Looking for insightful blog posts on content writing, and SEO copywriting? You will find them on Credible Content Blog. Updated almost daily. Fresh, unique perspective.
Doing research is an integral part of content writing because often, clients don’t give you all the information you need to write convincingly.
What does research for content writing mean?
I will give you a small example.
I don’t have an accounting background. My search engine rankings for “content writing services for accounting businesses” have suddenly come to the first or second position on Google. Lots of accountants are approaching these days.
Top Google rankings for my content writing services.
Most of the clients expect me to find relevant information on the net from other websites and then come up with the relevant content and make it “unique”.
Of course, I make it unique, but I need to find the meanings of all the services that are alien to me, for example SMSF auditing or BAS accounting, or different ways of accounting in Australia, Canada and the UK. How do I find that information? I research.
There is another company, or a group of individuals, who have gotten hold of some scripts, who want to build DEFI platforms (decentralized finance) or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), or general blockchain applications. Sometimes I feel that the terms that they want me to use in the content, even they don’t know them, but maybe it’s just my skepticism. The thing is, whenever I ask for some clarification, they ask me to look up on the Internet. I research.
There are no special tools for researching. Yes, if you want to research keywords to write optimized contents, there are many specialized SEO tools such as Ahrefs, but if you want to find information to write content, you need to use the good old Google or Bing.
I use Google for research purposes. I set it to various countries to find diverse information. In Firefox I open a “Private window”. I go to google.com. Then I go to settings. In the settings I change the name of the country for displaying the results. This way, suppose I set the country to Australia and then search for “crypto wallet development company”, it is going to show me companies from Australia and not India, from where I’m doing the search.
Your ability to research as a content writer must also include your ability to recognize useful information. How do I do that?
When I’m looking for information, my main purpose is to find information that would be useful to my client’s readers (customers and clients). I look at the information from their perspective. If I feel that they would find the information useful, I use it. Otherwise, I keep looking.
Do I charge extra for research when I’m writing content? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how much time I need to spend researching. If I feel that I need to research a lot, I add it to the time that I spend writing content. I let the client know, and if he or she is not ready to pay for the extra time, I insist that he or she give me the right information.
I had this interesting epiphany when trying to explain to one of my clients why I charge the same rates for my English and Hindi content writing services. I write quite well in Hindi. When I was in school, my Hindi teacher used to show off my writing to other teachers.
Language is just a tool, what matters is, what I’m writing, and how I’m writing it.
These days I’m trying to get work for writing content in Hindi. There is a huge market for Hindi content writing.
The only problem is, clients looking for a Hindi content writer have a very negative point of view for writers offering services in their own language – they think that since the writer is writing in Hindi, he or she shouldn’t charge much.
At the same time, though reluctantly, they see the logic behind paying a higher fee to someone who writes in English.
To an extent this is understandable because it is difficult to get people who can write well in English. Everybody seems to know English in India and in fact, people often compare India with China where very few people know the English language. Nonetheless, writing, writing well, writing professionally, is an entirely different ballgame, and this is where the problem begins.
Hence, even if they don’t want to pay, considering how well I write, they have no choice but to pay.
But with Hindi the attitude is different. In India we have this colonial mentality that makes us consider Hindi an inferior language compared to English. When they want to make an “important” point, or when they want to sound “professional”, or even when they want to be taken seriously by the other party, people start speaking in English.
Consequently, even if it makes tremendous sense to hire a professional content writer who can write in Hindi, somehow they cannot bring themselves to paying the same rate that they would, reluctantly, pay a writer who writes in English.
If I psychoanalyze, maybe they don’t want to shatter their own belief that they have nurtured since childhood: English is far superior than Hindi. If they pay the same rate, they bring Hindi at par with English, which, they don’t want to do. Anyway, I’m simply intellectualizing a cultural issue here.
So, I was explaining to a client who wants to publish a technology blog in Hindi. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why I was charging the same rate? Why wasn’t I charging a lot less for writing in Hindi?
I told him it doesn’t matter in which language I write. I may be writing in Maithili, or Bhojpuri, or Bengali, or Haryanvi, writing is just a tool. I’m not charging for the tool. I’m charging for what I create, what I manifest, with that tool.
He suddenly understood.
It is such a simple thing. I wonder why it didn’t come to my mind before.
