Category Archives: Content Writing

How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs

How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs?

This blog post will explain to you how to find the right content writer or the right content writing service for your business.

Once you know what sort of content you want to publish on your website or blog, the greatest dilemma that your content marketing campaign faces is, how to find the right talent for your content writing needs.

Typically, your search for a professional content writer may begin with the following activities:

Search on Google
Go through freelance websites
Search online forums
Mention the need on your website if it is a high-traffic website
Mention on your social media profiles that you are looking for a content writer
Look within your own organization
Put up an advertisement in the classifieds section

Why is it extremely crucial to find the right content writer?

The content that you publish on your website or blog is going to stay there for a long time. Whether you get 10 visitors or 1000 visitors or even 1 million visitors, they are all going to consume the very same content that has been written by your content writer.

Hence, it is very important to choose or find the right content writer for your content writing needs.

Your content writer is going to help you

Improve your search engine rankings
Improve your conversion rate
Enhance your brand presence on the Internet
Write case studies
Write white papers
Prepare social media updates
Prepare email campaigns
Write blog posts and guest blog post
Write informative articles for your website

It is through your content writing that people will recognize you and form an opinion about your business and ultimately, decide to do business with you, or with someone else. The right content writer can provide you high quality content on an ongoing basis.

High quality content means more business

So, high-quality content – good business; low-quality content – less business or worse, no business.

Personally I feel any web content writer with decent skills should be able to help you improve your search engine rankings provided you target the right keywords and you are ready to spend enough amount of money and time into regularly publishing unique content on your website or blog.

The problem is not SEO, the problem is the conversion rate.

The problem is often not search engine rankings.

The problem is your conversion rate. And the right content writer understands this.

How many people actually do business with you after coming to your website?

Although there are many factors that affect your conversion rate, content writing, or the copy on your website, is one of the most important factors.

A content writing service like Credible Content can give you content that can improve your conversion rate.

Hence, even if your online content writer is not able to improve your search engine rankings, if he or she can improve your conversion rate, that’s what you need.

You can get targeted traffic to your website in multiple ways, but if the traffic does not convert, nothing matters.

I don’t mean to say you should settle for a website content writer who is unable to improve your search engine rankings. In fact, an experienced and capable content writer should be able to achieve both for you:

Improve your SEO
Improve your conversion rate

It’s all about finding the right talent. How do you do it?

Jot down the following to settle on the right talent for your content writing needs:

How are the communication skills of the website content writer you are evaluating?

Communication skills of your content writer

Communication skills of your website content writer

Writing, after all, is all about communication. The ability to communicate the right message at the right time is more so important during online content writing.

Can your website writer communicate convincingly?

Of course, if you are not sure what exactly is communicative writing, it will be difficult for you to judge your writer, but go with your gut feeling.

How do his or her emails sound? Does he or she take care that there are no spelling and grammar mistakes in the emails he or she writes to you?

Does he or she articulate in clear sentences without unnecessarily using words?

Is he or she too pushy?

Does he or she seem to be agreeing to every possible condition just to get the job?

Is his or her writing style conversational?

Is there a consistency in the manner in which he or she has written his or her profile on the website and the way he or she writes emails to you?

Does he or she understand your business needs?

Does your content writer understand your business needs?

It may be important, or it may not be important whether a writer has some sort of expertise in your business field. Still, a professional, established content writing service can be invaluable to your business.

I get to write a lot on technology – web design, server management, programming protocols and Cloud technology.

So, you can say that I’m comfortable writing on technology-related topics and my clients don’t have to spend lots of time explaining the specifics to me. Even when I don’t understand certain concepts, I know how to look them up on Google and then write about them in my own language. You can say that if you want an experienced tech writer for your business, I’m the right content writer for you.

I’m the right content writer for you also because I have been writing content for websites since 2007 and in all these years I have written for different businesses, from fashion to real estate to cooking to advertising and marketing to healthcare business to network marketing to accounting to financial consulting to house maintenance, and more.

Nonetheless, recently a client approached me who needed some knowledge of finance for his content writer. Although I told him that I can easily write on financial matters, he was reluctant because he needed a writer who has been writing financial articles for a while. I forwarded his message to another writer.

As a professional content writer with lots of experience, I know when I am the right content writer for you or not. I’m not here to get your work by hook or by crook. If I feel I’m not the right match, I will either let you know that you should look for the right content writer for your business somewhere else, or I will try to find one for you among my own group of writers.

Go for someone who you think can deliver your content for your business need.

Can he or she write search engine friendly content?

SEO-friendly content writing

There are many ways you can do business on the web without minding much about Google and Bing, and in fact, I advise my clients not to put all their eggs in the search engine basket. But, a big source of targeted traffic to your website are going to be the search engines.

Your search engine rankings are based on the following:

The age of your domain.
The number of genuine incoming links to your website.
The quality and the authority-factor of the websites linking to you.
The quality of your content.
The formatting of your content.
The relevance of your content.
How easy it is to access your content.
The frequency with which you publish fresh content and update existing content.
The timeliness of your content.
The sort of buzz your content creates on social media platforms.

As you notice, after the first three factors, it is all about your content, and in fact, without your content, the search engines have nothing to rank.

