Writing a goal-oriented vision statement

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Writing a goal-oriented vision statement

Every corporate website has a vision statement. I encourage even smaller businesses to have a vision statement because it gives an idea to prospective customers and clients what the business stands for, what are its values and how it plans to chart its growth path. I know, lots of corporate stuff, but what I want to say is a vision statement is not only reassuring to your customers and clients, it also helps you stay focused. Again, what a mean to say is writing a good vision statement is serious stuff. So even if it takes a couple of weeks, it’s worth it.

Though, as a content writer, before you start worrying, I don’t take that much time to come up with a good vision statement provided I have all the base material needed for it from you.

What is a vision statement?

The explanation depends on what you understand by “vision”. A generic explanation is, an ability to decide your future actions based on your current and predicted capabilities. So when you say, “this person has a vision” it means the person knows what he or she is going to do vis-a-vis himself or herself and people associated with him or her in the next 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.

As a business, your vision statement tells your customers and clients why you will still be existing in the coming months and years and what will you be achieving by then. It takes into account where you are currently, how you recognise and perceive your capabilities and how your inherent qualities as well as the resources at your disposal are going to help you achieve what you intend to achieve in the coming months and years. When you lucidly write this down and publish it somewhere, it becomes your vision statement.

What is a goal-oriented vision statement in terms of content writing?

In terms of content writing every page that you create, every blog post that you publish, needs to have a goal. Okay, it doesn’t always happen that way, but this is the underlying philosophy, that every action of yours must carry an intended goal. For instance, why am I writing this blog post? What do I want you to do after reading this blog post? I’m not going to talk about it right now, but I must have something in mind otherwise why am I sitting here spending my time?

Just as any piece of content on your website, the web page that contains your vision statement, hence, must also have a goal.

Your business website is often accessed by your customers and clients (former, current and prospective) as well as your employees. A goal-oriented vision statement gives an idea to your prospective customers and clients of your present state as well as your future plans. If I come across your vision statement I can know how you feel about your business, how you plan to grow it and sustain it and how you place yourself vis-à-vis the challenges and opportunities that you currently face or have. I will either feel confident or indifferent after reading your vision statement. I should feel confident.

Before doing business with you I must know you have a direction and purpose and it makes sense to stick with you for a long time. You’re not here just for a few weeks or a few months. Even after a few years you’re still going to be around. Every customer and client needs that assurance. This assurance must be the goal of your vision statement.

The vision statement on your website also gives a sense of purpose and direction to your employees. They know what you want your organisation to achieve. They know that you understand your current problems and challenges and you also recognise the current opportunities and advantages.

How to write a goal-oriented vision statement

  1. Keep it short: Don’t try to write a blog post or an essay on your vision statement. Keep it around 2-3 sentences or at the most a couple of paragraphs.
  2. Write down the goal first, somewhere: It’s very important to know what is the goal of your vision statement. Whom do you want to communicate to? Your customers and clients? Your employees? Your stakeholders like business partners, investors, shareholders or suppliers?
  3. What is your ultimate reason for existence: Why your business exists? What do you intend to achieve? Whom do you want to serve? Why?
  4. How do you plan to expand your business: Growth is a natural evolutionary trait. You begin to stagnate if you don’t grow. Consciously or unconsciously everybody acknowledges that and knows that. Having a growth plan means you’re going to take all necessary steps to make sure you get more customers and clients and your service improves. This is reassuring to your prospective customers and clients.
  5. Based on what values you plan to expand your business: Values are like the moral parameters your organisation works within. It tells people you’re not going to compromise on fundamental values. You are not going to cheat the stakeholders and people who deal with you while trying to grow.

Vision statements normally have the same sort of language for every business and you can easily copy/paste text from other websites but this is not recommended. Your vision statement should be unique to your business and people can see through if you’re simply copying others.

How to make your content marketing more effective in 2015

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Content Marketing in 2015

By specifically saying 2015 I don’t mean there is something cosmically special about the year, what I mean is which currently available opportunities you can use to make your content marketing more effective than it was the previous year, that is, in 2014.

