Tag Archives: Content Marketing

How to get more customers and keep the old ones coming back, with content writing

Getting new customers with content writing

Every business depends on customers and clients. Even if you’re not a business but a non-profit organisation or a not-for-profit business, you need funds and donations and for that you need the maximum number of people feeling a connection with your cause. Having a for-profit business is no different. Content writing can help you establish a connection between the audience that you seek and the audience that seeks you.

Why content writing keeps the old customers coming back to you

This is how constant content writing keeps your old customers coming back and doing business with you

They remember how helpful your website was the first time:
First impression is normally the lasting impression. If they have a good experience when they come to your website for the first time, if they find all the information they need written in an understandable language, they will keep this in mind.
Content writing provides them all the answers: Whenever they seek an answer they can find it on your website because you’re constantly creating new content for your website. I assume that when you write content for your website you are actually creating knowledge base rather than simply creating gibberish. If you just want to create nonsensical text to improve your search engine rankings than this blog post is not for you.
People eagerly subscribe to your updates: When they find well-written content on your website they eagerly subscribe to your email updates. They would like to know what new offers you have, how well you are describing your new products and services and just in case you have something they need.
They closely follow your social media updates: Everybody uses social media these days (or social networking websites). You will hardly come across someone these days who isn’t on Facebook or Twitter (or both). Through well-targeted content writing you can encourage your existing customers to follow you wherever you post your content, whether on social media websites or social networking websites.
Quality content writing encourages your existing customers to promote your content: They promote your content for the goodness of it. Why do people promote content? Why do people share links on their social networking timelines? They want to share something interesting, something useful to their friends and followers. If what you give them is interesting and useful, they will automatically share it.
They feel you understand their problems: Constantly writing content for your website makes your existing customers feel like you understand their problems and you want to provide them solutions. You’re constantly talking to them through your content writing.

Why content writing gets you more new customers

They are immediately hooked to your website content: It’s very easy to bring people to your website and very difficult to keep them there. If you don’t write quality content for your website on a regular basis, if you don’t pay heed to the copy of your homepage and your important landing pages, you won’t be able to keep people on your website for more than a couple of seconds. In order to make sales you HAVE to keep people on your website for as long as it takes and the best way of doing this is, giving them awesome content.
They can make informed decisions by reading your content: You shouldn’t be shoving your own decisions down their throats. Provide them the information they seek. Provide this information through writing informative content. Then let them decide. Empower them with decision-making and give them all the tools they need right there on your website.
They find all the answers you’re looking for:
Indecision can be bad for your business. Confusion can be distracting. The moment your customers feel they cannot find the answers they are looking for, they’re going to move elsewhere. Even if they don’t intend to, just to find the answer they want, they will leave your website and even if they don’t find the answer at the other place, there is a remote chance that they will come back to your website even if initially they had intended to do business with you. So if you’re constantly writing content in order to provide them the answers they seek, you will make sure they stay on your website.
They come across your content when it is shared by your existing customers: Writing interesting content, as already mentioned above, encourages your existing customers to share it on their social networking and social media timelines. This highlights your content in front of people who have never come to your website, consequently, bringing you new visitors.
Content writing improves your search engine rankings: Better search engine rankings don’t mean more sales since once people are on your website what matters is the quality of the content you have written, but they do help in getting you new visitors because after all, it’s these visitors that eventually turn into customers. When you’re constantly writing quality content for your website it begins to have a positive impact on your search engine rankings (because you end up covering important stuff that the search engines may feel, is important).
They consider you an authority on your subject: People prefer to do business with people they consider having an authority on the concerned subject. This might not be true for an e-commerce website because they are not based on individual branding but if you are selling something like books as an author or your services (for instance I am a content writer and hence sell my content writing services) it helps you tremendously if you can establish yourself as an authority figure through regular, authoritative content writing.