Your content writer should be able to write search engine-friendly content.

Don’t confuse search engine-friendly content with stuffing keywords into your writing senselessly. This is counter-productive. More than doing good, keyword-stuffing can bring you irreparable harm. The search engines can ban you for life.

Think it this way: there is a reason Google is called “the search engine giant”.

The company uses innumerable brains to make sure that you cannot trick the search engine into ranking your content higher even if your content actually does not deserve to be ranked higher.

Once I read that at a particular time, 240 math PhDs are constantly tweaking the Google search algorithm so that only quality content comes up when people use the search engine.

Too many people spend lots of time and money on trying to “trick” Google.

Even if they spend half of that time and money on publishing high-quality content on their websites, they will get better results.

Anyway, find out if your website writer can write search engine-friendly content and your content writing service can improve your SEO.

What is search engine-friendly content?

Keywords must be strategically used in the title and the body.
Keywords must be a part of the overall content rather than being forced here and there just for the sake of using them.
Content must be authoritative: as much information should be packed as possible in a single link.
The content is formatted so that it is easier for the search engine crawlers to analyze the content: various parts of the content should be arranged under the appropriate headlines and with bulleted points to make it “scannable” and understandable.
Various sections of your website should be interlinked strategically. No need to repeat the same content again and again if it can simply be linked to (within your website).
The sentences must be very simple, straightforward and clearly-formed. A 6th standard student should be able to understand what has been written.

How active your content writer is on the Internet?

Is your content writer active on the Internet?

No, I don’t mean that you should check out whether your content writer regularly posts cute cat videos on Facebook or the pics of his or her breakfast on Instagram. You don’t want a content writer who whiles away his or her time like that.

What I mean is, is he or she actively contributing to his or her field through constantly publishing high quality blog posts, articles and social media updates?

This is not a necessity: maybe you have come across a content writer who is so busy that he or she only gets enough time to write for his or her clients and he or she never gets time to write otherwise. That’s fine. There are always exceptions.

My personal experience is, content writers who only want to write for their clients are generally not good content writers. Many writers who approach me for work are very stingy about publishing content to showcase their services. They just want paid assignments. This makes them desperate and this has a direct impact on their writing quality.

Again, this has been my personal experience because I am often working with other content writers too.

Content writers who don’t blog often, who don’t write articles and blog posts on different topics, even non-paying topics, aren’t very interesting writers. They are lazy writers. Even greedy. They won’t write a single extra paragraph just for the love of the craft.

The case scenario can be opposite too. Is your writer so busy working on his or her own stuff that he doesn’t turn in your assignments on time?

There must be some balance. When you search for your writer on Google, you should be able to find lots of blog posts, articles and social media updates from the writer telling you that he or she actively participates in discussions relevant to his or her field. This shows that he or she proactively tries to grow his or her skill and he or she is also communicative and interactive.

How are his or her writing skills?

How are the writing skills of your content writer?

The most important quality to have for a writer or a content writer – writing skill.

Although there might be different styles of writing and different writers follow different writing guidelines, there is wrong writing and there is right writing, and your writer must be able to distinguish.

The following must be impeccable:

Sentence formation
Spelling
Grammar
Flow
Vocabulary

If the language in which you want the content writer to write is not a strong point for you, initially you will need to get the writing reviewed by someone you can trust (someone who knows the language well).

When looking for the right service provider for your business, keep in mind that good writing abilities are very essential to being a good content writer.

When the writing is well, proficient and error-free, you seem professional and you show respect for your visitors. It matters what image they form of you and hence, it shows that you pay attention to every word that you publish on your website or blog.

Is your content writer going to stick around for your ongoing content writing needs?

Is your content writer going to stick around?

The more your content writer writes for you, the better he or she gets. This has been my personal experience.

Organizations and individuals don’t want to let go of me once I have been writing content for them for a few months (provided they need quality content on an ongoing basis).

Comfort level develops.

Your writer knows more about your business after a while. You also begin to trust him or her. Your website or blog begins to adopt his or her writing style.

Although one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your content writing needs to a content writer or a content writing agency is that it is very easy to change your content writer, make sure that you settle with a writer who is going to stick with you for a long time.

How do you know that your content writer is going to stick around?

Frankly, there are no guarantees in life. But there are some signs that you can pick to make sure that the content writer you are hiring is going to write for you for a long time. Some of them are:

If you contact your content writer from a freelancing website go through his or her profile and see for how long he or she has been writing content.
If you are contracting a content writing agency like Credible Content, just check for how long the person or the group of people have been providing content writing and content marketing services.
As mentioned above, check if your content writer is serious about his or her profession and if he or she continuously writes articles, blog posts and social media updates about his or her profession (that is, content writing).

Again, there is no guarantee. A company can go down no matter how impressive its website is, and a lone freelancer providing his or her content writing services from a freelance website may go on providing content writing services for years.

Conclusion

Whether right now you believe it or not, quality content is as important for your website as the web design itself.

Most of the entrepreneurs don’t realize that due to lack of quality content their websites don’t convert well and after a few months or after a couple of years, they have to wrap up their businesses. They think their idea was not good or people didn’t understand what they were trying to deliver.