We are constantly evolving and when we are continuously striving at something, we hope to evolve, naturally. So if we have been doing something average the better the previous year, we try to make it better this year and then hope to improve more the next year. Of course there can be ups and downs and this is a civilizational reality, but our constant effort is to keep moving upwards.

So how can you make content marketing more effective this year? Here are a few things you can do – some of the actions you carry out today are as effective today as they were yesterday and as they are going to be tomorrow or day after tomorrow, and some are the outcome of the technologies and trends available this year.

Focus on your audience rather than search engines

Quality and readability of your content matter the most and then the rest follow. Effective content marketing means drawing the right people to your website and then making sure that they do business with you or at least are open to frequent communication (that is, you are able to generate leads). This is possible only when your content serves well. It delivers what it promises. People come to your website with an expectation (if they aren’t just stumbling upon it by mistake) and if that expectation is not met they feel disappointed and soon forget about you. On the other hand if they find what they had expected, they will be thrilled, they will remember you, they will do business with you and they will also recommend you. Don’t worry too much about stuffing keywords and creating expressions simply to incorporate your keywords. Use natural language and provide value.

Create valuable content on an ongoing basis

There is no dearth of valuable content on the Internet despite all the noise constantly being created. Some people are pretty good out there and you need to compete with them whether you like it or not. Quality is given and you aren’t even in the game if you cannot publish quality content. The challenge creating quality content on an ongoing basis. Here is why you constantly need to create valuable and quality content:

  1. Someone out there is constantly creating more content than you
  2. Newly created pages and blog posts are ranked higher than older blog posts and articles
  3. People and search engines are constantly looking for fresh content
  4. Constantly publishing quality content increases your knowledge base
  5. The more fresh content you have the more content you get indexed by search engines
  6. Fresh content focused on a niche topic brings people to your website on an ongoing basis (repeat traffic is more important than unique traffic)
  7. You get to cover your primary keywords, secondary keywords and long-term keywords and every other possible combination without spamming existing pages
  8. You engage people when they come to your website
  9. You provide people opportunity to share your links on social media and social networking websites
  10. People trust businesses that regularly share their knowledge and wisdom

Broadcast your content using appropriate channels

Every publisher on the Internet is a potential broadcaster – you don’t have to be a newspaper or TV channel or a magazine to broadcast your content. When you post your links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you are broadcasting your content. When you are (or someone else) pins your images on Pinterest, your content is being broadcast.

Content marketing doesn’t just involve publishing articles and blog posts on your own website or blog. You need to broadcast your content. You need to spread it around. How do you do that?

You can use the latest social media and social networking websites (I’m not saying just Facebook and Twitter because well, every year you have something new). People will follow you for the sort of content you post so you can easily build an audience. If I’m interested in content marketers and if you constantly post links on content marketing, and if those links are valuable, I will certainly follow you. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer app to broadcast and schedule your content in various social networking websites. There is so much content on the Internet that it doesn’t make sense to simply publish it and leave it like that. You need to make sure that the right audience can access your content.

Don’t ignore SEO

The good old SEO isn’t going anywhere as long as there are search engines. The way they index and rank your content may differ from year to year, and sometimes even month-to-month, it matters how the gauge your content and then rank it accordingly. The basic tenets of SEO remain the same:

  1. Create content for readers rather than search engines
  2. Create lots of focused content so that your website is known as a specialty area
  3. Create as much quality content as possible
  4. Encourage people to share your content on social networking websites because the more your content is shared, the better it is for your SEO
  5. Become an authority figure. Known personalities on the Internet somehow enjoy better search engine rankings
  6. Organize your content in a search engine-friendly manner. Appropriately use headlines, hyperlinks and bulleted lists

Maintain a mailing list

This maintaining mailing seems like an advice from the early 2000’s but email still rules the roost contrary to all the negative predictions. No matter how widespread social media and social networking become, when it comes to actually doing some serious work, it’s still the email people depend on. It’s the best way to reach your target audience on an ongoing basis without annoying them. Use double opt in – let people confirm that they have actually allowed you to send them email messages.

