Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

Creating content for Twitter and Facebook

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Creating content for Twitter and Facebook is all about targeting and engagement (I know, clichéd expressions, but they are relevant). Remember that people interested in Twitter and Facebook marketing aren’t interested in the billions of members, they are interested in vertical niches, even if it means interacting with merely 100 individuals.

You need to create content in such a manner that it creates a platform for your target audience/customers/clients to interact with you. You become easily reachable to them. The content must be generated according to people who will likely follow you on Twitter and Facebook. And they shouldn’t just follow you, they should also respond to your content and share it, among their own friends and followers.

Even among Twitter and Facebook, the formats are quite different. You post content on Twitter mostly

  • To forward relevant news and updates about your business, about your product or service, or about any event affecting your customers and clients
  • To share interesting information on your own website/blog or from somewhere else
  • To share interesting thoughts and anecdotes
  • To interact with people who want to interact with you or with whom you want to interact
  • To post answers to queries made by your customers and clients regarding your products and services
  • To carry out awareness and PR campaigns

Facebook on the other hand is more informal and flexible simply because you can post more than 140 characters (a limitation in Twitter). Compared to Twitter, it is easier to post videos, images and links on Facebook, although you can easily share links to videos and images on Twitter too. Before deciding on what sort of content you want to produce, you have to figure out where your audience hangs out; is it Facebook, Twitter or both? If it isn’t both, you shouldn’t waste your time creating content for both.

For Twitter, as already mentioned above, you create content to share information, internal and external links, reply to questions from customers and other people and to create general awareness. Visibility is very crucial on Twitter. People’s timelines are extremely fast and within a couple of minutes your updates are going to scroll down out of their sight. It doesn’t mean that you constantly post, but be as regular as you can. On Twitter, you are known by the tweets you post. So be very careful what causes you associate with and what ideas you promote. Your messages become your brand on Twitter, no matter what your profile says. Twitter is also used for curating… more on that later on.

Facebook is being used by many individuals and companies as a full-fledged content publishing platform. People are posting long updates in the blog format and they seem to be working quite well. Facebook is more transparent in the sense that people can immediately see which users are responding to your content in various manners (replying, commenting, sharing and liking). You can also create your company’s Facebook fan page and initiate a dialogue with your customers and clients through it. Most of the mainstream companies these days have a vibrant Facebook fan page (it is another matter how they manage it).

No matter what platform you choose, the basic idea of having a Twitter or Facebook profile is to facilitate real-time two-way communication between you and your audience. It is well and good that people should appreciate your content over there and your content should go viral and lots of people should share it. But all this means is, you get more people to talk to and exchange ideas with. That’s the fundamental purpose of creating content for Twitter and Facebook: expanding your circle of influence.

Researching the right keywords for your content

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Right keywords for contentIf a big chunk of your content marketing effort involves getting qualified traffic from search engines then it’s very important that you research the right keywords for your content. Generating content requires lots of effort and if you’re not careful about choice of keywords and key phrases you might end up generating tons of content, and consequently, tons of such engine traffic for all the wrong keywords.

How to decide what are the right keywords for your content

The best way of finding out what are the right keywords for your content is by talking to your prospective and present customers and clients. What sort of language do they use when they try to find something what you have to offer? For instance, I offer content writing services but people might not necessarily be searching for “content writing services”.  They might be searching for “business content writer” or “SEO writer” or maybe “website content writer” or thousands of other combinations. You have to create a comprehensive list of keywords and key phrases people might use in order to find your service or product.

You can ask people around through your Twitter or Facebook profiles or even through your blog. Normally people don’t respond unless you have established a significant presence for yourself so you might have to practice a little patience. There are many online forums where you can get some help regarding this.

If instead of people you want to use technology then there are many free and commercial tools available on the Internet that can help you create a massive list of keywords and key phrases associated with your niche. One of the most prominent tools is Google AdWords Keywords Tool. You can enter a particular keyword or key phrase and it presents to you a list of matching keywords that you can use within your content. You can also enter the URL of your website and it will go through your content and accordingly present to you a list of targeted keywords and key phrases.