The problem, more than 99% of the cases, is with content. They either underestimate the value of a good content writer or they don’t even realize that they need high quality content for their websites.

Note: Most of the images above are from https://unsplash.com

How not to be repetitive when regularly writing content for your blog

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How not to be repetitive when regularly writing content for your blog

To maintain your search engine rankings and to keep your audience engaged, you need to publish content on your blog regularly, preferably, every day.

But, how much new content can you publish?

Sooner or later you come to a point where you feel that you are repeating topics.

Repeating topics doesn’t just make people lose interest in your blog it will also have a negative impact on your search engine rankings because then your ranking juice begins to get diluted when the same sort of topics from your website compete for different positions in search engine rankings.

Why you need to publish content regularly on your blog?

In an ideal world, you shouldn’t have to. In an ideal world, you cover all your important topics and then you focus on your work.

In reality, a continuous tussle is going on. All your competitors want to gain an edge over you.

If you have better search engine rankings, they want to rank higher than you.

If you have better web presence, they want to have better web presence than you.

If you engage more on social media, they want to engage more.

Your competitors are not just competing with you – knowingly and unknowingly – they are also competing with themselves, and in the process, even when they don’t intend to, they’re creating hurdles for you.

You constantly need to overcome these hurdles.

You may have to overcome more hurdles or less hurdles, depending on how much competition you face and how aggressive your competitors are.

To continuously get targeted traffic to your website, you need to maintain your search engine visibility and these days you also need to maintain a presence on social media and social networking websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

If you don’t publish regularly, you lose your search engine rankings, people stop noticing your website, and there is no original content to post on social media and social networking websites. There is no content for email marketing.

Regularly writing content: how not to be repetitive

There are two major downsides of being repetitive when writing content for your blog or website regularly:

Your visitors begin to feel you have got nothing new to say.
The search engines either conclude that you are publishing duplicate content, or your rankings for your keywords begin to get diluted through your own repetitive content.

You face the following problems, consequently:

You need to publish regularly.
You need to come up with original ideas each time you publish.

Listed below are a few things you can do to regularly come up with original ideas and avoid being repetitive.

Do regular brainstorming

Writing content for your website or a blog on an ongoing basis is a serious business. After all, you intend to generate business, right?

Just as you draw up a business plan, you need to regularly brainstorm on what you’re going to write about (or what your content writer is going to write about).

Surprisingly, I have worked with many clients who think that topics are just magically going to crop up.

Just to prove how important it is to regularly come up with right content writing ideas, I charge extra from my clients whenever they insist that I should come up with my own content writing ideas for their website.

Normally, I insist that they give me the ideas because I know that it can be a big drag.

Anyway, coming up with great, relevant and meaningful content writing ideas is a serious exercise, and you will need to brainstorm regularly. You will need to assign separate time.

Maintain an ideas repository

Sometimes ideas do crop up magically, so you need to capture them as soon as they appear, otherwise, like a tiny magical fairy, they’re going to disappear.

Maintain an ideas repository. It can be an Excel sheet. It can simply be a text file. Google Docs document. Voice recordings on your phone. A conventional notepad. Anything. Something that is always nearby, and you don’t have to waste time trying to locate it.

For many years I used Evernote to capture ideas. Then I stopped using Evernote and switched to OneNote.

But I also save drafts with just a title and a few words, within the WordPress dashboard. The main point is, when an idea strikes, save it.

No need to get too bogged down by longform content

Longform content – blog posts and web pages having more than 2000-3000 words – is good. It gives you a competitive edge because not everyone can publish longform content on an ongoing basis.

But, the idea of writing 2000-3000 words can be daunting. It can also stultify your creativity because instead of focusing on the topic, you are worried about how to stretch it beyond 2000 words.

Sometimes, if you can manage just 300-400 words, don’t lose use sleep over it. Remember that publishing something is always better than publishing nothing. If there is an interesting idea and you cannot stretch it beyond 2000 words, don’t worry about it, just publish it as it is.

Give new angles to old issues

The possibilities are infinite in this world. Just when you begin to think that every story that could have been written, has been written, there is a new chart buster or a New York bestseller.

I have observed that everyone these days wants to educate. So, web design agencies want to publish content that teaches you how to design websites. Mobile app development companies want you to know how to develop killer mobile apps. Financial consulting companies want to teach you how to manage your finances well.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t do it, but when you solely focus on educating your visitors in a “10 ways you can…” format, you are bound to run out of topics.

Focus on stories instead. Every story is unique in itself. Tell people how you solve individual problems.

For example, explain in a blog post how as a web design company you helped a business promote its brand on the web through a unique web design approach.

As an accounting firm, explain how you helped a business get out of a financial mess that seemed insurmountable before you took over.

You don’t always have to have solved real-world problems yourself. You can solve a hypothetical problem. You can give your own take on a problem solved by someone else.

Maybe you read some news about a business house and you can write about how the problem the business house is facing could have been solved with your service.

Cover recent studies and reports

People love data. They get impressed when you tell that so many people are doing so many things in so many ways in these many days during such and such hours.

Since people love data, bigger agencies are constantly gathering information and then tabulating it for presenting it graphically in an awe-inspiring manner.