Just as in any other case, it’s on the basis of the quality of your content that your mailing list is going to succeed. Remember that the benefits of building a maintaining list cannot be reaped in a short span of time – in fact, content marketing itself takes its own good time to give you some good results and prove its effectiveness. Nonetheless, it is one of the most effective ways of marketing your products and services on the Internet and also, the cheapest.

Be awesome at your work

Now, what can beat this? Don’t let them walk all over you, but make your customers and clients as happy as possible. Provide them the best product and the best service and the best after sales support and they will not only become your customers and clients for life, they will also get you new customers and clients. Be awesome and write about your awesomeness on a daily basis. Share it with the world. Boast about it.

Using Pinterest as your content marketing tool

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Content Marketing with Pinterest

Pinterest can be a good content marketing tool for your business. Although I write content for my clients I often advise them to not to stick to just one form of content and explore all the arenas available. If you haven’t used Pinterest much it’s a social media platform that allows people to post images, importantly, from the webpages or blog posts they are currently visiting. Suppose you are on this page (on my blog) and there is an image on this page. If you hover your cursor over the image you will see a Pinterest icon. This allows you to pin this image to your Pinterest dashboard. Most of the dashboards are concentrated collection of images and they are highly focused. What’s the big deal?

When you pin the image to your dashboard the image is automatically hyperlinked to my blog post. If someone clicks the image on your dashboard, that person will be brought to this blog post. This is how traffic is generated from Pinterest. This is why it is very important to have at least one image on your webpage or blog post that someone would like to pin.

Everybody on the Internet likes to share interesting stuff. Sharing videos using YouTube is a complicated process and contrary to that, sharing images with people using Pinterest is quite easy. It just takes a couple of seconds. You can either upload images existing on your computer or you can simply share them from the website where they have been originally published.

This slightly old blog post claims that by 2012 some websites were getting more traffic from Pinterest than Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. By that year it had also become the second highest referrer of traffic just after Facebook.

What sort of websites can benefit from Pinterest content marketing?

On the surface, mostly websites that draw an audience interested in visual content and that too, mostly images and photographs. The first such websites that come to my mind are, fashion websites, entertainment, travel, interior decorators, accessories, cooking and food related items, beauty products, hobbies and crafts, education and such – websites that can convey ideas and messages visually. But then these days any industry can use graphics and images to drive in a point, for example infographics.

In order to use Pinterest, as I just mentioned above, use interesting images and visuals along with written content. Focus on images people would like to share. Just make sure that people can easily pin your images on the dashboards without much effort.

Writing reader-friendly content automatically improves SEO

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Reader friendly content writing is good for SEO

Want to improve your SEO? The first thing that you need to do is write reader-friendly content because this is the sort of content that is ranked higher by search engines whether it is Google or any other. Through your content if you solely concentrate on SEO, you neither improve your search engine rankings (in some cases you do, but it hardly pays) nor your conversion rate. Coming to the point, here is how you make your content reader-friendly:

  1. Create a meaningful title for the webpage or the blog post: Many content marketing experts and established copywriters believe that the title of your webpage or the blog post is as important as the body text because on the Internet grabbing someone’s attention is very important. If people don’t come to your page, if your title does not draw them in, there is no chance of them ever reading your webpage or blog post. This can be achieved by writing a compelling and to-the-point title. Writing a great title tells people what your blog post or webpage represents and has to offer. The search engines make out what your webpage or blog post intends to communicate by analysing your title. Spend ample amount of time writing your title.
  2. Make sure the body text has high-quality and relevant content: Unless people really like your content it is never going to enjoy better SEO, so make sure that your written content solves the purpose for which it was written. If your title says that your webpage or blog post solves a particular problem then actually solve that problem rather than simply beating around the bush and leaving the reader hanging. Provide the solution. Help people. Deliver what you have promised.
  3. Be mindful of the language that you use: Preferably you should write in the language people use but sometimes some writers go overboard and end up using really crude language that doesn’t look good on a business webpage or blog post. When I say use the language that people use what I mean is, use the sort of language people use to find your product or service on the search engine. For example, I need to decide whether I should write more content about “content writer”, “content writing services”, “web content writing” or “need business writer” and such. They don’t necessarily have to be the same words because these days even related and contextual words can get you higher rankings even when you have not used the main keywords. The gist is, neither dumbify your writing nor make it too hard to read.
  4. Use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs: Remember that when you are writing commercial content you’re not showcasing your literary skills and all the prestidigitation that you can do with words and phrases. The sole purpose of your writing is improving sales and leads. So use concise sentences that are stick to the meaning. This will also help those who are reading your content from their mobile devices.
  5. Make your content scannable by using headlines and bulleted points: Organize your main thoughts using headlines and bullets. Take for example these bullets that I have just now used. Even if you don’t read the paragraphs you can just read the highlighted bullet points and you can make out what I’m trying to say. Your headlines and bullet points are the regions where the search engines quickly go through to find relevant information and then evaluate your content accordingly. It also makes it easier for people who don’t want to read the whole thing and just want to scan your material.
  6. Link to existing content without compromising the wholesomeness of your current page or blog post: Since many people might be reading your content using their phones and tablets avoid using lots of links to other pieces of content at the cost of the meaning of your current webpage or blog post. Use the hyperlinks only when the topic is totally different and it would help your readers learn more but if they don’t want to click or tap the hyperlink they shouldn’t miss anything.