Combining pay-per-click advertising and organic content writing.
Here is a nice Forbes article that describes in detail 13 smart ways you can integrate paid search results with organic content to improve your SEO.
As a content writer I primarily focus on providing organic content to my clients. Most of my clients don’t want to spend a ton of money on Google AdWords and other PPC campaigns because they understand that once they are able to organically improve their search engine rankings through optimized content, they won’t need to pay for every click they get from Google. Though, I do provide Google AdWords copywriting services.
What are organic search engine rankings?
Your content appears naturally in search results. You don’t need to pay for it. You’re not paying for every click. You appear in search results due to the quality and relevance of your content and not because you are paying Google.
But the benefit of using PPC advertising is that – provided you can afford – you can immediately start getting traffic to your relevant landing pages, for the conversion-friendly keywords. The key is, you need to know what you’re doing. Since you are paying for every click, you need to make the maximum number of sales or optimally tweak your conversion prospects.
This can be tricky. You may need to spend a lot of money before you can figure out how to optimize your campaigns and bring your costs down.
Organically improving your search engine rankings on the other hand is a safer bet. Although you may feel that you are randomly publishing content and hoping that your search engine rankings may improve for your desired keywords, if you use the right tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to find the right target keywords and topics for you to focus on, you can get tangible results with optimized content writing within a foreseeable future.
Should you use a mix of PPC advertising and organic content writing?
If you can, yes. Through PPC advertising, as I have written above, you can instantly start getting targeted traffic, and with better conversion rate, you can also start generating some good business.
There is a side benefit though, that I noticed a few years ago. When you start advertising on Google for certain keywords, your organic rankings for some keywords begin to improve on their own. This was quite surprising. I don’t even know whether it was a fluke or it really happened.
For example, I created a couple of AdWords campaigns for a range of around 10 keywords and I selected 2 Indian cities to be targeted because I didn’t want to spend lots of money. I was just experimenting.
To my great surprise, the organic rankings of those keywords that I hadn’t bid for, suddenly improved manifold. The links that were appearing on the fourth or the fifth page, began to appear on the first page. Again, I’m not claiming that it was related. Maybe it was coincidental. Maybe the ranking of those links was bound to improve and then they jumped to the first page just as I was advertising using Google AdWords. Who knows?
It may also be because when Google crawls your website for the paid links, it also ends up crawling and indexing the other links it finds, and then ends up ranking them around the paid links.
So, if you have some money, you can try that out. Use a combination of PPC advertising and organic content writing, and for a while, observe what happens.
Other than this, you can use PPC advertising to increase your visibility. Your website gets indexed faster. It becomes easier for people to find your content. This in turn has a positive effect on your organic search engine rankings.
Want to improve search engine rankings of your e-commerce store? Want to supercharge your conversion rate? You must start an e-commerce blog.
If you’re wondering why you should start an e-commerce blog, you will find your answer here.
The e-commerce space is quite crowded. With websites like Shopify and Rackspace it’s even easier to start an e-commerce website within a few days without knowledge of programming or HTML.
According to this UNCTAD report, Covid-19 has led to a surge in e-commerce business. Due to multiple lockdowns all over the world, almost everyone ordered from home. Even those who were reluctant to purchase stuff online, started doing their shopping from online retail stores. The share of e-commerce in the global retail trade rose from 14% in 2019 to 17% in 2020, according to the same UNCTAD link.
Starting an e-commerce blog enables you to carve a space for yourself on this crowded terra firma.
Data from IBM’s US retail index shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards digital shopping roughly by 5 years. The non-essential purchases in the conventional, brick-and-mortar department stores declined by 75% in the second quarter of 2020.
It is not just the big e-commerce websites like Amazon.com, JD.com or Walmart e-commerce that have taken a huge proportion of the e-commerce business. There have been thousands of startups all over the world in the wake of not just the Covid-19 pandemic, but also to leverage the fast-changing consumer dynamics. I was recently reading about a new startup called Dukaan (colloquial for a neighborhood shop in India) that came up during the Covid-19 lockdown when the founders realized that the local shopkeepers were no longer able to sell their products even to the traditional customer base. Hence, they built a platform for traditional shop owners to sell their products using the platform. There are hundreds of such examples.
