Increase your influence with your content

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Especially on the Internet people need to trust you, respect your opinion or your judgment before they show some eagerness to do business with you. This is primarily because they might be sitting halfway across the globe with no idea whether you are real or phony. They cannot even look at your face or the place you do business from.

In order to become familiar to them you need to do something that draws them to you on a regular basis and the best way of doing that is publishing authoritative or interesting content. Two things need to happen here:

  • Your content needs to be regular
  • Your content has to be of great quality — it must deliver some value

So that people trust you and become familiar with your presence, your thoughts and opinions you need them to come to your website or your blog repeatedly. Now, they are not going to visit your blog or website just because you want them to. You have to give them a reason. You need to constantly publish content that delivers value. You need to provide what they are looking for. You have to figure out what your target audience wants and then publish content accordingly.

This is where content strategy plays an important role. It helps you identify your target audience and then formulate and publish content accordingly.

How does this help you increase your influence?

By regularly publishing content on the related topic you become an authority figure. Without charging you are providing content that is valuable. You are solving people’s problems without charging them. It doesn’t mean you are targeting freeloaders it’s just that in order to build an audience you need to create a presence and nobody is going to pay you for creating a presence for yourself. You need to do this on your own without expecting people to pay you. You can also take such an example from television broadcasting. Have you observed how a new TV channel does not show advertisements? It’s not that they are following a no-advertisements policy. In order to get advertisements first they have to build an audience and they can only build an audience if they broadcast quality programs over a long period of time.

When you publish content on a specific topic for a long duration you develop a consistent audience. They visit your website or blog regularly, they bookmark it, they subscribe to your RSS feeds and e-mail updates and they eagerly click on the links belonging to you whenever they come across them on social media and networking websites. When this begins to happen you have increased your influence. Once you have increased your influence people are ready to do business with you.

While writing content focus on the why part

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“Why” is a very important part of your content writing and copywriting process because very often this is the first expression that crops up in your visitor’s mind as soon as you tell him or her to buy your product or service. When you focus on “why” you highlight the tangible benefits of your product or service and not superficial features.

Many of my clients, when they send their briefs for me to go through, they get so much embroiled with terminologies and rhetorical claims that sometimes I am not even able to make out exactly what they intend to offer to their customers or clients. This can be a big business killer. When you are not even able to tell your customers or clients what you’re selling how are you going to sell it? The end user is least interested in going through the nitty-gritty of your technology, he or she simply wants something that enables him or her do better in life and in business.

That is why in the page title and the first paragraph I focus on the problem and the solution my client’s business offers. It is not necessary to ponder over the name of the business or where it comes from or what a great team it has. I concentrate on, “Is this the problem you have? This is how we can solve it.” This is the “why” part.

This is the sure shot way of grabbing your visitor’s attention. Assuming that when people arrived at your website they are not fooling around and are looking for a solution it pays to straightaway come to the point and address the problem. If I am looking for an e-book reader I immediately want to know whether you have the one I’m looking for or not.

Does your content tell a story?

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We all love stories don’t we? They excite us, engage us, attract us, fascinate us, antagonize us and motivate us. Whenever there is a story we have readers and listeners. Why do stories captivate as so much?

We can relate to them. They strum the chords of our emotions, attitudes, sense of wisdom and life experiences. We share the emotions present in the story one way or the other. That is why we all have our own indigenous folk tales, anecdotes and historical stories; they bind us together.

Stories can exist in any form. They don’t always need to adhere to a particular form of narration. Even a journalistic account of some event unfolding can be a very engaging and enlightening story. This is precisely why free press is curbed by authoritarian and repressive regimes — effective storytelling can move people into doing things they otherwise would never do.

The same concept can be applied to content writing and copywriting. Whenever you are writing you are trying to move people, you are trying to make them do something. Create a story around the product or service you are offering or describing so that people can empathize with you and really absorb its importance.

When you tell a story instead of a monosyllabic harangue about how great your offer is you get your readers’ undivided attention because whenever we are reading a story we always want to know what happens next. Remember the last time you read a page turner? How eagerly you wanted to know what lay ahead.

Of course not all of us are storytellers but describing a product or service in an interesting manner can be easily achieved by creative content writers and copywriters. Your story needn’t always have esoteric characters; you just need to have a theme and you can center your writing around that theme.

When I’m looking for a solution, frankly, consciously, I am not interested in reading a story. I want to know how this particular product or service can solve my problem that I am facing in my business or in my personal life. A story can definitely help me visualize. It gives me a three-dimensional picture of exactly how your offer can make my life easier — it has a live example I can relate to.

