Category Archives: Content Strategy

10 ways to write highly engaging content

Leave a reply

write engaging content for your websiteThe success of your content marketing pretty much depends on how engaging your content is. This is why it is very important to know how to write highly engaging content.

First, what is “engaging content”? Although I have explained this multiple time on my blog and my website, it’s always nice to quickly visit the topic before proceeding, in every individual post.

Writing and publishing engaging content means involving your readers and visitors. Content consumption on your website or blog should be a two-way process. It should be a dialogue instead of a monologue. You have to hit the right spots. You have to provide the right information, ask the right questions and express the right doubts, at the right time, to give your readers the “aha!” moment.

Here are 10 ways to write highly engaging content

  1. Tell a story your visitors can relate to
  2. Try to know and understand what your readers are really looking for – what moves them?
  3. Write content from your reader’s perspective
  4. Get your readers emotionally involved with your content
  5. Ask questions and up their stakes
  6. Develop a unique voice
  7. Back your claims and opinions with verifiable facts
  8. Provide a social interface to your readers and visitors
  9. Curate useful, interesting information from other sources
  10. Understand how your particular audience prefers content – format as well as length

1. Tell a story your visitors can relate to

Stories are always interesting and they are more interesting if people can relate to them. So, you can make your content engaging by telling people stories of how your product or service solved problems and made life easier for people who use them. Simply saying that your product or service is great doesn’t cut it. Use real-world examples. Use real-world names. Use real-world situations and then provide believable narratives.

Your stories don’t have to be dull and drab. You can make them funny. You can sprinkle them with suspense. You can even introduce melodrama. The basic idea is to make it as interesting and engaging as possible.

2. Know and understand what your readers are looking for – what moves them?

Frankly, this is the most difficult thing to achieve through your content. Most of the content marketing campaigns fail because people responsible for the campaign cannot really write or create content keeping in mind what their visitors are looking for. Web analytics tools like Google’s Webmasters tools can help you in this regard. If you closely study your visitor statistics you will know how people land on your website. If they are coming to your website using the wrong search words it means you’re drawing wrong sort of people through your content which means you are creating wrong content.

3. Write content from your readers’ perspective

The thing is, people read your content not because YOU are writing it, they read it because they derive something out of it, whether it is information, entertainment, or empathy. Write what they would like to read, not what you would like to write.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean your writing always has to cater to the whims of your readers…you can play around with your own ideas. But when you are writing for a business website or for a business blog, remember that ultimately, the purpose of your writing is to convince your visitors into doing business with you.

4. Get your readers emotionally involved with your content

If your readers remain passive about your content, you cannot move them much into doing something constructive. They will read your content and just move on.

But if you make an emotional connection through your content, they don’t just stay longer, they also remember what they read.

How do you make an emotional connection? By addressing their problems as if they are your own problems. By providing them the needed solutions. By assuring them that the resolution of their problems is your primary concern.

For example, if you are looking for well-written content for your website or blog you obviously want to improve your business: you want to get more traffic, you want to engage your audience, you want to increase your social media visibility, and consequently, increase your sales. I should be able to convey to you that I totally understand this pressing need of yours and will do my best to provide the right content marketing and content writing services.

5. Ask questions and up their stake

You can also engage your readers by asking them timely questions. Don’t always provide them all the answers. If you provide them all the answers they’ll get bored. Instead, engage them by asking them questions.

For example, if you are looking for good content for your website, I should ask you why your website needs good content instead of telling you why your website needs good content.

Or, if I come across an example of extremely terrible content written on another website or blog I can ask my visitors what’s the problem with that content and how that content can be improved. They will feel that you value their opinion.

6. Develop a unique voice

If everybody is publishing content on his or her website how do people distinguish? Let’s be frank, whether they know how to do it or not, everybody seems to be using content marketing these days. It means lots of content is being published and distributed on daily basis. There is so much noise coming from all directions that it turns into an indecipherable buzz. The only way you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd is to develop a unique voice.

Develop your own style. Even if it means using unconventional language, as long as you don’t offend anyone and inadvertently offend your customers or clients, go for it.

