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.

Blog success has got a lot to do with persistence

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Blogging — whether business or personal — is an ongoing activity. It’s not like you publish 20-40 blog posts and there you go, you have got a successful blog for yourself. No, it doesn’t work this way. The nature of blogging is such that it goes on and on.

I have noticed that many clients put an upper limit to the number of blog posts they need due to financial or other (mainly financial) reasons. Although they may slightly end up improving their search engine rankings due to the way blog titles are formulated, it is a very restrictive approach and to be frank they are wasting money in two ways:

They are losing money on those 20-40 blog posts because on their own they cannot do much for the clients

They are losing money by not continuing because persistent blogging is one of the strongest promotional tools they could have had for their business.

Do I tell this to my clients? Depends upon how receptive they are to my suggestion. They normally feel — it is but natural — that I am seeking a long-lasting business opportunity for myself. Of course, if they continue publishing content on their blogs (provided by me) I continue to get paid and for them it is an ongoing expense. But they fail to understand that they are incurring a far greater expense in order to avoid a smaller but significant expense. They missed the opportunity they could have had by persistent blogging.

But why do you need to publish content on your blog on an ongoing basis? Because this is the nature of blogging. You continuously publish content so that the search engines always have something new to crawl and index from your website. With every single new post you are improving your search engine rankings whether you can directly see that or not.

With new content you also give your visitors a reason to come to your website/blog repeatedly. It is repeat visiting that eventually gets you business.

Ongoing content publishing also helps you maintain the buzz around your brand/business over social media and networking websites. You routinely have something new to post there and your friends and followers can see that you proactively communicate through your website and share lots of information with your visitors.

There is another thing that should prompt you to publish content on your blog regularly and that is your competitors are doing it. Managing an online business is no longer about having a website and 5-10 customary webpages. You always need to be proactive and aggressive in your approach simply because there are so many people trying to grab business and they are constantly coming up with new things in order to beat you. The strongest weapon in their arsenal is of course content marketing. Targeted content gives an immense boost to search engine rankings for relevant keywords and longtail expressions. They are constantly feeding the search engines and the social media and networking websites with high quality and compelling content. In other words they are promoting themselves aggressively.

There was a time when some businesses had telephones and some didn’t. It was the same with fax machines and the same with websites: some had them and some didn’t. than people realized not having a website was a big drawback. the same phenomena is taking place when it comes to publishing content on blogs. There are many who understand that it is an ongoing exercise and then there are those who consider blog posts as normal webpages. blogging, once started is just like another recurring expense, and those who understand this have a great advantage over those who don’t.

But what if you don’t have a budget that can support ongoing blogging? Well, when I say that you have to publish content persistently it doesn’t mean you have to publish blog posts daily. Even 2 blog posts per week can fetch you great benefits. Of course daily blogging has its own advantages but if right now you cannot afford it you can go on publishing on your blog by scheduling 2 blog posts or even 1 block post per week. It’s just that the search engines and your visitors/followers/friends must always have something new to view and promote about your business — directly or indirectly.

Increase your influence with your content

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Especially on the Internet people need to trust you, respect your opinion or your judgment before they show some eagerness to do business with you. This is primarily because they might be sitting halfway across the globe with no idea whether you are real or phony. They cannot even look at your face or the place you do business from.

In order to become familiar to them you need to do something that draws them to you on a regular basis and the best way of doing that is publishing authoritative or interesting content. Two things need to happen here:

  • Your content needs to be regular
  • Your content has to be of great quality — it must deliver some value

So that people trust you and become familiar with your presence, your thoughts and opinions you need them to come to your website or your blog repeatedly. Now, they are not going to visit your blog or website just because you want them to. You have to give them a reason. You need to constantly publish content that delivers value. You need to provide what they are looking for. You have to figure out what your target audience wants and then publish content accordingly.

This is where content strategy plays an important role. It helps you identify your target audience and then formulate and publish content accordingly.

How does this help you increase your influence?