Why reader-friendly content improves your SEO?

Why do you want to use a search engine like Google? It is because in most of the cases you are able to find what you’re looking for and you also like the quality of the content that comes up on the results page. You wouldn’t be happy with the search engine if you rarely find high-quality content. So Google has to constantly think more about its users and less about people trying to promote their services using the search engine because you cannot force people to use your search engine but if many people use your search engine you can always force businesses to adhere to your guidelines. Most of the major search engines make it a point – through their algorithms and ranking patterns – that you make your content as reader-friendly as possible and if you keep on creating high-quality reader-friendly content they rank your content well, automatically improving your SEO.

Many clients hire me to create SEO content. They give me SEO titles and a list of keywords and they want me to write content around those titles and keywords. For a while I have also promoted my SEO content writing services but in reality, when I’m writing SEO content I’m simply writing high-quality reader-friendly content. The rankings of my clients improve and so does their conversion rate.

How does targeting work in content marketing

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Better targeting with content marketing

Your content marketing needs to target a particular audience if you want to experience success. I think this is a fundamental fact and everybody knows that. The problem is, how does this targeting work? How do you know whom to target and then target them with content marketing?

Even the “whom” part is quite easy. I sell my content writing services to people who are looking for high-quality content in order to improve their conversion rate and if possible, also to improve their search engine rankings. In my particular case, the problem is my niche is not clearly defined. Everybody who has a business on the Internet needs compelling content. So whom do I target? Again, people who are looking for high-quality content to improve their conversion rate and these people may have any sort of business (as long as that business is legitimate and truly serves people).

Targeting is very important and the more narrowly you can target, the better are your prospects and the greater is your expertise. I’m good at writing content for IT companies, web design companies and personal development agencies. Of late I have also been writing content for realtors, companies that deal with employee background checks and accounting firms and my clients have been pretty happy with the work. This gives me confidence in targeting these particular niches. If I target these, I can be pretty sure that even if not many businesses give me work, people working in these areas will definitely appreciate what I have to offer.

How do I target these people with content marketing?

Once you have figured out whom to target, you start creating and disseminating content about these niches. If I want to attract realtors I will write about how my content writing services are helping realtors get more customers. To create multiple blog posts and articles I may cite examples of various realtors who are doing great business because of my content writing services (with their permission of course). I can also talk about the various problems I come across while creating content for creating services and then how I deal with these problems. It can be as creative as it gets.

Targeting with content marketing means relating your service with your target audience and creating lots of content around that. This will also help you improve your search engine rankings. For example, make a list of keywords that involve your target audience and then also create a list of keywords that involve your own business and then combine these keywords to create blog topics, webpages and articles.

Of course content marketing doesn’t just mean writing blog posts, articles and webpages on your website. You need to make sure that the content that you create and publish reaches the right audience and for that you have to use the right platforms. For some, LinkedIn works. For some, it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a combination of these. Some prefer to target search engines instead. It depends on where your target audience is. You create content that caters to these audiences and then promote that content using the channels used by these audiences.