How to pitch for a guest blogging assignment

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Guest blogging is a great way to not just increase traffic to your website but also get visibility on other blogs and websites. Back in the early 2000’s when nobody knew anything about blogging I started my web design business backed by scores of articles that I had written for other websites. They were mostly about web design and web development telling people how to achieve various things with HTML, JavaScript, and sometimes PHP. I got lots of traffic. Those days competition wasn’t much so I also got decent traffic to my website that in turn, gave me decent business. I must confess that when I started my content writing business I lost my mojo for writing for other websites and even when blogging entered the scene rarely did I write for other blogs. Although I help my clients guest blog for other blogs and even advocate this aspect of content marketing, I myself haven’t really been into it for a long time.

Benefits of guest blogging

There was a time when people used to guest blog mainly for SEO purposes. The people who write Google ranking algorithms started frowning upon external links that people obtained just for the sake of obtaining external links. Page rank also mattered – what is the authority of the page that has your link? Search engines like Google also started penalizing websites that would just put links from other websites in lieu of money or link exchange. The only alternative left was, guest blog on other websites so that when they published your blog, they would also include a small bio that would include a link to your website. If you did that with high-ranking websites, the effort was worth it. Your website or blog immediately showed improvement.

Then again things began to change. In this blog post the Chief Search Engineer Matt Cutts at Google declared that:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more.

The statement made sense; people were actually using guest blogging to boost their search engine rankings which, in itself is not bad thing to do, but the quality begins to be compromized when the sole purpose is improving your rankings. You know what happens when people simply start sending you email messages to promote their products and services.

Are you wondering why I’m talking about this while I’m trying to tell you how to pitch for a guest blogging assignment? If it doesn’t help you, if it doesn’t improve your search engine rankings and if search engineers at Google frown upon it, why should you indulge in it?

First, many of the advisories broadcast by Google engineers don’t normally work in the real world. There are still SEO benefits of guest blogging because links from quality websites do matter. What Matt Cutts said was guest blogging shouldn’t be done just for the sake of improving your search engine rankings. He talked about low quality links coming to your website that can anyway get your website penalized whether you get those links via guest blogging, link exchanging, or simply by buying the space. If you stick to the quality guidelines, if you provide value to the readers of the blog post or the website where you are publishing your guest blog post, there should be nothing to stop you. Here are the benefits of publishing a guest blog post:

You get exposure to new audiences
By giving expert advise you build credibility in your niche (for example I should be writing more and more guest blogs on content writing and content marketing just to show how much I know of it)
It strengthens your brand across the Internet when your presence is seen on various websites and blogs
It makes you a subject-authority
It lessens your reliance on search engines for traffic (high-traffic websites and blogs can send you tons of direct traffic)
It improves your SEO, yes.

So how do you pitch for a guest blogging assignment?

Thoroughly study the blog: It will be very odd to pitch for a blogging assignment for my blog (that is on content writing and content marketing) that talks about how to dominate the real estate market even during the times of depression, unless of course, you intend to do it with the strength of content marketing. Spend some time reading the blog where you want to pitch. Understand the tone. Get a grasp of the audience. Is it a light-hearted blog? Do they have very serious blog posts? Are they always looking for a great headline? Do they normally publish lists? Only when you have thoroughly understood the nature of the blog you think about guest blogging for it.
Start interacting with the publisher on a regular basis: If you simply one day shoot an email pitching for a blogging assignment there is a great chance your email will be ignored. Not that the publisher doesn’t care about you, it’s just that being a successful blogger, he or she might be receiving 100s of such pitches every day and he or she would rather respond to people he or she is familiar with rather than someone totally strange. So start finding your favorite publishers on Twitter and Facebook and establish a contact with them. Engage them in meaningful discussions without nagging them or wasting your time. They should be able to respect you and remember you on the basis of your interactions. Interact with them for at least a couple of months before pitching your guest blog, preferably, although this differs from situation to situation.
Start interacting with authors of multi-author blogs: There are many blogs and websites where multiple authors write. On such blogs it’s very difficult to elicit response from the editor or the owner and one can only write for such blogs if he or she already knows someone who has access to the editorial team. If you want to pitch for a guest blogging assignment to such a blog, start following their main writers and start engaging them on a regular basis. Then, someday, you can ask them to refer you to the editorial department where you can submit your article or blog post.
Write to serve the audience of that particular blog: Remember that you are not guest blogging to promote your own business (at least not directly). You are adding value to that blog. You are offering something valuable to the audience of that blog. They may have never heard of you so they’re not interested in knowing what a great person you are, or what a great product or service you have got. They are used to a particular format of content on that particular blog. So stick to that format.
Don’t treat the guest blogging assignment as a stepchild project: You may wonder why you should invest enough time on your guest blogging assignment when it is being published on another blog rather than on your own blog. It should be the opposite. Since you are writing on another blog you should put in more effort (not that you shouldn’t put in enough effort for writing for your own blog) because one, someone is providing you a ready-made platform, a platform that he or she must have built with lots of hard work and dedication and two, since it is a branding exercise you don’t want to give a wrong impression by getting average or ordinary content published to serve such a big audience.
Use a convincing subject line while sending your pitching email: Even if the editor or the editorial team isn’t aware of your existence you can sometimes send emails pitching your guest blogging assignment. Use a convincing subject line that clearly states that you want to guest blog. Most of the blogs have a separate section used for accepting guest blog posts. Use that section instead of sending to a random email ID so that when they receive your message, they know that it’s a guest blog post pitch. Clearly mention in the email body what you intend to convey to the audience of the blog and why you think it is an important topic and also why you think it hasn’t already been covered on that blog.