For example, this study on HubSpot reveals that businesses and companies that publish 16+ blog posts every month get 3.5 times more traffic than businesses publishing 0-4 blog posts per month.

Though, this is common sense – more content means more traffic – but a study that reveals exact numbers is more convincing and reassuring.

Similarly, every month there are 4-5 studies by different companies and agencies in your niche and you can use these studies to create data-packed blog posts.

One day, you will be publishing your own studies and people will be linking to your studies to create blog posts and articles.

Talk to people for fresh content writing ideas

You can also “crowdsource” your need for fresh content writing ideas by regularly interacting with people wherever the opportunity exists.

You can spend time on online forums.

You can participate and go through Quora discussion threads.

You can encourage people to leave comments on your blog, asking them what they would like to read about.

You can interact with people on Twitter and Facebook.

Whatever platform you prefer, interact with people to get fresh content writing ideas.

Use social media to get new topics

Social media is all about content. I have mentioned Twitter and Facebook above, and even Quora, but you don’t always have to interact with people. You can simply observe conversations and note down what people are talking about in your niche.

Sometimes you can find interesting ideas on YouTube. Many people don’t prefer to write, they would rather make a quick video. Topics that you don’t find on Google, sometimes you find them on YouTube.

Doing image search is also a good way of coming across good content writing ideas. In images, people use phrases and expressions that they don’t use in the text. You can get a completely new take on a subject.

Infographics. These days many companies publish infographics. You can pick any of the subtopics and write complete blog posts around them.

Read books, white papers and case studies

In-depth knowledge in your field can be gained by reading books, white papers and case studies.

Every new chapter in a book, every new heading or subheading, can give you a new content writing idea.

Even if you don’t get a single idea from a book, it will create a fertile ground and trigger your creativity that will in return, help you come up with original content writing ideas.

In whichever field you are, reading books anyway helps you grow intellectually. Even if you don’t plan on writing blog posts, reading books is a good habit to develop.

Use blog topic idea generators

Personally, I’m not a very big fan of online blog topic idea generators, but they can at least kickstart the creative process sometimes. They can give you a nudge towards the right direction.

When you use these topic idea generators, you simply submit your main phrase and then they churn out 5-10 topics you can work on.

Some good blog topic idea generators are

There are many more blog topic idea generators. BuzzSumo above easily comes in the most expensive category but it also gives you many more tools.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, regularly publishing high-quality content is simply unavoidable. Even if you think that it is needless to publish content regularly, your competitors don’t think so.

Sooner or later, every business realizes that it needs to have a sustainable content writing and content marketing strategy. Some realize its sooner, and some take their own good time, incurring lots of losses in the process.

So, once you have decided that you need to publish content regularly, you need to set in motion a process that supplies you with fresh content writing ideas on an ongoing basis.

In the beginning you may face some problems, but as you get used to regularly publishing content to promote your business, you will be surprised how fast you come across new ideas.

Content writing: why strategy is important

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Why your business needs a content writing strategy

Almost everyone these days acknowledges that quality content writing is needed to improve search engine rankings and conversion rate. As a very small-time content writer and content marketer, the quality of content assignments that I get these days has markedly improved. Even my clients from India are sometimes ready to pay the price that I ask because I know that what I provide can help them improve their business.

It shows that more clients now have a clearer perspective of how important content writing is for their business.

But there are very few who think about content writing in terms of strategy. Without strategy, you are simply publishing content hoping that writing about certain topics will help you improve your search engine rankings and if you can improve your search engine rankings, getting more business is a natural next step.

It is not.

B2B with documented content marketing strategy

Source

The above link also reveals that whereas 89% B2B marketers use content marketing (use content to promote their business, in our case, content writing), only 37% organizations use documented content marketing strategy.

This number might be according to the target audience of Content Marketing Institute, the generic status is much worse.

Just because you have improved your search engine rankings doesn’t mean you’re going to get more business. This is because business doesn’t depend on how many people you can get to your website. Business depends on how many people you can convince into doing business with you.

And this job happens on your website. The way your content delivers your message.

In fact, if you take into consideration the RankBrain algorithm, these days even your search engine rankings depend on how people engage with your content when they are already on your website.

For more information on how RainkBrain analyses your content, you may like to read How to write content for the Google RankBrain System.

What does strategy mean?

There are many definitions of strategy on the Internet, but the closest definition that is relevant to our topic goes something like this:

The art and science of planning and marshalling resources for their most efficient and effective use.

Even this is not a full definition in the current context., I would also like to add

The art and science of knowing exactly what you want to achieve, knowing what resources you have at hand, and then planning and marshalling these resources for their most efficient and effective use.

Content writing and the concept of strategy

Content writing and strategy

According to the current definition of strategy, the resource here is content writing.

You may think why I’m just writing about content writing and not content in general because when you want to use content marketing, there can be various sorts of content, and I totally agree.

But for this blog post, I just want to focus on content writing because this is what I provide, currently.

So, the resource that we have is content writing.

How do we use this resource to accomplish what we want to accomplish?

What do you want to accomplish?

Through content writing you want to accomplish two things:

Improve your search engine rankings to increase targeted traffic to your website.
Improve the conversion rate of your website.

Both these are very important and there is no use focusing on one and neglecting the other.

Where does strategy come in?

