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.

Importance of understanding your audience for better content writing

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Understanding your audience for better content writing

In this blog post you are going to read about the importance of understanding your audience for better content writing.

Writing content is all about giving useful information to your audience to generate more leads and sales.

Regularly publishing content on your website or blog isn’t always about SEO, although, SEO does play an important role in getting you targeted traffic.

Traffic in itself doesn’t mean anything.

You can get thousands of visitors to your website but if these visitors don’t understand what you’re trying to sell, or if your writing doesn’t convince them into becoming your paying customers and clients, your SEO doesn’t solve any purpose.

Why is it important to understand your audience for better content writing?

It is like this: to have a meaningful conversation with someone, you need to know that person. You need to know his or her likes and dislikes, preferences and interests.

Understanding facilitates meaningful conversations

Even if you don’t intimately know the person, at least you need to have a common ground for effective communication.

Goes without saying that you both should be able to understand the language being used.

In terms of selling your product or service, it is also important what the other person is looking for and whether he or she actually needs what you are selling or, does he or she even know that he or she needs what you are selling (can make a big difference)?

This is why, there are different content writing requirements for different phases of a sales funnel.

You may write content for someone who

Is looking for what you can offer,
Wants to do business with you but hasn’t yet made up his or her mind,
Isn’t aware that he or she needs your service or product to solve his or her problem,
Doesn’t know that he or she has a problem that can be solved by you

There can be many such categorizations for which you need to write exclusive content.

To be able to hire my content writing services, you first need to know that you need quality content and for that, you need a professional content writer or a content writing service.

What if you don’t know the importance of quality content writing?

I need to tell you what you are losing by not having quality content for your website.

If you are worried about your poor search engine rankings, I can tell you that maybe it is because of the inferior quality of your content.

If your traffic is good but you are not generating much business, maybe I can tell you that it has got something do with your present text.

Why is it important to understand your audience before you start writing content for your website?

Understand your audience before starting to write your content

For the purpose of clarity and focus.

For saving money and time.

Above all, for generating more business.

Content can be high-quality and still it may not get you business.

Sometimes when your search engine rankings are improving, when you are getting lots of attention on social media, you think that you are doing great.

Maybe in terms of generating traffic you ARE doing great.

But maybe you are writing for an audience who, although, likes your content, doesn’t want to do business with you.

If you keep on writing and publishing content for an audience who likes your content but doesn’t want to do business with you, all your effort and investment will go waste.

On the other hand, through your content writing, you need to target an audience that likes your content but ALSO wants to do business with you.

So, if you know what sort of audience you want to attract and what sort of audience you don’t want to attract, in the beginning itself you will put all your effort and money into writing and publishing lots of targeted content towards that direction.

How to understand your audience for better content writing?

There are many ways.

Here is a nice post on Search Engine Journal on what various things you can do to understand your audience better to be able to generate epic content.

There is a reason big businesses spend millions of dollars on research companies (heard of the controversial Cambridge Analytica company?).

Bigger companies spending millions of dollars doesn’t mean smaller businesses cannot use methods and tools to better understand their audiences. These are some things you can do

Put yourself in their shoes

Evaluate your content from their point of view.

If you were looking for your service, what would you try to find?

Suppose you are promoting a task management app.

Think from the point of view of the person who is having difficulties managing his or her tasks.

Also think from the perspective of a person who may have already tried many mobile apps for task management and is looking for better or more suitable options.

You can further narrow down to someone who likes to be able to maintain tasks very easily and may also like to rearrange them by drag-and-drop rather than manually having to change time and date.

Then there is a whole, bigger market of people who are not aware of how important it is to use the right tool for managing tasks.

Targeted content writing can be done for all these individual audiences if you are able to understand what they are really looking for.

Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics

A tool like Google Analytics can tell you what sort of people convert and what sort of people don’t convert.

If you are promoting your links on social media and social networking profiles there also you can generate unique links to track how much traffic they are generating and from that traffic, how much business you are generating.

Observe which keywords and search terms on search engines improve your conversion rate and which pieces of content are ranking well for these keywords and search terms.

This isn’t something that you will be able to achieve in a few days. It may even take a few months to gather enough data from which some usable intelligence can be drawn.

The trick is, understanding the nature of quarries and incoming traffic that gets you more business and then writing more content to cater to that audience.

Creating personas when writing content

Personas can be very helpful.

Persona is a complete or an almost complete profile of your ideal customer or the ideal person who satisfies your KPI.

Understanding your audience and then writing content accordingly doesn’t always mean just writing for your customers.

