Why quality content writing matters and how to maintain quality

Importance of quality content for your business blog

Do you think quality content writing matters? As a business vying to promote yourself through the power of content marketing, how seriously do you take the quality of content that you publish on your blog or website?

As a professional content writer I am routinely approached by clients looking for highly cheap content. This is also because they think that if they suddenly publish lots of content covering every possible keyword their search engine rankings will improve, but at the same time, they either don’t have the needed budget or they don’t have the inclination to spend enough money on getting the content written (because they aren’t sure whether it is going to work or not). Since they don’t want to spend much money on the content (due to whatever reason) they are often fine with publishing inferior-quality content, thinking that once people are drawn to their website, somehow they will end up doing business with them (the same sort of people are fine with spamming people with emails). Unfortunately (unfortunately for them, fortunately for people who take content writing seriously and would like to maintain a reasonable level of quality) this rarely works and even if lots of people end up on their websites, very few actually do business with them.

Regular interactions on social media and social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may give you an impression that people aren’t much worked up about what sort of grammar you use while expressing yourself. In fact, people who care about grammar in casual conversations are often termed as “Grammar Nazis”. Then why does quality content writing matter especially when it comes to promoting your business and generating leads and sales?

In the business world, quality means seriousness. If you are putting effort in producing quality content writing, it shows that you are serious about your business, and you also respect your customers and clients. If you don’t respect them, you don’t care about the sort of language they are exposed to. If you are not serious about getting business from them, you’re not going to spend much effort and money on getting quality content for your website and blog. You are fine with publishing mediocre content because you anyway have no confidence in your business. This is the message that you send when you neglect quality content writing.

So it has got nothing to do with how well you can write and what an impression you can make on your customers and clients. It is about conveying a message that you take your business very seriously, you take your customers and clients very seriously, and this is why, whatever it is they come across on your website, it is of high quality. When you respect your website visitors (or email recipients) it means you respect your own business and when you respect your own business, you take utmost care that whatever is present on your website is of good quality.

How to maintain the quality of content writing on your blog, website and emails

You can take care of the following in case you want to publish quality content:

Hire a professional content writer if you are not comfortable with the language you need to write in.
Avoid excessive use of jargon.
Always keep the central purpose of your writing in your mind if you are writing yourself and instruct your content writer to do the same in case he or she is writing content for you.
Although you don’t need to be a “grammar Nazi” be mindful of your grammar and don’t commit mistakes that reek of carelessness and ill-education.
Try to write in the language of the persona you are targeting.
Do proper research when writing.
Use a conversational style.
Continuously solve problems of your prospective and current customers and clients when writing content for your website or blog.
Use proper formatting such as headlines and bulleted points to organise main points of your content to make browsing and scanning easier for your readers.
Use interlinking (hyper linking to other important pages and blog posts on your website) to avoid content duplication if you need to explain a single point from within multiple pages and blog posts.
Try to deal with just one topic on one web page or blog post.
Use smaller paragraphs whenever possible and express just one idea.
Use images that help your readers understand your content better.
Thoroughly proof read before publishing.

For effective content marketing you must know your audience

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There are three reasons why you publish and market your content: to improve your search engine rankings, to provide useful content to your target audience so that your business or your brand becomes familiar to them, or for both. Whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or increase brand awareness, you need to know what sort of information your target audience seeks (related to your business) and then publish and market that content.

Exactly how much time do you spend understanding your core audience before publishing content on your website or blog? I always ask this question from my clients before starting new projects. I need to understand for whom I’m writing. Sure, I’m writing for my client in terms of my business, but for whom am I actually writing? I’m writing for my client’s customers and clients.

In broad terms everybody knows who should be the target audience. For example, I am publishing content on my blog and website to attract people who would like to hire me as their content writer, preferably for content marketing purposes. I’m not selling content writing books. I’m not trying to earn ad revenue by publishing content writing and content marketing tutorials. No, I’m trying to attract people who would like to hire me as a content writer. This can be a big difference and I need to constantly keep it in mind while writing and marketing my own content.

I gained this experience while trying to promote my web design business (in the early 2000’s) through content marketing – at that time very few people talk about content marketing but I knew publishing content on other websites meant greater visibility for my own website. But a tiny mistake that I committed was that I ended up writing lots of content that drew only those people to my website who wanted to learn web design. It wasn’t attracting clients who would need a web designer.

In order to understand what your core audience wants, you first need to understand what core audience you want to draw. As I mentioned above, I didn’t want to draw people who just like to learn about content writing and content marketing. I wanted to draw people who would like to hire me as a content writer and content marketing consultant. This is a broad category. I can go deeper and deeper – maybe I would like to attract small businesses because they are easier to handle compared to big businesses. I’m comfortable writing about technology, so I may try to draw technology-based small businesses that are looking for a content writer and a content marketer. And so on.

It’s not just about knowing what your core audience wants, it’s also about constantly being aware of what sort of audience you want to attract.

This is also called creating a persona for your content marketing – what sort of person should come to your website? What should be his or her requirements? What is he or she looking for vis-à-vis your website?

In most of the cases even when you know what sort of people you must draw to your website in order to increase your business, it is difficult to know what such people look for. This is the question this Content Marketing Institute blog post answers by interviewing various content marketing experts. Although there are many pearls of wisdom shared by these experts, the advise I can most relate to is given by Rand Fishkin of Moz.