Strategy in the context of content writing means

Knowing what sort of content you should be writing/publishing.
Knowing what format is most suitable to draw targeted traffic to your website – general website pages, informative articles, blog posts, social media updates, guest blog posts, email campaigns, e-books, white papers, slides, PDFs, and so on.
Knowing what channels to use to promote your content.
Knowing what people should do once they are on your website, what path they should follow.

The biggest attribute of strategy is knowing what you are doing, what you should be doing, and what the outcome is going to be.

Similarly, when you are publishing a blog post, you should know exactly what you are trying to achieve. You should know what sort of people are going to read it, how they are going to interpret it and what they’re going to do after reading it.

Goals and KPIs for strategic content writing

Content writing goals and KPIs

Goals and KPIs are different.

Goals are normally long-term. You want to get more business. You want to generate more ad revenue. You want to get more subscribers to your newsletter. You want to achieve your sales goals for the chosen region.

Goals take place in months, even years.

KPIs – key performance indicators – are, as the name suggests, indicators.

They tell you how your content is performing.

Is your search engine traffic for the intended keywords and search terms increasing day by day?

Has the frequency with which people subscribe to your newsletter improved ever since you published those five blog posts?

Are more people using your contact form?

Key performance indicators tell you if you are moving in the right direction with your content writing. Unless you get more targeted traffic you can’t know whether your content is performing well or not (simply getting traffic isn’t performing, getting new business is).

Web analytics, strategy and content writing

Content writing with strategy is incomplete without web analytics. Having hard data is very essential to a successful content writing strategy.

Web analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics (I’m mentioning just these two because they are free but very potent) can tell you what sort of traffic your content is drawing.

If you want to try out a paid traffic analytics tool, these days I’m using LongtailPro. You may like to read Why I’m recommending LongtailPro to my clients.

LongtailPro tells you which longtail keywords you should target (according to the authority of your own website) and it also tracks the current position of your individual keywords – how much higher and lower they have moved compared to the previous positions.

This can help you streamline your content writing.

These tools will also tell you how much time people spend on your website. They tell you what web pages and blog posts they visit once they have entered your website through a web page or a blog post.

Suppose there is a web page (or URL) that draws lots of traffic from Google but people don’t stay on the web page for more than three seconds. They immediately leave.

Then there is something really wrong with this web page even if it enjoys higher search engine rankings. More than doing good, it is doing harm to your cause because it is telling more people why they should leave your website and why it is not relevant to what they’re looking for.

It also begins to negatively affect your search engine rankings because when people leave your website after immediately finding it on Google, the Google algorithm begins to “think” that the website is being ranked higher for wrong reasons and it doesn’t deserve to be there, and consequently, that particular link begins to lose its place in the search.

There is a reason why sometimes your content writing is directionless – there is no strategy

When you have a clearly drawn out strategy, you know why you should be writing. There is no ambiguity. There is no throwing of darts in the dark.

When you have a strategy, you know why each page, each blog post exists. You want to deliver a definitive message. When you are sure, it shows through your writing.

In the lack of a strategy, you are not only spending more effort on writing content that isn’t benefiting your business, if you are working with a content writer or a content writing agency, you’re also wasting money.

How to quickly create a content writing strategy

Create a content writing strategy

A strategy can be as complex as you want, and as simple as you want. It depends on your business size and the goals you are aspiring to achieve.

What about creating a quick content writing strategy?

When my clients ask me to help them come up with content writing ideas I ask them first to make a list of issues they would like to cover through publishing content on their website or blog. A list of questions they would like to answer. A list of ways they can help their customers and clients.

What helps them stand apart?

Naturally most of the clients want to improve their search engine rankings so, keywords are very important.

Improving search engine rankings is one of the topmost priorities when businesses approach me so when they are preparing a list of issues that they want to cover, I try to cover as many keywords and search terms as possible.

Every piece of content these days must have a clearly-defined objective, if you want to get good search engine rankings.

When you are covering a topic, cover it from all angles. Give it all you have got. Deliver something that people cannot get from other websites.

Every web page and blog post that you publish must have objectives like

Group of keywords to cover
Message to deliver
People to target
What people should do after reading it

Once you have these objectives in front of you when writing content, your writing becomes clear and your bounce rate comes down.

When you have covered everything that currently comes to your mind you will have a good collection of web pages for search engines to crawl and index.

Remember that you want to keep your content relevant to the keywords and search terms you are trying to optimize your website for, because you don’t want people to think that you are misleading them into visiting your website.

As you have more and more web pages and blog posts, you will have more content to link to from within your newer pages.

You also want to focus on quality and purposefulness because you want the others to link to your content.

Focus on creating topic clusters. A topic cluster is a very comprehensive web page or blog post where you have completely, and I mean really completely, covered a topic. A topic cluster web page or blog post easily consists of 3000-4000 words.

Of course, you cannot just fill up bigger web pages and blog posts with random text, it is not going to help you. Only create such clusters when you have enough information to deliver.

Here are some immediate steps you can take to create a content writing strategy:

What is the bigger objective you are aiming for?

I know, the most obvious question, but many people who want to use content to create an online presence, have no clear idea of what their bigger objective is.

