Step up your game by being keen on details to aim for ‘perfection’ at your craft. Take note that a sloppy output will reflect on your branding and the company as a whole. If you think of this as an exaggeration, think again. A little fire from the kitchen can set an inferno to the whole house, and perhaps you don’t want it to happen.
If you’re having a hard time proofreading your own work, call out a friend or a colleague. It is imperative to get a second-hand opinion that can lead to an insightful discussion. Hence, being a little critical of your work can save you countless possibilities of mishaps or revisions.
Content is the King — an adage that speaks facts for itself.
With the scarcity of quality content, your website would be devoid of life as a barren desert. Just like every craft, content writing must come with hard work and passion. Content writing guidelines can be complicated, but this should not hinder you from producing quality output and enjoying the process.
Mastering these tips can transform you into a wordsmith with the ability to craft content that resonates well with your target audience. With this line of work, you got to become an industry expert who has far-reaching skills in developing people. With your voice, you can influence a legion with your body of work while positioning your brand to a higher benchmark.
Are you interested in content creation to elevate your marketing strategy? Let us know by giving us a sign-up. We’re also available to help you nourish your pursuits in digital marketing.