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.

Communicating convincingly by writing a case study

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I was just reading this informative blog post on the topic of how to develop a case study and realized I haven’t written on the subject on my blog. A case study is a great way of communicating to your clients and customers the exact value of the service that you provide. In the case study you have a live example of what needed to be done, how you did it, and what effect it had. This reminds me, I must put some of my own case studies (I have some with me but first will need to contact those clients for more information) on my website.

Wondering what is a case study? A few days ago I wrote a blog post on how you should tell a story through your content writing because stories are always so engaging. The same is applied to a case study. There is a conflict, there is a process and finally there is a resolution. Whenever you take up a new project you are basically trying to solve a problem. Your client comes to you because he or she needs to address a problem and you have the necessary means to solve that problem. A case study goes through the entire sequence of events like a story.

A case study, certainly is not written to satisfy your literary urges; it is written for your customers and clients so that they can understand the value of a product or a service you offer in real time. You can create a case study in the form of written text, a video or a flash or PowerPoint presentation. Just make sure there is the beginning that immediately grabs the attention of your customer or client and once he or she has gone through it he or she must feel that yes, there was a problem and then that problem was solved and everybody lived happily ever after (or at least for the next few months).

Since Conversation Agent has already written about how to create an effective (please visit the link mentioned above to read that) case study I will write my version in a later blog post.

What comes first, content writing or social media?

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Social media marketing these days in an integral part of business development: it is just a matter of who realize it and who don’t. Some online marketers even compare the indecision about investing in social media marketing to that initial phase when people were not sure whether they should get a telephone connection for their business or not.

But what exactly is social media marketing? It is constant interaction with your present and prospective customers and clients (on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) and not only your customers and clients but with all those people who are interested in your brand and your philosophy while not being interested in doing business with you. Why bother with people who don’t want to do business with you? Word-of-mouth marketing: they may not want to do business with you but they may know somebody who would and they would like to recommend you due to the level of familiarity you have sustained through your social media marketing effort.

Aside from regular interaction you need to post lots of content on social media and networking websites. It doesn’t do much good to your brand identity and reputation if you simply get content from other websites and blogs and keep posting it under your profile. Then you become just another user who simply wants to spend some time on Facebook and Twitter sharing “interesting stuff”. People begin to respect your opinion only when you have your own content on your website/blog. This is because expressing your thoughts and sharing your knowledge shows that you are confident and knowledgeable enough to articulate your opinions and experience openly and be open to scrutiny. This is how true interaction begins: you post links to your own content and then your friends and followers either forward that content to their own friends and followers or they expressive opinion.

So should you write content first or launch your social media campaign first? You can do one of them or you can do them together, simultaneously, it depends what approach you want to follow. My personal preference would be to maintain a balance. Both the activities take time and effort, and also expense, if you’re going to hire people to write your content and manage your social media profiles. Companies and individuals that build their presence based upon their opinions and knowledge need to have lots of content in order to have a solid social media presence. You also need content if you intend to spread awareness regarding your product or service. You don’t need content much if your audience is not the reading types.

Your content helps you attract the right people to your website

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The greatest challenge people face while doing business online is getting the right people to their websites. But what do we mean by “right people”? They are the people who would like to do business with you. What sort of people would I like to get to my website? People who would like to hire me to avail my content writing services.

Once you get to it it isn’t as easy as it seems especially when billions of people are constantly going through millions of web pages processing millions of terabytes of information. For instance, how do I make sure that people who are looking for a content writer can easily find me when they need me? Since there might be thousands of content writers doing business on the Internet how do I make sure I get ample amount of exposure and consequently, attention.

And even if I get the sufficient amount of attention how do I make sure that the right people are getting attracted? I can do it by creating a noticeable presence on the Internet. My content helps me do that.

You can publish your content on your own website/blog, on other websites/blogs, online forums and social media and networking websites. It gives you the needed visibility. Of course your content has to be about the product or service you offer. It is no use writing about scooters if you’re selling cars. And even if you’re selling cars it is no use talking about Mercedes-Benz if you’re selling Ferraris.