As you must have noticed I have focused less on sending email pitches and more on preparing the ground for sending such pitches. Although I haven’t been guest blogging much (I should), what I have experienced is, sending random pitches rarely elicits responses. If you randomly approach people then it becomes a game of numbers, something like, if you send 50 emails then maybe 5 will respond. If you want to do that, go ahead, there is no problem in that. But if you want to optimize your time, rather than sending 50 emails and then hoping that 5 people will respond, I would rather start interacting with people who can actually help me get through. So more focus should be on networking rather than the number of pitches that you send.

Why you should create evergreen content and how to create it

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Evergreen content is just like an evergreen movie or an evergreen song – something that you can experience and enjoy irrespective of when you watch it or listen to it. Evergreen content never goes stale. It’s like the immortal wisdom of great philosophers; it is timeless, it is fundamental, it can be applied in any age. No one says about evergreen content that it is out of date or irrelevant.

Why should you create evergreen content when it is always recommended you create topical and contemporary content? Both have its value but the benefit of creating evergreen content is that it is always useful. A blog post that you write in 2014 will provide the same value to a person who reads it in 2018. Maybe the examples that you use won’t be relevant, but the inherent message will still be.

A good example of evergreen content would be, writing a blog post on the importance of headlines. Catchy and compelling headlines will never go out of fashion. They were used to grab attention back in the 1700s and they’re still being used to grab attention these days. Their fundamentals never change.

Similarly, writing something about nutrition can be evergreen (they are just examples, you may have your own example coming from your own industry, realm or subject). Can eating nutritious food be ever irrelevant (unless there is no need to have food and we can simply swallow a capsule or tablet or even use a one-time shot to do away with the need for food, forever)?

Why publish evergreen content on your website or blog?

To keep your content relevant for a very long time
To make your content appropriate for long-term content curation
To encourage people to link to your content without worrying about it becoming irrelevant after a while
To enable your content to generate revenue for a long time rather than for a short time
To encourage people to share your content with each other without worrying about irrelevancy and outdatedness
To focus on quality rather than quantity and timeliness – when you prepare evergreen content you are in a more relaxed frame of mind and you are able to focus on the quality rather than worrying about missing the deadline
To create a portal of knowledge – with more and more evergreen content on your website or blog comes to be known as a portal of knowledge for your particular niche
To improve your long-term SEO – evergreen content not just enjoys good search engine rankings, but lasting rankings. This is because as people share your evergreen content more and more the relevancy of your content for the search engines keeps on increasing

How to create and publish evergreen content?

