Tag Archives: Content Strategy

35 types of content that require writing

Content writing isn’t just about writing for blogs, web pages, email broadcasts, and social media updates.

Similarly, when it comes to content marketing, and writing for that purpose, there are multiple content forms where writing is required.

In one of the Quora updates, someone had asked if content writing is overrated. The sentiment originated from the fact that everybody seems to be providing content writing services these days.

It is like saying everybody walks, so walking is overrated. Everybody uses mobile phones these days, so, mobile phones are overrated. Millions of people drive around, so driving must be overrated. Almost everybody goes to doctors these days, so doctors are overrated.

Since everybody writes, sometimes people end up thinking that writing is overrated.

Writing was invented some 3000 years ago. Initially not everyone was crazy about writing. Socrates was dead against writing because he thought that if people started writing, they would use their brains less. Since knowledge could be preserved with writing, there was no need to memorize it. I wonder what he would think of mobile phones.

Most of the non-verbal writing exists in written format. Of course, you may say that you can use graphics and videos to explain concepts and I completely agree, but if everything turns into graphics and videos, what about those people who want to read?

Reading is a conversation. It provides multiple stimuli that are lacking in graphics and videos. When you are reading, you are imagining. You are not being provided audiovisual cues on a platter. Therefore, most of the people prefer to read, and since they prefer to read, content needs to be written.

As mentioned above, although content writing is mostly related to website content and blogs, there are various types of content needs that can only be met by writers. Listed below are some content types that require extensive writing.

Blogs
White papers
Case studies
Podcasts (writing script)
Articles
Email marketing
Newsletters
Social media campaigns
Website content
Guest blog posting
Influencer interviews
FAQs
Testimonials
News assignments
Storytelling
Product descriptions
Product reviews
E-courses
Landing pages
SEO content
Press releases
Wikipedia-type websites
App notifications
Lists
How to articles
Best practices
Content repurposing
Business forecasting
LinkedIn posts
Chat bots
Paid advertising
Sponsored content
Guides
Reports
Educational content

Although these are different content types and they can all be used for content marketing purposes, they need talented writers to be effective.

13 ways you can build better content than your competitors

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Publish better content than your competitors.

Publishing regular content is always about beating your competitors. This may not be your direct aim, but by the end of the day, it matters how much business you can wean away from your competitors, towards your own website or blog.

How can you build better content than your competitors? Here are a few things you can do

1. Understand your audience better

The more you understand your audience, the better your content will be. But what does understanding your audience mean?

It means writing and publishing exactly the content your visitors are looking for.

It means understanding the search intent and then writing content around that search intent.

2. Use conversational writing

Write in a manner that it is easy to read.
Use small sentences.
Use smaller paragraphs.
Use bulleted lists whenever possible because they are easier to read.
Organize your text under headings and subheadings for easier reading.

3. Publish lots of long form content

Although I’m not a big fan of needless long form content, not many publishers can come up with quality long form content.

Long form content means publishing well researched blog posts and articles. These can be anywhere between 2000-3000 words, and sometimes even more.

The thing is, everyone can write 400–800-word blog posts but it is very difficult to come up with lengthy and comprehensive blog posts. This is where you can gain an edge.

4. Offer more value than your competitors

Most of your competitors might be publishing purposeless content just to improve your search engine rankings.

This may be a good thing for you because you understand that the purpose of publishing content regularly isn’t about improving your search engine rankings but providing value to your visitors.

Publish meaningful content.
Provide information that is valuable to your visitors.
Educate your visitors better than your competitors.

5. Maintain a schedule and be persistent

A big problem with most of the business blogs is that they are not regular. They post whenever it is convenient for whenever their budget allows.

Content publishing is a commitment. You can’t just offer content to your visitors whenever you feel like.

You need to be persistent.
You need to be regular.
Have a clearly defined content publishing calendar.

Publishing content with a schedule makes search engine crawlers visit your website regularly and also encourages your human visitors to keep a tab on your website.

6. Work with a professional content writer

I’m not saying this because I provide professional content writing services; it actually helps to work with a professional content writer because well-written content always outperforms content that is written in a lousy manner.