Your “bigger” objective is of course a situation where your business does well, and you make lots of money. But this is not an objective for your content writing strategy, it is just a life-related objective.

Clearly define the persona you are going to target

Who are the people who can benefit the most from your content? Why?

Persona is also known as “buyer persona”.

You write content for a defined set of people, who would appreciate what you are doing and who would someday become your customers and clients.

Have you ever done a LinkedIn search? Their interface very nicely allows you to define the personae of people you would like to search. For example, you can target your searches by (or by multiple combinations)

By region
By language
By industry (content marketing, real estate, pharmaceuticals, business consulting, and so on)
By designation/title (CEO, project manager, consultant, speaker)
By gender

There are many other attributes you can use to find conacts in your search. The more targeted you get, the better and precise are your results.

In the same manner you can define a persona before starting to write content for your business and then whenever you are writing content, keep these personae in front of you.

You may like to read Content marketing is basically P2P.

Audit your existing content

Why is it an important part of your content writing strategy?

If you already have lots of content and when you were writing (or getting it written) that content you were not very aware of the need to create optimized, targeted and high-conversion content. That content is just lying around achieving little or even nothing.

But it may have great potential once you have revised it for better search engine rankings and better conversion. This content is something that you already have. It is always better to audit your existing content before going for new content.

Define KPIs specific to your business needs

The key performance indicators tell you how effective your content writing is. Before beginning to write content for your website or blog, make note of the following:

Bounce rate – how much time people currently spend on your website
Web page engagement rate – for how long people stay on individual web pages
Email subscribers – how many email subscribers you currently have
Overall search engine rankings – if you plan to aim for certain keywords and search terms you should note down their current rankings, otherwise, you can note the overall rankings of your website
Conversion rate – how many people do business with you among all the people who come to your website

It’s only when you know where you are currently that you know where you’re going to be in future. After a few months of regular, strategic content writing on your website or blog, you can revisit these KPIs and see if there is an improvement.

Remember that different businesses may have different KPI requirements. For example, for some businesses, getting new email subscribers is more important than improving their bounce rate or their search engine rankings (although, everything is interrelated). So, define your KPIs according to your specific long-term business goals.

Focus on creating topic clusters and content pillars

Coming back to topic clusters, Google loves authoritative, comprehensive content. No matter how good and relevant to your content is, if it is just 300-400 words, it is not going to be able to compete with web pages and blog posts 2000-3000 words long.

It doesn’t mean you can fill up 2000-3000-word web pages and blog posts with trash – these bigger web pages and blog posts need to be packed with relevant and useful information. Quality can never be compromised.

Remember that no matter how much content you publish and how well you write, ultimately it all boils down to how people react to your content.

If your visitors don’t find your content useful, they’re not going to spend much time on your website and if they don’t spend much time, Google thinks that you are not publishing relevant content.

It might not be easy to create comprehensive topic clusters and content pillars every week. Maybe you can target one such piece for every month.

Repurposing your existing content

Although this current blog post primarily focuses on writing content, content these days exists in numerous forms. You have textual content, video content, audio content, slides, images, infographics, GIFs – and many more formats.

You don’t need to focus on every existing format because you may not have your audience using that format. But you will need to find out all possible formats consumed by your audience.

For example, maybe your audience prefers infographics. If you have blog posts, web pages and articles that contain lots of information around a theme, you can re-purpose these blog posts, web pages and articles and create infographics out of them.

If you have lots of instructional content, maybe you can create YouTube videos out of this content? What about slides? What about combining 15-20 blog posts into an e-book?

Is creating a content writing strategy worth your time?

A long time back I remember we used to tell a joke: there is this man who is running with his bike. On his way someone asks him why doesn’t he climb up his bike and ride it instead of running with it? This way he will reach his destination faster. He says he doesn’t have enough time to stop and get onto the bike.

The same sort of state of affairs exists with content writing strategy. While you are spending all that money and time on writing content without a strategy, you can take a breather and start working on a strategy. It may take a month to figure things out, but when you eventually start publishing your content, it will be more effective.

How I generate content writing ideas for different clients

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Getting content writing ideas for clients

It is difficult to come up with content writing ideas, especially on an ongoing basis. This is why when sometimes clients ask me to come up with my own content writing ideas, I charge them extra. Often, writing is easier, but coming up with writing ideas is very difficult and time-consuming.

I normally help my clients with writing topics when I’m working on their content marketing strategy rather than simply providing content.

A successful content marketing strategy cannot be implemented without a comprehensive list of content writing ideas surrounding a particular niche. Before you start writing content you need to know

Why you are writing that content?
Whom are you targeting (your customer or client persona)?
What reaction do you want to elicit from your target audience?
What is your long-term content marketing goal?

It is very important to know these points because otherwise, though content marketing is very promising, you will be simply wasting money and effort if you randomly publish web pages, blog posts, articles and email updates.

What is your purpose of writing content?