7. Back up your claims and opinions with verifiable facts

I’m not a big fan of overwhelming my readers with lots of statistics and facts, but whenever you mention facts that are not well-known but are important, try to include the original source that is credible. These days there is lots of talk about fake news. So, while linking to the original source, be mindful of the fact that it is original information and not fake information otherwise the entire purpose of backing up your claims and opinions is defeated.

What I mean is, if I say that if your link appears at the first position on Google search results, it may enjoy 31.35% clickthrough rate (31.35 people out of 100 will click your link) and if I back this bit of information with a credible link like this Hubspot link you will not only believe me you will also appreciate the fact that I do research before making claims.

8. Provide a social interface to your readers and visitors

Engagement these days also means that the visitors on your website or blog should be able to socially re-purpose and share your content. There are lots of tools available that allow people to, for example, tweet some of your best quotes from your website, one of the reasons why recently I recommended using Medium for content marketing. Even a simple commenting facility keeps your visitors engaged as they exchange their views and opinions with you and among themselves.

9. Curate useful, interesting information from other sources

You don’t need to continuously create original content in order to engage your readers. There is lots of interesting stuff on the Internet that you can curate and present it to your readers and visitors. People will really appreciate if they don’t have to scour the Internet in order to find what they’re looking for. Although you shouldn’t base your entire content marketing strategy on curated content (in some cases it may actually work) now and then you can create lists of subject-specific blog posts and articles and compile them into a single URL.

10. Understand how your audience prefers content – format as well as length

Different audiences have different preferences. A network security website may have a different audience than a beauty products website. You will need to understand your audience and write and publish content accordingly. Your audience may also prefer different formats: they won’t necessarily like streams of text. Maybe they prefer images. Maybe videos. Maybe they don’t even like to come to your website and they mostly use Instagram.

These days there is a tendency among content marketers to use very long blog posts – stretching over 2000-2500 words or even more. But if you visit Seth Godin’s blog, almost all of his posts are not more than 150-200 words, and still, his blog is more popular than the blogs of many renowned content marketers and SEO experts. His blog posts are very small, and very insightful. Another thing that I have heard about him is that he posts everyday, even on Christmas.

So, these are some ways you can write highly engaging content for your website or blog. Remember that when it comes to web content the technology that you use on your website to enable people to re-purpose, reuse and share your content is as important as the quality of your writing. Don’t clutter your website with lots of buttons and bells and whistles, but do provide necessary means to make your content socially shareable.

Image source

Should you use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

Leave a reply

content-marketing-with-MediumI have been using the Medium blog publishing platform for quite some time now. I have never published content marketing and content writing blog posts on Medium (maybe 1-2 experimental posts) but this is because when I started publishing on Medium, that was never my intention. I use Medium to publish my political, cultural and social commentaries.

My success rate at Medium has been much better than on my own websites, although, the topics that I take up when I write on Medium are usually politically and ideologically provocative and hence, more people respond or share them, compared to my content marketing and content writing blog posts on my own blog.

But of late, I have noticed more and more people recommending the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing. See, for example, this post on Problogger. The writer recommends routinely publishing your content on Medium to increase traffic on your own website or blog.

So, should you use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

Being a vibrant platform already leaving behind many much-established blogging platforms like WordPress.com, you definitely get better exposure on Medium for your content. If one of your posts is featured on the main page or even under the main page of a major category, the implications can be great.

Just like any other platform, you can’t simply just start publishing your content on Medium and expect to get traffic from there. It’s not like OK, let me publish a few blog posts on Medium and I will get thousands of visitors to my blog or website. No, it does not happen that way.

Just like any other platform, you need to build a community around your presence. This is true for every platform, whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Medium. This is why these social networking and social publishing websites have millions of users but still, just a few hundred or just a few thousand have a decent following. It takes time. It takes energy and persistence. It takes good content.

Why would people respond to your blog posts on Medium if they don’t find your content exciting enough? Why would they recommend it? Why would they share it?

Although Medium has a ready-made audience (so do Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), you need to draw attention of this audience to your presence by consistent writing and publishing and by continuously engaging people.