Although, eventually, every person you target should become your customer or client, but through your content writing, you don’t always have to target people who are ready to do business with you.

You can also write content for someone who isn’t aware of the fact that he or she may need your product or service.

Suppose you have just launched a website and you think that once you start getting traffic from search engines, your business will grow in leaps and bounds.

You have prepared a list of keywords and search terms and then you have started creating content to target those keywords and search terms.

You are generating traffic but the business isn’t growing.

The next best thing you know is, investing in PPC advertising.

You realize that the ROI is quite low and you are spending more money than you are making.

Even Facebook and Instagram campaigns are not working.

You are in your mid-30s. You have a great business idea. You know there is a great market for what you are trying to promote.

But, why aren’t people buying? Even when they come to your website.

So, I have this persona of a person like you who is feeling frustrated and has no idea what to do.

I know the solution is targeted content.

But you don’t know.

So, I start creating content that educates you.

When I write content that educates you, I am mindful of the fact that I’m writing content for you – someone who has a business that can do well with content writing.

I’m not targeting people who want to learn content writing and then become content writers.

I’m not saying that I’m not going to attract such people, but my main target are people who don’t want to become content writers but who need professional content writing services to improve their search engine rankings as well as conversion rate.

Concluding remarks on understanding your audience for better content writing

There are many other ways you can gather intelligence on your audience and then write content that is purposeful.

You can ask questions to your visitors. You can conduct a survey. You can also ask your friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The basic idea of this blog post is not to tell you how to understand your audience, the basic idea is, it is very important to understand before you spend your time and money on content writing.

Don’t publish what you want. Publish what your target audience is looking for.

How to use the scrum concept for incremental content writing

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Scrum methodology for content writing

Scrum is a method, a framework for building software applications and web applications in an iterative manner.

Every iteration is a complete software application in itself. It is not complete as per the vision, but it can be fully used.

This iterative process continues until the entire application has been developed.

The scrum way of building applications breaks down highly complex tasks into smaller, achievable tasks, and then, with every iteration, moving towards the bigger, complete goal.

This concept can also be implemented in content marketing, as explained in this Content Marketing Institute blog post.

The blog post walks you through the entire scrum content marketing process involving a team of people of different responsibilities and designations.

I was thinking that the scrum framework or the scrum method can also be used for content writing.

Continuously writing and publishing high-quality content can be a complicated as well as a tedious exercise after a while, especially when you are writing on complex topics.

Sometimes the topics are very useful and you should definitely have something about them on your website or blog, but just because you cannot gather enough information and you cannot collect your thoughts right now, the topics are ignored and sometimes totally missed.

In such cases, you can use the scrum methodology for content writing.

This will involve:

Create the most appropriate title (changing the title later might be difficult so spend some time on it).
Write a couple of paragraphs explaining what you are writing about. You can use whatever comes to your mind, but just make sure, no matter how small the piece of content is, it delivers a complete message.
Publish these 2 paragraphs (even one would do).
If you want, you can mention at the end that in the next iteration you will be adding more information.

The benefit of using the scrum methodology for content writing

If you use the scrum methodology writing lengthy blog posts and web pages will not seem daunting.

You will know that you are not going to have to sit for a few hours and create a killer blog post in one go.

You will also know that even if you publish just a few paragraphs, you will be delivering something valuable to your visitors.

Besides, they will be no lag in your publishing process.

The biggest benefit that I see is that you will get more time to add valuable information.

Normally what happens is, we write a lengthy, comprehensive blog post or article, publish it and then move on to other topics.

After that we rarely get time, inclination or chance to revisit existing content and work at refining it.

The scrum methodology of content writing can help you develop the habit of continuously revisiting the content that you have already published.

This will in turn help you publish longer blog posts and articles packed with lots of valuable information even when you hadn’t initially planned to write long content.

At the content writing level, I see 2 immediate benefits of using the scrum methodology:

You can publish content with greater regularity because it’s very easy to create blog posts of just a couple of paragraphs and hit the publish button.
Writing and publishing longer blog posts becomes easier because the process is spread across multiple days, even multiple weeks.

Content marketing strategies that always work

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Content marketing strategies that always work

In this blog post you will read about content marketing strategies that always work and bring you success.

Want to ensure that your content marketing does not fail and always succeeds?

Here is a nice blog post published in Entrepreneur that lists a few strategic approaches that you can follow when carrying out your content marketing strategy.

Before proceeding, you may like to read 11 things that make your content marketing successful.