Different reasons for writing content

Different content marketing needs may have different reasons for writing/publishing content, and these may include:

Attract more people to your website or blog
- You aim at making your content go viral
- You aim for increasing brand awareness on other websites, blogs and social media platforms
Educate people
- You want to establish yourself as an authority and an expert in your field or industry
- You want to help your customers and clients by providing them information they can use to improve the way they work
- You want to educate your prospective customers and clients so that they are in a better position to use your product or service
Encourage call-to-action
- You want people to click on advertisements published on your website
- You want to build your mailing list and hence want to encourage people to subscribe
- You want people to buy your product or use your service
Increase your general visibility
- You want more people to link to you
- You want people to share your content on their social media profiles
- You want to attract large number of people to your own website or blog
- You want to increase your search engine rankings

Every business can use a strategic mix of all these reasons to publish and write content. If you have a clear idea of these reasons, you can easily come up with lots of topics that can see you through over many weeks and months.

Aside from these, you can also decide whether your content should fulfil a need, should cater to a desire or a want, or simply provide enjoyment.

What keywords do you want to target?

Importance of keywords in SEO content writing

Your keywords – both your primary keywords and related keywords – have a significant bearing on your content writing ideas.

If you have a list of your keywords, then you naturally want to cover them through your content. Only when you write on these keywords search engines like Google will be able to make out what core topic you are trying to cover.

Taking my own example, for my business I have two primary keywords: content writing services and content marketing services.

One way or the other, all my content – web pages, blog posts, graphics, videos – hover around these two primary keywords.

What sort of content can be published on a business website or blog?

On a typical website you can publish

Educational and informative blog posts and articles
Web pages describing your products and services and encouraging people to buy your products and services
Case studies and white papers
Email marketing content
Curated content – useful, helpful, and relevant content gathered from other websites
Testimonials from your customers and clients
Straightforward promotional content
Landing pages
Industry News updates
Your internal corporate updates (hired a new CEO, installed a new enterprise solution, started a new department, released an updated version of your software)

Using the information gathered to generate content writing ideas for a long time

Frankly, you cannot ensure an ever-lasting supply of content writing ideas.

Publishing content for content marketing is a journey and many unpredictable events can happen during your journey, and these events will generate further writing ideas.

But the information presented above can easily give you 40-50 writing ideas for your website.

When I start on a new content writing or content marketing project I try to get as much information as possible from the new client.

The basic purpose is, understanding what the client wants to achieve.

He or she must have a clear idea because if he or she doesn’t have an idea, it will be very difficult for him or her to make it clear to me what sort of content I should write and what sort of audience I should target.

Initially I begin with trying to understand what sort of questions and apprehensions people may have regarding my client.

What would stop them from doing business with my client and what information should be provided to them to allay their fears.

Together with the client, I prepare a long list of topics (preferably using the exact language used by the client’s target customers and clients) that should be of interest to my client’s prospective customers and clients.

If the client already has some existing content I go through it and make a list of strengths and weaknesses of that existing content. Sometimes new content writing ideas can come from existing content.

Also, existing content can be repurposed, and new content can be generated out of it.

Sometimes, same content can be regenerated using different formats, for example, an old blog post can be easily turned into a slide or an animated GIF, or even a YouTube video.

You may also like to read 15 ways you never run out of blogging ideas.

For an ongoing content marketing assignment, I also use Google alerts to get alerts on the latest content being written on my client’s profession. I also use content curation tools like Flipboard, Twitter feeds and Feedly.

Google search too is a great way of finding new content topics. When you search on Google, it gives you some suggestions that people have used to find similar information. When I searched for “content writing tips”, in addition to bringing up the results for my search string, it also gave me the following suggestions:

How to write content writing samples
Content writing samples PDF
Content writing tips for beginners
Content writing tips examples
How to write content for project

There are more examples. Even when you click one of these suggestions Google gives you more suggestions.

You don’t need to generate topics out of every Google search suggestion, but they give you a very good idea of what people are looking for.

Checking Google trends is also a good way of knowing whether a particular content writing idea is worth trying for or not.

Google Trends for content marketing and content writing

Closely observing Google Trends will also let you know that the topics that you want to cover are used mostly in which region. For example, if you compare “content marketing” with “content writing” in Google Trends, you will notice that not many people are looking for content writing outside of India. Very few people are looking for content marketing in India.

For every client I have an “Ideas” file where I keep collecting all the good ideas I come across on my own and from different sources. The list in this ideas file is not definite; it keeps changing. I keep modifying existing ideas and adding new ideas as long as they conform to

The keywords that need to be used
The messaging that needs to be conveyed
The end result

I also arrange content writing ideas in an Excel sheet in different columns: Long blog posts, short blog posts, long web pages, short web pages and social media updates.

Sometimes my clients help too. For example, if they have multiple employees some of their employees come up with great content writing ideas because they directly dealing with their customers and clients, constantly.

Is it easier to come up with content writing ideas for one’s clients?

Compared to those who don’t write content regularly, and professionally?

Obviously. When your write content for a living you get into the habit of finding content writing opportunities everywhere.

If you hire me and I know you are going to pay me $35 for every piece of content I give you, my brain is constantly on an alert, even when I’m not aware of it.

How to write content for the Google RankBrain System

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Content writing for Google RankBrain

For a couple of years now Google has been using its RankBrain system to rank your content.

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps the Google algorithm in ranking various links and websites.

Although it hasn’t totally taken over the Hummingbird algorithm (the current ranking algorithm that Google uses) many SEO experts are claiming that the Google ranking algorithm derives almost 30% of its influence from RankBrain.