Remember that it is in Medium’s self-interest to promote well-written content. The makers of Medium want to build it into a serious publishing platform, not a spam farm. So badly-written, uninspiring and spammy content is automatically ignored.

It is very important for the Medium blog publishing platform to know how many people actually read the complete blog post. This is what one of the founders of Medium has to say about the importance of the quality of the blog posts that are published over there:

How we calculate the ranking is an algorithm that will change over time (kinda like Google’s PageRank but obviously much more simplistic at this point in time). It’s not a direct popularity ranking. It takes in a variety of factors, including whether or not a post seems to actually have been read (not just clicked on) and whether people click the “Recommend” button at the bottom of posts. The ratio of people who view it who read it and who read it and recommend it are important factors, not just the number. (This is an attempt to level of the playing field for those who don’t already have large followings and/or a penchant for writing click-bait headlines.)

Why use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing?

I totally agree with the writer on Problogger that the Medium blog publishing platform should be/can be used as a great content marketing tool because one, the audience is already there (all you have to do is publish good content), and two, everything you need to make your content publishing social is already built into the Medium blog publishing platform. The content can be easily socially shared.

One great thing that I like on Medium is that if you want to share a big paragraph on Twitter, just highlight the portion that you would like to share and then click on the Twitter icon in the context menu that appears over the selected portion. The entire selected text is turned into an image and then along with the link and the title of the blog post, it can be posted on Twitter. This is just one example of convenient social sharing that is available on the Medium blog rubbishing platform.

Medium twitter highlighting

Building a community on Medium is quite easy: you can follow people and brands on Medium. You can leave comments. You can recommend posts to people who follow you. This reminds me, your content is automatically broadcast to your followers so building a following on Medium is as good as building a mailing list.

Here is why you should use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing:

  • Medium has a ready-made audience.
  • Medium-users like to read long, text-based posts unlike Facebook and Twitter users.
  • The blog publishing platform has social sharing features inbuilt.
  • The content is categorized under various categories and featured under the correct categories.
  • Larger publications like Huffington Post and New York Times routinely publish dedicated content on Medium and they often approach independent content writers through Medium. Even the former President Barack Obama regularly uses Medium.
  • You can tag your blog posts to make it easier for people to find them.
  • Influencers can easily find your content. If they find and share your content you can generate massive amount of traffic.
  • You don’t need to depend on other social networking platforms because the Medium blog publishing platform is itself a social networking platform.
  • One of your posts can go viral even if you have published just a few posts. You don’t need to start everything from scratch.
  • Since most of your traffic comes from mobile devices these days, the Medium blog publishing platform is mobile-optimized.

Here are a few things you can do to use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing:

  • It goes without saying, publish quality content that people would like to read.
  • Republish your existing content with links back to your original content.
  • Publish original content on Medium and in the footer of the post you can encourage people to subscribe to your updates or mailing list. This is how I do it:
    Amrits Updates - new
  • Hyperlink to your existing content from the new posts that you publish on Medium.
  • Respond to others’ content by writing rebuttals, add-ons, comments and references and then let those people know that you have posted.
  • Recommend content by other writers to your followers whenever you feel that your followers will benefit from the post.
  • Regularly leave comments on other posts on Medium.
  • Quality, relevance, quality, relevance, quality, relevance…

If presidents and famous publications are using Medium to reach out to its audience it means it has a great audience. Every platform can be used for marketing and so Medium can also be used for content marketing provided you stick to the fundamentals of content marketing:

  • Publish quality, relevant posts.
  • Use great headlines.
  • Encourage people to share your content.
  • Share other people’s content.
  • Post content regularly.

5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing

2 Replies

beating-you-competition-with-SEO-content-writing

The biggest challenge that you may face from your competitors might be on the search engines. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you need to beat your competitors at SEO. Although you can take various actions – for example read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website – the best way to beat your competitors is through SEO content writing.

Why search engines-based content writing enables you to beat even your toughest competitors?