How to use less competitive keywords for your content

When you’re just starting out in a highly competitive market it makes no sense to aim for high competition keywords. In every niche there are high-competition and low-competition keywords and you can always start with low-competition keywords so that you can first gain traction among those keywords and then gradually move towards high-competition keywords. Take for instance, “content writing services”; this is certainly a high-competition key phrase and optimizing for this key phrase will take lots of content and time. So comparatively “website content writing services” or “business website content writing services” are low-competition keywords. You can find similar low-competition keywords in your niche.

The importance of finding the right keywords before you start creating your content’

As I mentioned above, you will end up saving lots of time if you research your keywords and key phrases before embarking upon your content writing expedition because then you will be generating all the content around your appropriately targeted keywords instead of using the guesswork. If I know that “content writer” and “content writing services” are important key phrases for me I won’t waste my time creating content for keywords that are not used by people.

What do you understand by copywriting?

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There are many writers who cannot/do not draw a distinction between copywriting and content writing. Originally the word “copywriting” comes from advertising whereas, content writing, as far as I know, is a more recent terminology mostly used for creating online content. Although I might be wrong because even for newspapers, magazines and even course books, what you do is write content. Anyway, about copywriting.

Copywriting is basically content written to promote a product, a service or an idea. Copywriting can be done for a website, for a radio advertisement, for a print publication advertisement and for television. In copywriting you have to come up with highly engaging, entertaining and contextual content whose primary purpose is to increase sales or promote an idea. Writing blogs and information articles cannot be called copywriting, but it surely is content writing. Even on your website whatever content you publish that prompts your visitors to do business with you is copywriting, including your sales copy.

The thought came to my mind that although I’m writing content for various business websites, I never draw a distinction between a home page, the primary pages and information pages, although I charge more for the homepage and the primary pages (product descriptions, services, profile, about us etc.). A big reason perhaps is that the client is not bothered about what I call it. He or she simply wants text that helps him or her sell more. But if the client really wants to appreciate the criticality of the content he or she is publishing on his or her website, then he or she must understand the fundamental difference between content writing and copywriting.

Copywriting is about selling

As I mentioned above, the primary purpose of copywriting is to sell/promote a product, a service or an idea. It can exist in the form of a story that eventually leads its audience to the final goal – purchase of a product or a service or an endorsement of an idea. If you simply produce text then it is called sales copy and when you write it for audiovisual advertisements you call it a script. Since copywriting helps businesses sell, some copywriters can ask exorbitant amounts of money for coming up with even a couple of paragraphs. Copywriting does the job of educating the audience and selling the idea at the same time, although selling the idea is of utmost importance.

Content writing is about informing

From the perspective of websites, content writing paves way for a more effective copywriting, or vice versa. You first inform your audience with content writing, and then you sell your product or service with effective and compelling copywriting.

So which is important, copywriting or content writing?

Going by the amount of money charged by copywriters, I would say copywriting is much more important compared to content writing, but this doesn’t mitigate the role of content writing. If your audience is not informed it is all the more difficult for your copywriting to work.

Am I a copywriter or a content writer?

I can wear both the hats, I mean that’s why I’ve been writing sales copies and I always write the homepage when I take on a content writing assignment. On the homepage the primary purpose of your content is to engage the visitors, inform them as concisely as possible, and get them hooked to your website. The text must be informative as well as entertaining. It must be created keeping in mind the core audience (techy, geeky, spendthrift, miserly, etc.). It must be able to convince. I manage to achieve that.

How much content does your customer need to read before doing business with you

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This question was asked on Quora.com and I wrote a small answer over there, but then I decided to do a bigger post here on my blog. So how much content does your customer need to read before he or she  decides to do business with you? First of all, do you really believe that your content can make a difference? I think for the sake of this blog post, and for that matter, even for the sake of future blog posts, I am going to assume that you take your website content really seriously and consider it to be an inveterate part of your marketing strategy.

With that out of the way, how much content is needed before the actual business happens? It depends on what niche you are dealing with and what product or service you are trying to sell/promote. Websites representing well-known brands might not need as much content as a lesser-known brand might require. For instance, Forbes.com might need less content to promote their business content section compared to, say, credible-content.com. Nonetheless, you will find tons of content on Forbes.com. Why?