Mind your niche: First of all your content needs to be niche-specific. There is no sense creating evergreen content for a dating website that talks about how to survive in the Sahara (unless of course there is a connection). So make a list of topics that you think will draw people to your website in relation to your business rather than as a random occurrence simply because at that particular time they happen to be looking for how to survive in the Sahara.
Pack as much information as possible: Long form content fares better in search engines compared to shorter articles and blog posts. People tend to curate comprehensive, detailed content because it contains the information they need, in detail. Don’t be so detailed that one piece of content goes on and on. Use your own judgment. Try to think from the perspective of your reader. Don’t assume he or she knows what you know.
Lists are better compared to unformatted paragraphs: Take for instance “15 things that make your content go viral”; it is better than “How your content goes viral” or “How to make your content go viral”, followed by long streams of text. People want to know exactly how much they are going to learn.
Write about occasions and seasons: You may feel that writing about Christmas, Diwali, Ramadan or the Valentine’s Day are once-in-a-year of occurrences and hence might not be evergreen. But they definitely attract yearly traffic if you have written something like, “20 ways to avoid post-Christmas depression” because people need such articles every season. Similarly you can write “50 items to stock in order to survive a long power cut during winter”. Or something like “5 things you should immediately do during an earthquake”.
Create a “Regularly Updated” section: This is a section that, as the title suggests, you update regularly and since you update it regularly it is constantly having fresh content and hence you can call it evergreen. In order to seek fresh, useful content, people are going to visit that section on an ongoing basis. Your business blog can be one example.
Create an FAQs section: When people use your product or service they constantly need to know about it. Sometimes they have technical questions, sometimes they have existential dilemmas, whatever, whenever they have a doubt, they head to your FAQs section.
Create an online forum: Having an online forum is a great way of creating evergreen content because people are constantly posting questions and answers. If you notice, even posts and answers created in 2004 may appear in search results sometimes.

This is no way a comprehensive list because every business need is unique but this list gives you a basic idea of how to create evergreen content for your business that generates ongoing traffic for a long time.

Well, I have never said that Content Is King

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I’m not writing this to dispute anybody’s claim whether content is king or not because it is just a way of telling someone how important it is. I may have mentioned it in the passing that yes, content is king, that is, marketing doesn’t exist without content, but it isn’t just content that gets things going.

Content is like fuel. Without this fuel, you cannot run the engine of your business, that’s an established fact. Now, it is up to you what sort of fuel you want to use. You can use low quality or high-quality fuel. You can use fuel that wears your machinery down or creates lots of pollution. Or you can use good quality fuel that gives you better mileage.

Are you wondering why I’m comparing content with fuel rather than with King? No reason at all actually, I could have compared it to anything, as long as it is important. The whole point is, it’s not just content that matters. Your content needs to be backed up with:

High-quality
Regularity
Relevance
Distribution
Engagement
Publishing platform

The old saying, “build it and they will come” no longer works because there is so much of everything. So after building it, you need to get people to it. “It” in this case is your content. It is given that you need to write and publish high-quality content. Low quality content neither works with search engines nor with human readers.

Regularity is very important because millions of pages are being created everyday and and some of them are exceptionally well-written. You are constantly getting competition. Besides, search engines as well as people love new content. For instance, if I want to know what’s the latest happening in the field of content writing, I would rather check out something that is a few months old rather than something that was written back in 2011 (this is February 2014). When you post regularly it gives people a reason to visit your website or blog repeatedly (even the search engine crawlers visit your website with greater frequency if it is constantly updated).

Relevance in the context of content writing means you need to offer something people can actually use and benefit from. There is no use creating content that exists just for the sake of existence. It needs to solve a purpose.

How do people access your content? If your content exists in isolation then again, you’re just wasting your time. Content is published to make an impact and that impact can only be made if people actually make contact with your content. So you need to distribute your content. You need to use all available channels to you including social networking websites, blogs and online forums.

Engagement, although is a new buzzword, it has existed since the time immemorial. Engagement basically means two-way communication. You talk to people, and then people talk back to you, and then you talk back to people and engagement begins to happen. Without constant engagement it is difficult for people to remember you, and remember you for the right reasons.