The above listed Entrepreneur blog post talks about the following strategic approaches when writing and publishing content:

Write authoritative content: I have written a lot on my blog what authoritative content is and how it benefits your business. Writing and publishing authoritative content means conveying to people that you have full knowledge of your business or your stream and you are the right person to do business with.
Write and publish evergreen content: This type of content lasts. Of course, you should also write on topical trends but write high-quality content that can be used by people for many months, many years. This way, your content is always relevant. You can also keep it relevant and evergreen by constantly updating it.
Write in an easy-to-understand language: Write in a manner that freely flows. When you’re writing for a business website, you’re not writing a literary novel. Keep your sentences short and simple. Focus on the benefits. Be conversational. Stay to the point.
Give your readers something significant: Give them something that really solves their problem like no one else does. As the above blog post says, “focus on one big idea”, which means, give them something that is irresistible.
Connect with influencers in your field: Influencers are those who have already built an audience for themselves, who have built a platform. They can influence people. People listen to them. If they promote your content or one of your links, you can get lots of attention.

11 things that make your content marketing successful

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11 things to make your content marketing successful

In this blog post you’re going to learn about 11 things that can make your content marketing successful.

Content marketing success is not a random phenomenon.

The approach to success is very scientific and methodical.

Just like in any business or any strategy, you have to be persistent and you need to have a clear idea of what you’re doing and through what you’re doing, what you intend to achieve.

If you are clear about that plus, if you are persistent, success can never be random. You are bound to plunge into it.

Why use content marketing to promote your business?

I have written a lot about the benefits of content marketing and why you should use it to promote your business. Some of the links I could quickly find are

Some of the reasons why you should use content marketing to promote your business include:

It provides useful information to your customers and clients (and shoppers) that they can then use to decide whether they will need to do business with you or not.
It definitely improves your SEO, especially organic search engine optimization.
Helps people use your products and services in a better manner once they have purchased from you.
Gets you more leads and attracts prospects and customers to your website or blog.
Builds your brand.
Establishes your reputation.
Keeps your prospective customers and clients engaged.
Helps you maintain a positive buzz on social media.

Why content marketing sometimes doesn’t work?

There are many reasons content marketing doesn’t work. In this blog post I have listed the mistakes that you should avoid in 2019.

But this blog post is not about why content marketing doesn’t work. It is about the 11 things you can do to make your content marketing successful, and here they are:

1. Create/write useful content

Create useful content for content marketing success

Useless, aimless content is neither useful to you nor to someone else. And if your content is not useful, why should someone appreciate it?

The entire purpose of having an operational content marketing strategy is that you promote your business on the strength of your content.

Your content derives strength from people.

When you are writing content (or when you are getting it written by a content writer) make sure you publish only useful content. It must help your visitors in one way or another. It must solve problems. It must provide solutions.

Why is it important that you publish useful, high-quality content?

Your content marketing success solely depends on how people react to your content. Even your search engine rankings these days depend on how people react to your content.

Drab, uninspiring, useless content is not going to get any attention.

Useful content, on the other hand, grabs people’s attention. People react to it. They share it on their timelines. They link to it. They spend more time on your website, bringing down your bounce rate that in turn, improves your SEO.

2. Publish original content

Publish original content

If you are publishing what everyone else is publishing, there is no motivation to come to your website or blog. People will come to your website or blog only when they find something that they cannot find somewhere else.

Constantly coming up with unique topics can be a problem.

But your opinion is always unique.

For example, I am constantly writing about content writing and content marketing and there must be thousands of other individuals doing the same.

Still, what I am saying here is unique because I’m using my own “voice” and my own writing style to express my own opinion.

Even when you are curating content – linking to external content – give your own take, the way I do sometimes.

These days when I don’t have time to write a completely original blog post, I link to an external article or blog post and then write some words on my own. I present my only unique view on the topic, even if couple of sentences.

3. Be consistent and persevere

Persevere and be consistent for successful content marketing

I don’t know about other people, but this is a big drawback that I have experienced in my own clients. They initiate their content marketing with great enthusiasm, even have the clarity about what sort of content they need to get written and publish, but then, within a couple of months, and sometimes even within a month, they lose track and no longer want to publish new content.

Now, you may say that being their content writer I should be able to convince them that content marketing success cannot be attained without consistently publishing high-quality content, but the problem is not with clients who hire me as their consultant (and hence, would heed to my suggestion), the problem is with people who hire me just for my content writing services.

Though, I give them my unsolicited advice, and then it’s up to them.

Anyway, the point is, they pursue content marketing for a couple of months, don’t see results, and then abandon content marketing midway.

Content marketing is an ongoing process. New content is constantly being pumped into the World Wide Web.