The primary reasons why a well-known company like Forbes.com needs as much content as any other website are:

  • The Internet creates a level playing field for bigger and smaller players so it doesn’t really matter whether you are Forbes.com or credible-content.com when it comes to optimized content and better search engine rankings
  • People can access your content from all over the world and it isn’t necessary that in your part of the world Forbes.com is as well-known as in the USA or even in India

These are the reasons why Forbes.com requires massive amount of content just like any other website – it needs to convince its visitors into doing business with it and for that they have to visit the website again and again.

Doing business on the Internet is all about credibility and trust and these two traits can only be developed with lots of quality content.

It’s not just a brand that decides how much content is going to be read before people decide to do business with you. It also depends on the requirement. Here I will refer to the example I used at Quora.com

If you want to purchase an iPhone you are going to purchase it and for you the only difference is from where you are going to purchase. If price is not an issue you might straightaway purchase it from the vendor’s website or one of the major gadget e-commerce websites. If it is an issue, you might explore around websites like ebay.com or buy.com.

But what if you are not brand conscious and you just want a phone that runs the android operating system? There might be 100s of smart phones running on android and if you don’t have a preference you might have to read a lot before you eventually decide what make you are going to go for.

So in order to decide how much content your visitors need before purchasing your product or service you need to figure out

  • What drives your visitors to purchase the product or the service you are offering
  • How much information they need in order to make up their minds
  • How familiar they are with your product or service
  • How often they visit your website
  • How much trust and loyalty you enjoy among your audience

Once you have figured out these things you can easily make out after how much content or how many visits they will be ready to do business with you.

Can your SEO content writer improve your search engine rankings

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Your search engine rankings definitely depend on the sort of content you have on your website/blog and also the quantity if you face tough competition. Your content conveys to the search engine algorithms exactly what information your website contains. Than the search engine algorithms use their own logic to rank your content according to the keywords and search terms used by their respective users. On a basic level a search engine like Google.com ranks your pages according to

  • The quality of your content
  • The quantity of quality content
  • The occurrence of keywords and relevant phrases
  • The usability of your website
  • The number of “trusted” websites linking to your website

The importance of an SEO content writer

As far as an SEO content writer goes, his or her job is not only producing great content for your website but also arranging the text in such a manner that it is easier for search engine crawlers to crawl it, index it and then supply that information back to the search engine servers. There is a thin line that divides quality/qualified content and spammy content. Even when you think that you have got great content going for your website (most of us don’t intentionally want to publish spammy content) you might end up having suspicious content just because your SEO content writer doesn’t actually know how to create SEO content.

That is why it is very important to work with a content writer who exactly knows what he or she is doing and also has a performance record to prove that. Merely having an ability to use keywords again and again doesn’t make one an SEO content writer. He or she should know that search engine algorithms can also read between the lines.

Can your SEO content writer improve your search engine rankings?

Of course your SEO content writer can improve your search engine rankings because after all your search engine rankings are all about the content you have. Frankly content can exist in many forms and textual content (where a content writer gets involved) is just one of them. Content on your website can exist in the form of video, audio, presentation slides and images and almost all major search engines have separate engines dealing with them. But if you want to be found for written/textual content then your SEO content writer can make a big difference.

An SEO expert is totally different from a content writer. An SEO expert can help you improve your search engine rankings but he or she cannot help you improve your conversion rate. Your conversion rate can only be improved by compelling content: content that informs as well as convinces.

SEO experts have their own importance and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire SEO experts to improve your search engine rankings, but given a choice between hiring an SEO expert and hiring an SEO content writer I will always suggest you to go for an SEO content writer. This is not because I myself am a content writer and hence I’m biased towards them, it’s just that if you are hiring an SEO expert at the cost of an SEO content writer then you aren’t achieving much (it’s another matter if you already have high-quality compelling content but it’s not faring well on search engines – that again indirectly means that it is not high-quality content, but anyway, I digress).

With an SEO content writer – provided he or she really knows his or her stuff – you kill two birds with one stone (I’m not in favor of killing birds, by the way). You get a content writer that produces high-quality content and consequently improves your conversion rate, and additionally, he or she also gets the right people to your website from search engines and other online sources.