Another great benefit of creating a story is that it has a beginning and then an end. The beginning can be the initiation and the end can be a business transaction that takes place between your visitor and your organization. By storytelling you can change the event of buying a product or service into an experience. It is difficult to remember events and it is difficult to forget experiences.

How come targeted content improves your search engine rankings?

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If you ask me SEO content is actually targeted content, and if you are wondering what is targeted content it is content specifically generated for a particular audience using particular keywords (and that’s what makes it SEO content). Purely SEO content doesn’t do you much good because even if it generates lots of traffic it doesn’t generate much business because it doesn’t move your visitors. Targeted content on the other hand not only draws qualified traffic from various search engines it also improves your conversion rate.

A couple of weeks ago I removed a package that I had started offering from my website. I had collaborated with a writer (a content provider, actually, who hires writers to generate bulk content) to provide low-cost, average-quality content that could help clients improve their search engine rankings. I started offering this package because I was getting lots of queries from India and I also got contacted by a few writers who were ready to generate lots of content at very low rates. This worked for a while but then I felt it was counterproductive for my clients and also for my own business.

I am not a very well-known copywriter on the Internet but over the past five years I have managed to eke out a presence through providing quality content persistently. Since there are very few people who understand the difference between cost and value a majority of clients confused that package with the overall content writing services that I provide.

They somehow got themselves into believing that they could pay dirt cheap and still they should be able to use that content as primary business content.

Content purely written for SEO rarely performs well as primary business content and if you want primary business content then you must pay accordingly. Anyway, it is very difficult to explain to clients once they have seen the rates. Instead of wasting my time again and again trying to explain the difference between quality content and low-cost SEO your content I stopped offering that package altogether.

Instead, I insist — even if they have to pay a bit more — that they should aim at producing highly targeted content. They may end up with less content than what they could have gotten by paying a lower rate, performance wise this content is much better.

But how does targeted content improve your search engine rankings?

In order to produce targeted content you need to be clear about two things, in fact three things:

  • What exactly you want to convey
  • To whom you want to convey
  • What words you want to use

Once you have sorted out these questions you are more than halfway through producing high-quality SEO content that can also be used as your primary business content. When you write content keeping your audience in mind you are careful about what you’re writing and how you are writing. When you know what you want to convey you stick to the topic and stay away from ambivalence. The words that you want to use while creating your content are your keywords and the search terms you want to target.

Although you should arrange your content so that it is more convenient for the search engine crawlers to go through it and assess it, your primary focus must always be your visitors, your readers. Search engines are not going to do business with you but people will.

Are you setting goals for your content marketing campaigns?

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Without goals we have no direction and this can be applied to content marketing too. When you set up goals — whether big or small — you have a direction and when you have a direction you know exactly what you have to do and what you should avoid doing.

How does setting goals make your content marketing more effective? Let us suppose in the next four months you want to increase your search engine traffic and you don’t just want any traffic you want traffic that converts, that generates business, revenue for you. Once you have decided that, you figure out what sort of traffic from search engines would have a better conversion rate? Obviously the sort of traffic that is looking for what you have to offer. So write down somewhere what exactly you offer.

In my case I offer online copywriting and content writing services. Very good! Incidentally there are thousands of online copywriters and content writers on the Internet and there might be 10-20 content writers and online copywriters whose links appear before my link on the search engine result pages for appropriate keywords and search terms. In such a case scenario I can do three things (through by content publishing efforts)

  1. Beat my competitors in the search optimization game and make my rankings better than theirs
  2. Target those keywords that are less competitive but that can get me a fair amount of business
  3. Generate content that significantly improves my conversion rate

The first option is obviously good but it may take a very long time and I don’t want to spend lots of money. The second option on the other hand is quite achievable. It won’t take much time and it will give me enough breathing space: I can get business and along with that I can also keep improving my website content for more competitive keywords and search terms.

Having a good conversion rate would also be very important for me because as much traffic as I get I would like to generate enough business from it. Since right now I won’t be able to attract thousands of visitors everyday to my website I would prefer that my content has a higher conversion rate. For me this would be my goal and I would generate all my content keeping this fact in my mind.

You may have another goal. Your goal may be getting lots of exposure on social media and networking websites and you may generate content accordingly. For this you will need to know what sort of content creates buzz and goes viral on social media and networking circles. This way you have a direction.

Simply dumping content on your website or blog doesn’t help you much. You must set clearly-defined goals for your content marketing strategy.