Unless you publish new content, your old content is going to be pushed into oblivion by your competitors and even by those who are not directly competing with you but are constantly publishing new content that can be remotely related to your content category.

People mostly abandon content marketing because they think it is an extra expense whereas, it is a necessary expense, running expense, just as you continuously have to spend money on running your infrastructure.

4. Make your content accessible for content marketing success

Create mobile accessible content

People these days are not just using PCs and laptops to access your content. They’re using all sorts of mobile devices.

They may access your content on their mobile phones, on their tablets and even through smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Your content should also be easier to read. Avoid creating long sentences and thick paragraphs.

5. Maintain a content publishing calendar

Maintain a content publishing calendar

The lack of a content publishing calendar can also derail your content marketing. Constantly coming up with new content writing and content publishing ideas can be a difficult task after a while.

Whether you are writing and publishing content on your own or your content writer is doing it, you definitely need to maintain a content publishing calendar so that you have things in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.

You can use an Excel sheet. You can use Trello. You can also use a mind mapping tool (which I use).

6. Learn to repurpose your existing content

Repurpose existing content

Backbone of a successful content marketing strategy is publishing content on an ongoing basis and sometimes, it becomes difficult to publish totally unique, original content even from the perspective of your own website or blog.

What do you do?

You repurpose your existing content.

Here is an older blog post you would like to read: How to repurpose old content.

Repurposing your existing content means creating new content out of your old content.

You can do this in the form of a weekly or monthly recap – creating summaries of all the blog posts you have written in the month of January, for example.

If you have been researching and gathering data to write and publish multiple blog posts, perhaps you can use this data to create infographics.

You can create podcasts from your existing blog posts, web pages and articles.

Similarly, you can create slides, animations and YouTube videos.

7. Try to improve your search engine rankings to ensure success of your content marketing

I always write on my blog that your search engine rankings should be a natural outcome of your quality content and you shouldn’t focus much on it aside from taking care that the search engines can easily crawl your website, it loads fast and you provide meta information to make it easier for the search engines to understand the nature of your content.

Having said that, it helps to have your main keyword in the title of your web page or blog post.

Strategically placing your main keywords also helps.

Again, don’t make extra effort. Focus on good writing but make sure that you use your keywords and search terms when you are creating content.

For example, since I want to attract clients who are looking for content writing and content marketing services, these are the phrases that I often use.

Just as content marketing is very important for better SEO, search engine optimization also fuels your content marketing.

If people are able to find your content on search results, more people can access it and there are more opportunities for inbound traffic.

8. Create an active presence on social media and social networking websites

Remain active on social media for content marketing success

Social media and social networking websites can be great content distribution platforms.

For example, everybody is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram these days.

Most of the content consumption happens through these platforms.

Your social media and social networking platforms (your accounts, your profiles) can be a great source of targeted traffic to your website or blog.

Share content from your website or blog on social media. Publish original content. Build an audience.

It takes time. Ongoing engagement will be needed. So, there is no need to hurry. But, consistently make an effort to build an audience.

9. Use email marketing to disseminate your content and keep the people in your mailing list engaged

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing

Billions of emails are sent to and fro every day. More people use email than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined. Email marketing can be the backbone of your content marketing success.

How do you use email marketing to implement a successful content marketing strategy?

If you continuously publish high-quality content, your visitors wouldn’t like to miss it. But, they cannot visit your website or blog every day. Give them an opportunity to subscribe to your updates.

When they subscribe to your updates, send them an email whenever you publish a new blog post or a new web page.

Send them useful information that they can use to better utilize your product or service.

Keep in touch with them. Ask them how you can help them.

But basically, you can use your mailing list for successful content marketing.

10. Use analytics data to steer your content marketing in the right direction

Use analytics for successful content marketing

Without analytics data it is just guesswork.

Analytics tell you what content your audience wants and then you can write and publish your content accordingly.

Even when you are trying to cover keywords and search terms for your SEO, analytics will tell you whether your SEO-content is working or not.

You can track individual links. You can track a group of web pages and blog posts. You can track your social media updates.

Your email marketing service (I use MailChimp) will have its own analytics features that will let you know how well your individual email campaigns are performing.

11. Have well-defined KPIs

Clearly define your content marketing KPIs

Key performance indicators are very important.

Although, as I often write on my blog, by the end of the day what matters is how many sales you have made, content marketing is more targeted and segmented.

Content marketing doesn’t directly increase your sales, it creates positive circumstances that in turn, increase your sales.

So, your KPI might be getting more subscribers for your email updates.

It can be increasing the number of unique visits.