The beauty of content writing is that it makes your presence on the Internet unique. Only you can write the way you write. No matter how hard your competitors try, they cannot be “You” – only you can be “You”. This is why even smaller companies on the Internet can pose big dangers to their bigger counterparts.

What is SEO content writing and how it helps you beat your competitors?

Being a content writer often hired by clients who want to improve their search engine rankings through content writing, I have written a lot on the topic. You can read this blog post that says SEO content writing actually improves your search engine rankings or you can read Does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings?

Anyway, there are thousands of companies on the Internet that provide you “SEO content” to help you increase search engine traffic to your website and many of these companies can actually help you.

SEO content writing in isolation doesn’t help you improve your search engine rankings – many factors play an important part. But SEO content is definitely one of the most important building blocks. It’s like, if you don’t have content, what will the search engines crawl, index and then rank? Obviously you need content.

And what sort of content gets ranked well? Good content. Well-written content. Content that is appreciated by people. Content that gets recommended. Content that people link to.

So, having good, relevant, topical, well-written and well-formatted content is a must. Everything comes after that.

Briefly, these are the 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing:

  1. Create unique content
  2. Solve problems better than your competitors do
  3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases
  4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner
  5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Now let’s go through these points one by one, in detail

1. Create unique content

Unique content automatically gives you an edge, because being unique, only you have it, or very few people have it. How does this help your SEO? On the same topic, the search engines like Google want to present different perspectives to their users so that they may find content they are not aware of, but may be useful to them. So well-written unique content is often ranked higher by search engines.

2. Solve problems better than your competitors do

This is a brute-force way of legitimately beating your competitors with better SEO content. If you solve problems better than your competitors, even if you don’t rank well, initially, compared to them, more people will visit, share, and recommend your links, eventually giving you an SEO edge over your competitors.

3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases

You don’t have to write content around keywords your competitors are already ranking well for. There might be many keyword variations your competitors might have ignored, or somehow couldn’t have achieved better rankings for. You can try different spellings. You can try different phrases for the same expressions. You can try bigger phrases. You can try local variations your competitors might have ignored.

Find out the keywords and phrases your competitors haven’t been able to rank well and then create good-quality content around them. This will definitely give you good search engine rankings for these less competitive keywords and search terms.

4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner

This basically is the same as point 2 but here what I mean is, you can also create the general content similar to what your competitors are creating, just in a better manner. You have the talent. You have your own unique way of writing. You can even have the same titles if you are daring enough while completely rewriting the webpages or the blog posts. Turn smaller subheadings from your competitor’s website into complete webpages of your own. You can even create multiple webpages out of a single webpage, or combine multiple pages into a single webpage or blog post.

5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Google likes to present its search results fresh out of the oven. If your content becomes stale, if it grows old, Google begins to ignore it in favor of newer webpages and blog posts.

Make updating your existing content an integral part of your SEO content writing strategy. Whatever webpages and blog posts that your have created, are your business assets. Keep track of them. Monitor them individually. Don’t just forget about them once your have created them. Revisit them to check whether there is some reason to update them or revise them. Even if you feel like changing a few sentences, changes them and the resubmit the link to Google.

Beating your competitors with SEO content writing might not be easy, and it may even prove to be a challenge, but if you want to take them up on this challenge, with strategy and hard-working, nothing should stop you.

10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website

Leave a reply

how-to-write-seo-content-for-your-websiteContrary to popular beliefs – mostly propagated by snakeoil SEO Experts – SEO content for your website is not a different entity. It is not something that you write or publish specifically to improve your search engine rankings.

In fact, if you are publishing content just to improve your SEO without paying scant regard to how your content converts (how it helps you grow your business), you are just like that proverbial dog chasing its proverbial tail. You go round and round, but nothing much happens, and then you wonder, why nothing much happens?

But it doesn’t mean there is no such thing as SEO content. If you want to improve your search engine rankings then you have to pay attention to creating and publishing search engine friendly content that is ranked well by major search engines like Google and Bing. You need to know how to write SEO content for your website and for your blog.