Naturally, the competition has increased. Whereas the bigger e-commerce websites don’t rest on their laurels and spend millions of dollars to maintain their visibility and push their products in front of their customers, smaller e-commerce websites need to rely on search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing to get their share of the pie that is already being shared by thousands of others.
E-commerce blogging can be a big weapon in your arsenal.
There are multiple benefits or advantages of starting an e-commerce blog.
Why do you buy from Amazon.com? It is a known brand. You have already purchased from it scores of times, in my case, even hundreds of times. You know it’s return policy. More or less, you have had a good experience when it comes to addressing your grievances and you know that you can rely on the company in case you don’t receive the product you have ordered or if you have received a faulty product.
Amazon.com doesn’t have to convince you. You are already convinced. It has been on the landscape of e-commerce for more than 20 years. It doesn’t need to win your trust.
But if you’re a small e-commerce website people hardly know, you need to win their trust. All the attributes that are assumed about Amazon.com, you need to establish them.
You need to convince people that not just their money is safe with you, in case they face a problem, you’re going to be there for them. Lack of trust is a big problem among the prospective e-commerce customers because they don’t know you yet. They don’t know whether it is safe to spend their money on your website.
Recently my wife purchased a kurti from an unknown online retail store that sells women’s garments. The piece of clothing cost double than what such a piece of clothing would cost on Amazon, but my wife liked it so much, that she bought from this website. It was a complete set containing upper and lower garments.
They sent the wrong color. They sent just the upper garment. When we called them, no one picked up the phone. Our email to their support elicited no response. We found that there are lots of negative reviews and feedback on Twitter about the company.
Such companies make it harder even for those e-commerce websites that mean to serve their customers well. This is an unnecessary hurdle created on the way of the well-meaning companies.
Blogging can fill this gap. It can familiarize people to your presence. It can establish a space of trust. Being a small e-commerce website, through your blog, it is easier to engage your customers at a personal level.
This Hubspot report says that e-commerce websites that publish a blog get 55% more traffic than those that don’t. Further, e-commerce websites that publish blogs get 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more pages indexed by Google.
Listed below are 5 reasons why as an e-commerce website you should publish a blog.
1. Blogging improves search engine rankings of your e-commerce website
Although a major part of your business comes from repeat customers (a universal trend among e-commerce websites) if you are an e-commerce store, in the beginning, you need to be found on major search engines like Google and Bing.
Before buying people look for information. For that they use a search engine like Google. They want to read about the product. They look for reviews. They look for opinions. They try to find the ratings.
In terms of improving your search engine rankings through an e-commerce blog, think about your own e-commerce store. It may be unique. It may be quite different from a bigger retail store like Amazon.com. Maybe you’re selling just 10 to 15 items, or even less. You need to educate people about the benefits of purchasing those items from your website. This you can achieve through regular blogging.
Blogging in itself is search engine friendly. Assuming that you update your blog regularly (1-5 times every week) Google crawls and indexes your e-commerce website with greater regularity because it expects to find fresh content. The Google crawler is engineered in a manner that it is constantly looking for fresh content, and even the Google ranking algorithm prefers fresh content over comparatively older content.
Make sure you choose the appropriate blog post titles that include the names of your products and their features. For example, if you sell ladies garments, you can publish something like “How to choose the best evening gown for the upcoming spring ball?” Or something like, “How we can help you if you’re not satisfied with our delivery”.
If you regularly publish a blog, people come to your website regularly. Research has shown that before buying, people need to come to your website for at least 4-5 times.
Regular blogging also gets you back links which are important for your SEO as well as wider visibility. Other bloggers and online publishers may link to useful posts from your blog. Also, blog posts are shared on social media with greater regularity.
2. Regular blogging establishes you as a thought leader
Trust matters a lot when it comes to shopping on an e-commerce website. Trust, coupled with familiarity. Familiarity comes from regular visibility. Trust comes from regular exposure to your knowledge, experience, and good advice.
Remember that having an e-commerce website doesn’t always mean having an online retail store where you list scores of products. Even if you’re selling one e-book, it is an e-commerce website, and to make people buy your e-book from your e-commerce website, you need to establish your presence among them as an authority figure.