If you want to target a particular geTorres of theographic area, you track whether your visitors from that particular geographic area are increasing or not due to your content marketing efforts.

You may also aim for bringing your bounce rate down.

Before and after data is very important for tracking your KPIs.

KPIs tell you how successful your content marketing strategy is at the grassroots level. This is how the sum total of your content marketing brings you success.

Concluding remarks on making your content marketing successful

To implement a successful content marketing strategy first most you have to understand and accept that it is not a one-off activity.

The second thing is, before it can bear fruit for you, you have to keep the momentum going even when you feel there is no return. This is because in the beginning, there is actually no return.

For the initial months, you will simply need to focus on creating and publishing lots of high-quality content, distributing that content using all available channels to you, and building a platform and a presence.

Then, it is this platform and presence that begins to generate business for you, more leads and more sales.

Content marketing in the beginning is like laying bricks and building other structures of a house or a building. You cannot use that house or building before you have built it.

Hence, unmitigated quality, distribution and engagement and perseverance definitely ensures content marketing success and through that, business success.

How to write a sales message with great conversion rate

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Writing a sales message with great conversion rate

In this blog post you’re going to learn how to plan and write a sales message or a sales letter with great conversion rate.

Point-wise, this is how to write a great sales letter:

Write from the customer’s point of view.
Have a well-defined flow to lead your reader through the entire sales process.
Make it easy to read.
Use call-to-action words and expressions to prompt your readers to take a decision.
Keep your readers interested so that they want to read more and know more about your business.
Cater to their sense of urgency.
Remain truthful.
Always sell the benefits, not the features.

No matter what you publish on your website, on your blog, or even elsewhere, ultimately what matters is your conversion rate: how many people become your paying customers and clients?

A big part of business writing or online writing is writing sales messages or copy that intends to sell.

Although, the entire essence of content marketing is not selling and simply providing useful information to people so that they can make up their minds about whether they want to do business with you or not, selling is a part of everything.

Selling doesn’t mean “come, come do business with me because I’m great!” but somewhere, you need to tell your customers and clients that you are open for business and you are a professional.

If all the time you’re educating your prospective customers and clients, they may end up thinking that you are an educational website and you’re not interested in getting paid assignments or selling stuff.

Here is an interesting take on how to write killer sales messages to improve your conversion rate. The gist of this blog post is:

Write your sales message or your sales copy the way you talk.
Cut the hype and tell the truth.
Write in a language people understand, avoiding jargon as much as possible.
Stick to the point.
Get to the main point as quickly as possible.

Let’s now expand the points mentioned above quickly.

Write your sales message or your sales copy the way you talk

When you write the way you talk, people feel as if you’re talking to them. They get a sense of engagement.

How do you talk normally?

You don’t use difficult words. You don’t go on and on. Your sentences are shorter, crisper, and to the point.

Don’t manipulate words.

Cut the hype and tell the truth

There is reason why most of the “money making” email messages go to the spam folder automatically.

This is because they make big, unrealistic claims. Spam filters can read such messages.

Stick to the truth.

I’m not talking about lazy and greedy people, but everybody is a realistic person. They can see through your tall claims.

Write in a language people understand

Every target audience has a different way of talking and writing. You will know that people in the fashion industry talk differently. Doctors talk differently. Scientists talk differently. Writers talk differently.

Although in most of the writing advises you are advised to avoid jargon, I’m not averse to using jargon. Just make sure people are comfortable when reading your sales message and they don’t have to refer to a dictionary.

Stick to the point

This is very important when you are writing a sales message. No scope for rambling or for making irrelevant points or references.

Remember that anything can distract your reader. There are already so many distractions around him or her. There are also distractions within the device and you don’t want to add to those distractions by including information that is not needed or that distracts.

Get to the main point as quickly as possible

The same as above. An average reader is in a great state of distraction so say your thing as quickly as possible.

It is recommended that your reader should be able to understand the gist of your sales message above the fold – he or she shouldn’t have to scroll to understand what you’re trying to promote.

Concluding remarks on writing sales messages with great conversion rate

This is standard advice – the points mentioned above.

A sales message – a message that you use on a landing page or in a promotional email, or anywhere you need to sell a product, a service, or an idea – is a mode of convincing.

It is rightly said that one of the most difficult tasks in the world is making someone give you money for your product or service.

On the Internet it is more difficult because when people come to your website, you are not directly talking to them. It is your text. It is your sales message that needs to convince them.

This is why it is very important to appear truthful.

Spell out the benefits of doing business with you in as plain a language as possible. By “plain” I don’t mean using very bland, uninspiring language, what I mean is, don’t mince your words and don’t ramble.