Although just good content doesn’t guarantee better SEO, it is the first step, and first step is always very crucial. After all, if you don’t have content, what’s the search engines going to rank? In order to enjoy good search engine rankings, aside from knowing how to write SEO content for your website, you also need to

  • Publish content regularly over a long period of time
  • Become an authority in your field so that lots of people link to your content
  • Get your content shared on social media and social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and the others

In order for your website to enjoy good search engine rankings, all these activities should go on as a collective effort.

But the focus of this blog post is to know how to write SEO content for your website.

The highlights of these 10 points are:

  1. Define the objective of the webpage
  2. Narrow the topic as much as possible
  3. Try to pack as much information as possible
  4. Thoroughly research your keywords
  5. Optimize for longer phrases
  6. Use headings and sub- headings to organize text
  7. Link to pre-existing pages
  8. Provide answers to questions
  9. Pay close attention to accessibility
  10. Make your webpages as fast-loading as possible

These individual points are explained in detail below…

1. Define the objective of the web page

This is very important. Why are you creating the webpage that you are creating, or the blog post that you are creating? What is the most important message that you want to convey? What sort of information do you want to give to your prospective customers and clients? The webpage should have an aim. It should provide some sort of value to people to find the link on search engines.

When people are trying to write lots of SEO content for their website, this is the aspect that they often overlook. They simply go on publishing lots of webpages hoping that it would improve their search engine rankings. This can have an adverse effect. If you don’t have an objective, how do you think search engines can know what exactly you are trying to do? They need to know it clearly in order to be able to highlight your link in front of the users. If you aimlessly publish content, your SEO credentials will be diluted and your subject-related authority will be undermined.

2. Narrow the topic as much as possible

The narrower the topic, the better will be its SEO prospects. For example, what does this blog post do? It tells you how to write SEO content for your website. It briefly explains that SEO content isn’t the only thing that can give you better search engine rankings, but the topic or the title of the blog post clearly defines what I intend to do. This way, if the search engines decide to rank this blog post, their algorithms will know exactly for what they should rank it: people who want to learn how to write SEO content for their websites.

3. Try to pack as much information as possible

Longer webpages and blog posts are preferred over shorter webpages and blog posts by the search engines these days. This is because writing longer webpages requires effort. Spammers don’t want to spend much effort when creating pages. There was a time when they would simply copy/paste a few paragraphs and that would improve their search engine rankings. Not now. The webpages and blog posts should be well-researched, giving lots of information to the readers. In fact, it’s better if your webpages and blog posts are multi-paged. This way you may be forced to publish fewer webpages and blog posts, but their impact would be much better than smaller webpages and blog posts.

4. Thoroughly research your keywords

Although many discount this, keywords are still important. Most of the search engines these days can rank your webpages and blog posts according to your central message, but irrespective of what language you use, you still need to take care of your keywords.

Keywords are the words that carry the true meaning of your message. They are the words people will be using to look for the content you want them to find. For example, there is a great chance you are reading this blog post after searching for how to write SEO content for websites.

Whether you want to use jargon or not, depends on your audience. Most important is, use phrases and words your prospective customers and clients are most likely to use in order to be able to find your webpage or blog post.

Make sure that the use of keywords and phrases is natural. Use the keywords when they seem like a part of your writing. Don’t force them. The search engine algorithms are so smart these days that they can easily make out if you are needlessly creating excuses for repeatedly using your keywords and phrases. The density of the keywords shouldn’t be over 3-4%.

Definitely use your main keyword phrase in the title.

5. Optimize for longer phrases

People don’t use single keywords. They use sentences and phrases. When people are searching for something, they are prone to asking questions, especially these days when many might be using voice when using search engines, instead of typing their queries. The gist is that people use a combination of three or four words to do searches.

6. Use headings and sub-headings to organize text

Using headings and sub-headings makes it easier for people to quickly scan your content in case they don’t want to read everything. After reading the headlines and the bullet points you can get a fair idea of what I’m trying to say in this blog post.

Whenever possible, try to use your keywords and main phrases in headings and sub-headings.