What sort of content you want on your website/blog in order to attract your prospective customers and clients? It depends on what sort of traffic you are trying to attract. Search engines, for instance, are looking for lots of informative content and consequently they rank higher content that teaches rather than the one that sells, especially Google. But it doesn’t mean it indexes and ranks only content that teaches: it just prefers it.

In order to attract right people from search engines you have to focus on keywords and search terms that help people find you for the exact service or product they are looking for. I would like to be found for “content writing services”, “freelance writer”, “website content writer” and such terms. Since I am continuously writing content on how to write content better or how to improve your business through content marketing and content strategy it may seem like I’m trying to attract an audience that is more interested in “learning” and less interested in doing business with me. This happened when I was offering web design services back in 2002: instead of attracting clients looking for a web designer my website was majorly attracting people who wanted to learn web designing and web related programming. When I started my content writing business and again started generating content for this website I made sure that I didn’t repeat the mistake. Although even now a majority of my traffic constitutes of people trying to figure out things and exploring career options I get sufficient number of business queries due to the content I continuously publish here.

The basic idea behind generating content to attract the right people to your website is getting lots of people for the right keywords. I may be getting lots of traffic for “website content writer” and 60% of that traffic may be those people who are simply trying to explore the field (want to try out this “content writing thing”) or researching for their own articles, 40% still are looking for someone to write content for them. In my specific case I have concluded that it is difficult to change this ratio and the only thing for me to do is increase the numbers so that this 40% becomes a bigger number.

While generating content for your website/blog (on your own or by hiring content writer) try to cover as many keywords as possible. Generate your business pages using those keywords first of all. If you’re providing content writing services then generate sufficient number of pages explaining that you actually provide this service. Once you run out of such pages don’t keep repeating them. From then onwards you can start creating instructional content. You may attract people who are trying to “learn things” but the brighter side is you will be covering all your major keywords and their various short and long combinations. Keep your focus on the relevant keywords and keep publishing all sort of content around them. Just make sure that your primary/business pages are visible from every possible page on your website/blog.

Does SEO content writing really matter or is it just a fad?

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You must have noticed that I provide SEO content writing as a separate service, as in, I provide business content writing services and I also provide SEO content writing services beside other such services. But on many websites and blogs you must have come across people saying that there is no such thing as “SEO content writing” and the term is used to sound more esoteric, confuse the clients, and ultimately, charge more for basically nothing.

More or less I do agree with this notion. I believe there is just good content and bad content and good content always improves your search engine rankings. So why provide SEO content writing as a separate service?

After everything is said and done it takes extra effort to write keeping both search engines and humans in mind. Whether you agree or not search engines are constantly looking for content for the appropriate keywords and such terms. It doesn’t matter much if you’re selling something uncommon. But if you are promoting a service or a commodity that faces lots of competition, and if it matters to your business how much search engine traffic your website gets you have to organize your text in such a manner that all major search engine crawlers can crawl you are website, index your content and rank your links according to the keywords and search phrases you have used.

Since the competition is fierce you have to be very particular about the way you write and arrange your content and to an untrained person this might be quite difficult. Writing is an interactive activity and you cannot quickly train yourself to write in a certain manner. You can easily write a story or product or service descriptions but it takes training and experience to create text that is received well by the search engines as well as your prospective customers and clients. the skill has to be ingrained into your subconscious.

This is why it is better to hire someone who is comfortable at SEO content writing rather than you throwing darts in the darkness just to find out where they hit. Of course you can do that if you want to learn how to do it but if this is not your business it is simply a waste of time. In order to save a few hundred dollars you might end up spending time worth thousands of dollars.

Again, many people confuse SEO content writing with simply inserting keywords and key phrases into the text being written. Sometimes they overdo it (inviting penalty, unknowingly, from search engines) and sometimes the under do it, getting no relevance at all. Even while using your keywords and search expressions you need to sound as natural as possible. You need to have a compelling voice. Your writing should be able to convince your visitors because simply getting traffic doesn’t really do you much good if people leave your website within a few seconds because you’re writing cannot engage them.