By regularly publishing content on the related topic you become an authority figure. Without charging you are providing content that is valuable. You are solving people’s problems without charging them. It doesn’t mean you are targeting freeloaders it’s just that in order to build an audience you need to create a presence and nobody is going to pay you for creating a presence for yourself. You need to do this on your own without expecting people to pay you. You can also take such an example from television broadcasting. Have you observed how a new TV channel does not show advertisements? It’s not that they are following a no-advertisements policy. In order to get advertisements first they have to build an audience and they can only build an audience if they broadcast quality programs over a long period of time.

When you publish content on a specific topic for a long duration you develop a consistent audience. They visit your website or blog regularly, they bookmark it, they subscribe to your RSS feeds and e-mail updates and they eagerly click on the links belonging to you whenever they come across them on social media and networking websites. When this begins to happen you have increased your influence. Once you have increased your influence people are ready to do business with you.

While writing content focus on the why part

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“Why” is a very important part of your content writing and copywriting process because very often this is the first expression that crops up in your visitor’s mind as soon as you tell him or her to buy your product or service. When you focus on “why” you highlight the tangible benefits of your product or service and not superficial features.

Many of my clients, when they send their briefs for me to go through, they get so much embroiled with terminologies and rhetorical claims that sometimes I am not even able to make out exactly what they intend to offer to their customers or clients. This can be a big business killer. When you are not even able to tell your customers or clients what you’re selling how are you going to sell it? The end user is least interested in going through the nitty-gritty of your technology, he or she simply wants something that enables him or her do better in life and in business.

That is why in the page title and the first paragraph I focus on the problem and the solution my client’s business offers. It is not necessary to ponder over the name of the business or where it comes from or what a great team it has. I concentrate on, “Is this the problem you have? This is how we can solve it.” This is the “why” part.

This is the sure shot way of grabbing your visitor’s attention. Assuming that when people arrived at your website they are not fooling around and are looking for a solution it pays to straightaway come to the point and address the problem. If I am looking for an e-book reader I immediately want to know whether you have the one I’m looking for or not.

Does your content tell a story?

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We all love stories don’t we? They excite us, engage us, attract us, fascinate us, antagonize us and motivate us. Whenever there is a story we have readers and listeners. Why do stories captivate as so much?

We can relate to them. They strum the chords of our emotions, attitudes, sense of wisdom and life experiences. We share the emotions present in the story one way or the other. That is why we all have our own indigenous folk tales, anecdotes and historical stories; they bind us together.

Stories can exist in any form. They don’t always need to adhere to a particular form of narration. Even a journalistic account of some event unfolding can be a very engaging and enlightening story. This is precisely why free press is curbed by authoritarian and repressive regimes — effective storytelling can move people into doing things they otherwise would never do.

The same concept can be applied to content writing and copywriting. Whenever you are writing you are trying to move people, you are trying to make them do something. Create a story around the product or service you are offering or describing so that people can empathize with you and really absorb its importance.

When you tell a story instead of a monosyllabic harangue about how great your offer is you get your readers’ undivided attention because whenever we are reading a story we always want to know what happens next. Remember the last time you read a page turner? How eagerly you wanted to know what lay ahead.

Of course not all of us are storytellers but describing a product or service in an interesting manner can be easily achieved by creative content writers and copywriters. Your story needn’t always have esoteric characters; you just need to have a theme and you can center your writing around that theme.

When I’m looking for a solution, frankly, consciously, I am not interested in reading a story. I want to know how this particular product or service can solve my problem that I am facing in my business or in my personal life. A story can definitely help me visualize. It gives me a three-dimensional picture of exactly how your offer can make my life easier — it has a live example I can relate to.

Another great benefit of creating a story is that it has a beginning and then an end. The beginning can be the initiation and the end can be a business transaction that takes place between your visitor and your organization. By storytelling you can change the event of buying a product or service into an experience. It is difficult to remember events and it is difficult to forget experiences.