You need to choose your publishing platform carefully because once you have chosen it, you will be spending lots of time writing and publishing content for it. For instance, it is a critical choice whether you publish a blog under your own domain name or you decide to use a third-party platforms such as Tumblr. Businesses these days are also using LinkedIn as well as Google Plus to publish long blog posts and articles. The only problem with choosing third-party platforms is that your content doesn’t belong to you. It will be sending all the traffic to those websites and then some of the traffic will come to your website. On the other hand, if you publish your blog under your own domain name than all the traffic will come to you. The benefit of using a third-party platform that is well established is that you can start getting traffic to your content from day one. Finally, the decision is yours.

These qualities and attributes collectively make your content the King. Without these attributes your content is just another piece of information aimlessly lolling around in the limitless wilderness of the Internet.

Promoting your content is as important as writing it

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Promote your content

This small blog post on Copyblogger rightly says that no matter how great content you write and publish, unless you have set up a mechanism to promote it, to make it possible for the right people to find it, it is of no use. This can be a great bummer if you have the talent, you have the intention, but you don’t have the ability to create that mechanism. What’s this mechanism?

Once you have published a blog post or an article, how do you make sure that maximum number of people read it and even respond to it? If you already have good traffic it is not a problem. But what if you hardly get 5-10 visitors every day and most of them don’t even stay for a few seconds, leave alone reading your greatest blog post? As I am repeatedly saying on my blog, depending on search engines, especially Google, doesn’t really help. You need to create your own ways to get targeted traffic to your website or blog.

Here are a few things you can do:

Network with people: Although, as suggested in the above Copyblogger link it might not be initially possible for you to network with highly influential people in your field, you can start interacting with people who are either slightly more influential than you are, or somewhere around where you are right now. How do you network? It doesn’t mean sucking up to them (it isn’t wrong actually unless it becomes a nuisance). Follow conversations of influential people on the Internet and pitch in whenever an interesting discussion is happening. If they ask something, and if you happen to have the answer, provide it promptly. Promote their content whenever you feel it deserves to be promoted. Recommend their links on your timelines. Write blog posts and articles in response to what they have written and notify them even if you slightly disagree.
Publish quality content non-stop: This involves long form and short form content. Be consistent. Whether you like it or not, the success on the Internet, as it also happens otherwise, depends on being there at the right time. What’s that right time? Either you depend on serendipity, or you be there so often that one of those times becomes the right time. Most people in the world depend on this strategy to increase their odds. Be regular with your content so that people always find something to promote, something to talk about, on your blog or website.
Interact on niche forums: This is something I also need to focus on. I know some people who get lots of targeted traffic from niche online forums. Despite Facebook and Twitter, these forums are thriving and lots of interesting discussion takes place in these forums. Be an active member if you have enough time.
Concentrate on building a mailing list: This point cannot be stressed upon enough times (this is also a self-note). Having your own mailing list can be invaluable. Actually I understand why it may seem like a vicious circle. You need traffic to build your mailing list. People advise you to build your mailing list to build targeted traffic. This ends up dissuading you. But you know what? Somewhere you have to start. At least have a signup form prominently displayed on your website or blog.
Work on building your authority: If you are interested in improving your organic search engine rankings you must already know that the author rank plays a big part in it. The higher is your authority over a particular topic, the higher are your links ranked for that particular topic. Your authority can be improved by encouraging more and more people to share your content under their social networking profiles, hyperlinking to articles and blog posts authored by you, sharing and promoting your social media content, and last but not the least, creating authoritative content for other blogs and websites.
Follow recommended SEO guidelines: Search engines, after all, rule the roost when it comes to sending targeted traffic. Don’t neglect search engine optimization guidelines while creating your content.

Wondering how you can have enough time for content writing as well as content promotion? Of course one way would be to hire a professional content writer who is not just adept at creating exceptional content but also knows how to promote it. The other option would be to schedule your content strategy in such a manner that you can devote equal amount of time to both the activities. Remember that, though creating content and publishing it regularly may seem to be an easier option and hence you may end up doing just that, it isn’t solving much purpose if it is not being accessed by your target audience. So even at the cost of producing less content, devote enough time to promoting it.