There is another aspect of SEO content writing: it forces you to focus on a specific topic. For instance if you’re writing a page on “small-business web designing services” you need to mention this particular phrase in order to make sure the visitors understand what you’re trying to convey. It needn’t appear in every paragraph but it should appear wherever it is necessary. This will keep you focused on this particular topic. You may be providing web designing services for different types of businesses but you will write this specific page only for those people who are looking for small business web designing services. The same goes for any other field, let us say for instance, SEO content writing. If you are talking about your SEO content writing services you will be explaining what sort of SEO content writing services you provide and what are the advantages of hiring you for such services. Ultimately, this focus increases your keyword relevance.

So yes, SEO content writing does matter if you are really concerned about getting targeted search engine traffic without affecting your conversion rate.

The importance of content writing for small business

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Normally small businesses, understandably, have small budgets and that means having less money to spend on marketing and promotion. When you’re working on the Internet it is practically impossible to survive without promoting your business. This is because there is lots of competition on the Internet and this is because anybody with a decent Internet connection and a little bit of dedication can run a marginally successful business and just imagine what sort of competition you may have to face if there are, let us say, 15,000 businesses offering the same kind of service that you are offering.

Doing business on the Internet is all about visibility and credibility. People should be able to find you, they need to be familiar with you and after all this they should be able to trust you. Creating this kind of atmosphere is an ongoing exercise because again, everybody is continuously performing this exercise – at least those who are really serious about their business. Everybody is trying to stay ahead of the game whether it is search engine optimization, online marketing, or social media and networking websites. There are scores of channels you need to compete for.

This is where content writing can come to your rescue. Whatever is there on the Internet it is in the form of content: you have text, videos, images and interactive presentations everywhere and they are being generated and promoted in billions in number. The easiest among them is text, of course.

Content writing can be performed on your own or you can easily hire a content writer, and through content writing you can publish new content almost on a daily basis. This advantage is not there if you want to publishing video or graphic content unless you have the needed hardware, software and expertise.

Content writing benefits for small business

Search engines primarily focus on written content

The current search technology doesn’t enable search engines to look for keywords and such expressions among videos and images. You can use tags but they work only to a certain extent. Through content writing, on the other hand, you can create, keyword-rich content all day if you want to. You just need to know what you want to write about.

Even if you are unable to write yourself you can easily hire a content writer who is adept at writing for humans as well as search engines. It won’t cost you much. The more content you have on your website the more keywords and their different combinations and permutations you can cover. Of course it doesn’t mean you always create content according to search engines because eventually what matters the most is how your human visitors react to your content.

It is easier and cheaper to create written content

I know, I have already mentioned this above. But since this is also one of the factors that may affect your content decision it deserves a separate heading. Even if you have videos and images as your primary content you will need to resort to generating some search engine optimized textual content in order to enable the search engine crawlers to find and index (and then accordingly, rank) your content. Again, as I have already mentioned, you can either write content on your own or you can hire a content writer. I wouldn’t advise you to go for an extremely cheap content writer because then you will be compromising on the quality. I always suggest to my clients that go for less, if you have to, but don’t compromise on quality.

Your written content helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field

You can continuously interact with your visitors through your written content. Share your knowledge, your wisdom and your experience with your visitors so that they feel enriched when they visit your website. The more they read and accept your writing the more they trust you and the more they trust you the more eager they are to do business with you. Again, it is an ongoing process because you constantly need to attract new visitors to your website/blog and you cannot achieve this by having a fixed number of pages or blog posts.

You seed new thoughts on your social media and networking profiles

Whenever you publish new written content on your website/blog you can post your links to your social media and networking profiles and invite comments from your friends and followers. This will give rise to lively interactions whether they agree with you or not and this will help generate buzz around your product or service. Although you can keep your social media and networking streams live by finding interesting and compelling content from other sources and posting it, sometimes you also need to post your own, unique content in order to become an authority in your subject.

You get lots of back links from other websites

Just as you find interesting and useful content on other websites and post it to your social media and networking streams or link to it from your own website/blog, so do other Internet users. People are constantly looking for new and interesting content to share with their friends and followers through their social media and networking accounts and blogs. They may also like to use your content to add value to their own content: if you already have a good explanation of “SEO content” they may as well directly link to it instead of writing it from scratch.

As you can see, there are lots of benefits of content writing for small businesses.