7. Link to pre-existing pages

If you have links to webpages and blog posts that you have created before, you can link to them from the new webpage or blog post you are creating. This not only encourages people to check out other links on your website, it also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index more links from your website. Remember that the more links Google can crawl and index from your website, the more SEO significance it gives to your website.

When you link to other webpages and blog posts from you website, use appropriate hyperlink text. This adds weightage to your keywords. For example, if I use the phrase “content marketing”, instead of writing it plainly, I can hyperlink it in such manner: content marketing.

Two things will happen…people visiting this link may also visit the content marketing link, and the search engine crawlers will know that I have more content dedicated to the phrase “content marketing”.

8. Provide answers to questions

Most of the people search for how, why, what, when, who and where. Formulate your SEO content in such a manner that you provide answers to people’s questions. Solve problems and this improves your search engine rankings.

Another benefit of answering questions and solving specific problems is that it helps you narrow down your topic and this in turn helps your SEO. Also, people tend to share the best answers to their questions on social networking website, further boosting your rankings. Search engines like Google favor websites that are large repositories of questions and answers.

9. Pay close attention to accessibility

Accessible content is good content according to the search engines. Don’t hide your content under JavaScript lawyers. When using images use captions that properly describe the images. Use the alt text attribute to indicate what information the image hold.

If you are using dynamic menus use CSS because then the menus can be accessed even when just the text of your website is being accessed.

The accessibility conventions have been formulated in such a manner that if you follow them your website automatically becomes search engine friendly, and so does your content.

10. Make your webpage as fast loading as possible

Yes, even in the times of broadband, how fast your webpage loads, matters.

An Akamai study has concluded that 40% of your visitors may leave your website if your webpages don’t completely load within 3 seconds. It’s an old study, but its significance still stands.

Want to know how fast your individual webpages and blog posts load? Try loading them via Pingdom.com.

In fact, the speedy availability of your content is so important that Facebook has launched Instant Articles so that articles and blog posts can be immediately loaded on mobile phones.

So these are the 10 most important tips on how to write SEO content for your website.

Again, when you are writing content for your website, good SEO should be a byproduct of good writing. If you follow good formatting practices, if you write useful, relevant content, you automatically write SEO content.

What is owned media and why you should have your own broadcasting platform?

Leave a reply

owned-media-and-your-own-broadcasting-platform“Owned media” and “broadcasting platform” – I know, these sound fancy words, but actually they are not. Owned media means the content that you create and publish on your own website, blog and under your social media profiles like YouTube and Instagram, and broadcasting platform is the presence that you create due to your content.

For example, let’s say you create a blog where you give advice to people about how to use your product or service. For example, on this content writing blog, I’m constantly talking about content writing and content marketing and content publishing. For me, the blog posts that I am constantly publishing is “owned media” – I own this content. When people come to read my blog posts on this blog, it becomes a broadcasting platform. I use this platform to broadcast my thoughts.

Up till now brands have been using third-party media and third-party broadcasting platforms to reach out to their customers and clients. For example, if you advertise on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and even Google’s AdWords, you’re using third-party broadcasting platforms. These companies have created broadcasting platforms through their own content and have built up an audience and now they are charging you to expose your brand in front of their audience.

Whether this works or not is another issue because for some it works and for some it doesn’t, but when you consider the amount of money and effort that you save by owning your own content and building your own broadcasting platform you suddenly realise what you have been missing by simply focusing on the third-party content and the third-party broadcasting platforms.

But let’s not talk about big businesses that have enough money to advertise on TV and newspapers. What about a small business? Does it make sense for the small business to own its own content and build its own broadcasting platform?

Again, no matter how fancy these terms sound, they are very simple. If you have a presence on YouTube, you have your own broadcasting platform. If you have a presence on Instagram, you have your own broadcasting platform. Wherever you have got an audience for yourself, wherever people go to check out your updates, is your broadcasting platform.

So, choose a platform and start creating your own content. The content that you own. It will be cheaper. It will be more effective. The results will be far-reaching.

This HubSpot blog post explains in detail is why even advertising agencies should stop investing in advertising and instead, should start investing in their own content, in owned media.

Listen to the audio version of this blog post