Talk, watch, think

I’m actually not a big fan of personas. But, I do love spending a lot of time with real customers, hearing their frustrations, talking to them about the industry and its challenges, seeing what speakers are talking about on stages, watching the blogosphere and social media to see what’s resonating and being discussed, and generally being part of our customers’ world. I also love doing the work myself – being my own customer and feeling the same pain our customers feel. Those experiences give me a much better sense of the field than a persona

Content marketing, social media marketing and SEO are different but connected

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It is normally assumed these days that content marketing, social media marketing and SEO are almost the same thing. They are interconnected but they are quite different and you can execute your content marketing, social media marketing and SEO strategies separately.

Being a content writer my personal opinion is your social media presence and your SEO are by-products of how you do your content marketing. It all depends on your content. I’m not saying this because I’m biased towards the importance of content. After all, what is SEO? It is the appearance of your content in search engine results according to its relevance. Similarly, what is social media marketing? It is about posting quality content under your profiles and continuously engaging people who follow you or connect with you, primarily due to the quality of your content.

But if an online marketer packages all these online marketing tactics into one solution, I don’t think he or she is doing anything wrong. Although you can reap benefits from them as separate entities, when combined, they can give you far greater results. Take for instance focusing just on content marketing. It involves publishing high quality and relevant content on an ongoing basis and then making sure that you leverage the strengths of all the channels available to you in order to spread your content as far as possible, among your niche audience. What are these so-called channels that you use in order to distribute your content? These may be

Search engines
Social media and social networking websites
Blogs and websites that link to your content
Blogs and websites where your content is published, attributed to you
Paid advertising to promote your content
Your mailing list

In order to promote content you need to have content. In order to reap the benefits of content marketing and content promotion, the content must be such as it should instil confidence among people who are drawn to it initially. This blog post explains in detail what’s the difference between content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.

70% of Internet content will be video?

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I found this interesting visual on this link:

70% content on the Internet will be video content

Being a content writing doesn’t worry me that people will be accessing with your content more than textual content? It doesn’t. Writing will always be needed. Yes, more people are consuming with your content because one, more video content is available and two, connectivity is improving all over the world. Even in Indian villages people are accessing YouTube videos and sharing them with each other and posting them on Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean people don’t need written content.

Well, I don’t have much to delve into this topic. It’s just that for a very long time I haven’t published anything on this blog and I wanted to make a beginning somewhere and when I came across this visual, I thought I should post it on my blog.

The actual link though is quite interesting. It talks about how MasterCard used content marketing to expand its brand presence by creating videos that emotionally touch people rather than thrusting their marketing pitch upon them.

25 reasons your business needs content marketing

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Content marketing is one of the biggest advantages the Internet has brought to small and medium-sized businesses, but it also has a drawback – very few people understand it, and it takes time, effort and strategy to actually experience its true power. Another problem with content marketing is that it is mostly related to writing and there are very few who take writing seriously.

On the other hand, people take SEO very seriously because they think getting higher search engine rankings is a big deal. Sure, it is a big deal, but getting higher rankings doesn’t guarantee success in terms of increasing your sales or getting more leads.

I often say that the need to implement a well-defined content marketing strategy is same as actually recognising the impact of global warming and taking corrective measures. Very few individuals in this world take global warming as seriously as it should be because they think it is some distant problem. Since content marketing takes time to show some real results and a great amount of consistency, one, people are unable to understand it and two, even those who can understand it, find it quite overwhelming, despite the fact that there isn’t more effective way of marketing your business than content marketing.

Why your business needs content marketing

Here are 25 reasons:

It is cheaper compared to traditional advertising and marketing (sometimes even free if you don’t count time as money)
It is much more effective than traditional advertising and marketing
It helps you consolidate your online presence
It makes your brand relatable and recognisable
It encourages people to do business with you rather than convincing them to do business with you
It organically improves your search engine rankings
It gets you more qualified traffic from social networking websites
It helps you engage your prospective customers and clients meaningfully
You get repeat traffic to your website
Your online presence becomes more authoritative if you continuously write about a particular subject and people can use your writing to improve their life or their business
Content marketing is self-sustaining – a web page or blog post that crosses a particular threshold level brings you business for months and even years without you having to spend any money
As your content marketing succeeds, its cost moves towards zero
It increases your sales as, the more people read your content the more they are eager to do business with you
Content marketing generates more leads for you
As more and more people link to your content you generate multiple traffic sources and consequently, you have to depend less on search engine whims
With content marketing, as a small business you can compete with big business by making your content more approachable and personal
It helps you build long-term relationships with your existing and future customers and clients
It helps you create a helpful resource on your website or blog continuously drawing people to your business
Content marketing gives you an edge because most of your competitors don’t have the needed patience to succeed at it
It encourages your customers to reach out to you and share your content on their own social networking timelines
When you encourage your employees to create content for your business website it improves their confidence and makes them more productive
As an independent consultant or service provider, as your authority increases due to content marketing, you can charge more for your services
As your audience feels more educated, they will be more inclined towards doing business with you rather than another website that doesn’t publish helpful content
Every piece of content you create and distribute is an invaluable business asset
Sustained content marketing builds you a broadcasting channel with your own dedicated audience through which you can carry out PR campaigns and product promotion campaigns without having to depend on third-party broadcasting channels

For medium-sized and big businesses, I personally believe that the 25th point is the most important. Content marketing helps you build a broadcasting channel which very few businesses have.