What exactly is Google RankBrain?

What is Google RankBrain?

It’s an artificial intelligence system, and just like any contemporary artificial intelligence, it learns itself. It sometimes writes and modifies the ranking algorithm on its own.

The overall ranking process at Google is handled by the Hummingbird algorithm. RankBrain is a component of that algorithm that contributes towards assigning ranks to different links according to their relevance to the searcher’s intent.

Just like RankBrain, there are multiple components in the Hummingbird algorithm that analyze content.

Panda, Penguin and Payday components are used to fight spam. Pigeon is used to improve local search results.

Then, there is a Top Heavy component of the Hummingbird algorithm that assigns negative marking to ad-heavy pages.

To reward you for your mobile-friendly pages, the ranking algorithm uses the Mobile Friendly component.

Whereas conventional SEO is based on the type of keywords you have used when writing your content and the quality of backlinks, RankBrain calculates the relevance of your content according to its own interpretation, according to what it thinks should be ranked rather than according to how the web page of the blog post has been “optimized”.

You must have read it at multiple places – even I have mentioned it multiple times on my blog – that when you are writing content, focus on the “intent” of the searcher instead of simply creating content based on your keywords.

The intent is what matters to RankBrain.

Unlike conventional ranking methods, RankBrain doesn’t rank web pages according to predefined formula.

It modifies the rank according to the interpretive need of the user.

It practically thinks like the human brain. It interprets meaning and gives you the best search result according to your particular need.

For example, if someone searches for “what are the best shows this week on Amazon Prime?” RankBrain will show the latest results no matter how well an article or blog post you wrote on the topic last month and how many people have linked to it.

Even if in terms of SEO practices your link should show up on page 10 or page 20 of the search results, if it is fresh and fresh content needs to be shown, your link will appear on the first page, even at the top.

So, how do you write content according to the Google RankBrain system?

How to write content for Google RankBrain

To be frank, there is no particular way you can optimize your content for the RankBrain system.

As mentioned above, RankBrain doesn’t rank your content according to some predetermined parameters.

But it doesn’t mean you cannot benefit from RankBrain.

Content writing for RankBrain is very matter of fact: does your content solve a purpose? If it does, it will enjoy good search engine rankings.

The age-old wisdom that your content should provide the needed information to your human visitors still stands as in fact, such systems are developed by Google and other search engines to make sure that content creators create content that is relevant to people rather than machines.

When content is specifically created for machines it is open to manipulation. This is why Google has incorporated multiple algorithmic components to make sure that people don’t try to game the system.

How to make sure you enjoy good rankings in the times of artificial intelligence?

Search engine companies like Google aren’t creating sophisticated algorithms to stop your content from ranking well. They’re creating the sophisticated algorithms to make sure that content that deserves to rank well, does rank well.

So, instead of worrying about getting good ranks, focus on the quality, the relevance and the purposefulness of your content.

Do keywords matter when you are trying to optimize your content for the Google RankBrain system?

Not necessarily, but it doesn’t mean you stop neglecting them.

What are keywords after all? They are part of the language that you use to write your content.

Take for example this blog post. I’m writing about RankBrain, so I’m referring to it repeatedly, not purposely, but contextually. I’m not trying hard to use it repeatedly. It’s just happening.

Another focus of this post is content writing. I’m trying to explain to you how to write content that can convince the RankBrain ranking system.

Obviously these two terms are going to occur in my writing more than once, even multiple times. This tells Google that the foci of my blog post are RankBrain and content writing. There is nothing wrong in that.

But don’t just focus on your primary keywords. Use LSI keywords. Use semantic keywords. Even use the trending keywords if they are related to your topic.

Keywords matter when you’re writing content, but just make sure that they are there naturally and not stuffed. Quality, is what matters the most.

Focus on a better user behavior vis-à-vis your content writing if you want to make RankBrain happy

Since RankBrain avoids depending on conventional SEO benchmarks, it depends more on user behavior vis-à-vis your content. It observes the following while ranking your content:

What is your bounce rate?:

How many people stick to your website after finding your links on Google?

Do they immediately leave your link and come back to Google or do they linger on your website because they find useful information on it?

If your bounce rate is low RankBrain likes your content and improves its rankings.

How many people interact with your content?:

If your content is useful people engage with it.

They link to your content. They share your content with their followers and friends on social media and social networking websites. They even sometimes re-purpose your content.

The more people interact with your con tent, the better rankings it gets through RankBrain.

How in-depth is your content?:

The days of highly narrow content pieces are gone.

Remember when people used to create dedicated web pages and blog posts for every keyword combination for the same phrase? It is no longer acceptable.

You need to cover all your keyword combinations through a single web page or blog post, and this means, writing in-depth content pieces.

When you’re writing on a topic, cover practically every aspect of the topic within a single blog post or web page.

Is your content writing conversational?:

Conversational content writing is important because a greater number of people are using voice search and when people use voice search, they normally use a conversational tone.

Write shorter sentences. Avoid writing very complicated paragraphs. Try to capture just one thought in a single paragraph.

All in all, the more human friendly content you write, the better it is suitable for Google RankBrain.