3. Build a community of loyal customers around your e-commerce blog
The very nature of a blog makes you attract people who are interested in reading what you have to say. If you publish interesting and useful content on your e-commerce blog, they keep track of your blog. They leave comments. They respond to other visitors’ comments. They feel connected to your community. When they feel connected, they show their connectedness by following the footsteps of the community. If many of your community members buy from your e-commerce websites, the others will too.
4. Publishing targeted content is cheaper than advertising
Organic search engine rankings don’t just increase your search engine visibility, they also reduce your reliance on online advertising.
A problem with online advertising, especially when you are spending money on a PPC campaign, is that you pay for every click. Whenever someone clicks your link on Google, for example, and if the link is not a part of organic search results, you pay for that click. Whether the person buys from your website or not, you spend money on the person for visiting your website.
Being an e-commerce website with multiple items in your catalog, you may need to bid on multiple keywords. For example, if you want to draw traffic for, let’s say, 50 items in your e-commerce catalog, you will need to pay for individual clicks for all those 50 items. On an ongoing basis. You can easily guess how much money you will end up spending.
With blogging, the only money you’re spending is the money that you pay to your content writer. If your listings begin to appear in organic search results, whether you get 100 clicks or 1 million clicks, you don’t pay anything. All the traffic is free.
Also, inbound traffic – people coming to your website when they come across your content on Google and other websites – always converts better than the traffic that you get through advertising. This is because when people come across your relevant content, they decide on their own to come to your website. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are aware of why they are coming to your website. This makes it easier for them to decide in your favor when they need to buy something, and you offer it.
5. An e-commerce blog builds you are broadcasting platform
What is a broadcasting platform? It is a place where people come to read about your views, get to know about your products, and display interest in your ideas and opinion. With regular blogging for your e-commerce website, you can generate massive amounts of traffic within a couple of years. Something to the tune of 2-3000 visitors every day.
This gives you the ability to broadcast your side of the story in case some dispute happens. You will have a ready-made audience with you. You won’t have to depend on other websites to tell your side of the story. In case something tarnishes your image on the Internet, you can immediately take corrective measures by publishing an explanatory blog post on your e-commerce blog.
Should you publish an e-commerce blog on your own website or use third-party blogging platforms?
I strongly suggest that you publish a blog under your own e-commerce website. This way you completely own your content. All the traffic that you generate comes to your own e-commerce website.
There are certainly some benefits of publishing your e-commerce blog on a high traffic website like Medium (or LinkedIn), but then you will be diluting your traffic as well as search engine benefits. You may start an e-commerce blog on Medium, and you may get visibility faster, but most of the visibility belongs to the Medium platform. Whereas, from the beginning itself if you start publishing your blog on your own e-commerce website, it may take a while to build traffic and presence, but by the time you have built an audience, you will have your own strong presence.
Difference between content repurposing and content spinning
Although I don’t take up content spinning assignments, now and then I get requests from clients to spin an existing article or blog post. On Quora I found that some people are confused about the difference between content repurposing and content spinning. I’m quickly explaining in this short blog post.
What is content repurposing?
Repurposing your content means creating new pieces of content from existing content. A few years ago, I published a blog post on this topic: How to re-purpose your old content.
I will give you a recent example of repurposing my blog post.
Within this blog post there a subsection titled “10 benefits of publishing a business blog”. I created a YouTube video out of this subsection:
This is called content repurposing. You use your existing content to create new content. The objective of repurposing is not to create duplicate content, but to create content in other formats.
These days I often pick up small portions from my existing blog posts and web pages and then turn them into social media posts and even carousal posts. Sometimes I pick up a subsection, and create a complete blog post on it.
What is content or article spinning?
Content spinning means rewriting the same piece a blog post or article but using different words. Nothing is original in the spinned article. Just so that Google doesn’t take it as duplicate content, you use different words and different phases.
People pick up a blog post that is doing quite well. Rephrase the title. Then rewrite the whole thing using synonyms and alternative words.
Is article spinning bad? Is it plagiarism?
It is certainly plagiarism in the sense that if you do the same thing as a journalist, as an author, or even as someone who is writing a research paper, you’re simply picking information from someone else and using it as it is, and you can be sued for that. Just because you’re using different words it doesn’t mean it is original or it belongs to you.
I don’t like such work. As a writer I find it offensive if a client expects me to spin an existing article.