Most of the websites don’t have professionally written content. Luckily for you, you understand the importance of high-quality content (that’s why you are reading this, right?). The advanced AI being used in search engines can differentiate between good content and bad content.

Badly written content also increases your bounce rate. Remember that the writing on your website represents your approach to your customers and clients. If you don’t have properly written content on your website, it means that you don’t respect your customers and clients.

7. Publish case studies on your website

Case studies explain to your visitors how you solve their problems once they decide to hire you or buy your product or service. The format of a typical case study by itself is quite helpful. Here is how:

The title of the case study.
A small profile of the company or the individual for whom you had offered your product or service.
The problem the company or the individual was facing prior to using your product or service.
The highlights and features of the product or service you are describing in this case study.
How your product or service solved the problem of the company or the individual.
How the company or the individual is doing right now after having implemented the solution that you offered.

You can see that there is a natural flow –

There is a narrative that the reader can follow.
You introduce the characters.
You introduce the problem or the conflict.
Then you offer the solution.
In the end, you offer the “happily ever after” condition created by your solution.

8. Use storytelling through content writing

Just like case studies, stories can also help you weave a narrative around your product or service. People easily relate to a story. They feel emotionally connected with the problem and the solution being offered. They are more receptive towards your messaging.

9. Use concrete numbers when stating facts

Avoid using expressions like “hundreds of”, “many”, “a wide range of”, and so on.

Use numbers as much as possible. Instead of saying that “we have served hundreds of clients” say, “we have so far served 300+ clients”.

Instead of saying “our product offers many ways to solve your problem” say, “our product offers 18 ways to solve your problem”.

10. Master SEO content writing

SEO content writing can boost your search engine rankings. Writers who can get higher search engine rankings for their clients are highly coveted.

You may like to read this for more information on the topic: 10 SEO content writing rules you cannot ignore.

11. Publish content on multiple platforms

Content publishing these days isn’t just about publishing content on your website or on your business blog. You need to cover many platforms such as third-party blogs and social media websites.

Share your content on LinkedIn.
Post answers on Quora.
Write on Medium.
Offer guest blog posts on authoritative websites and blogs.

12. Re-purpose your existing content

You can re-purpose your existing content in many forms.

You can recycle small portions and post them on social media websites.
You can create dedicated blog posts on subtopics that you may have mentioned in other blog posts.
You can create infographics.
You can create animation and videos explaining the same concepts that you may have explained in a blog post.

13. Build a mailing list

This has got nothing to do with content writing or content publishing, but you can beat your competition by building a mailing list from scratch.

Of course, publishing a mailing list or a newsletter also involves content writing. Whenever you publish a new blog post you can broadcast the link to your newsletter. You can distribute important updates about your product or service using your mailing list. You can increase traffic to your website.

Ultimately it boils down to delivering value.

Fortunately for you, very few of your competitors publish content to serve their visitors well. In most of the cases, they want to generate search engine traffic and then they hope that this traffic would lead to business.

Unless they are publishing advertisements and that is the main source of revenue, random traffic does not help. You need to generate targeted traffic and targeted traffic can only be generated by publishing high-value targeted content.

What is buyer intent and how to write content for it?

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Content writing for buyer intent.

Just as there is search intent there is also buyer intent.

The concept of search intent is broad: it has many intents such as informational intent, navigational intent, transactional intent and commercial intent.

Buyer intent (also known as buying intent) or purchase intent tells you how eager a customer or client is to buy a product or subscribe to a service. This is data or information that manifests before a buying action takes place.

Why is it important? Why is it important to know buyer intent and then write content accordingly?

This Gartner report says that prospective buyers spend 50% of their time seeking information about a product or a service from third-party sources such as social media websites, review websites, blogs, talking with peers, and online directories.

This information can sway them. Even when they are ready to buy, if there is something that puts them off or gives them enough reason to get reluctant, your sale is gone.

One thing is clear about buyer intent – your prospect is ready to buy. He or she needs the last nudge. Or, you need to prevent him or her from getting distracted or misled or getting confused.

Buyer intent can be gauged from the type of web pages visitors accessing on your website. In my example, people who want to hire me as a content writer often checkup my content writing rates page. They also go through my samples.

What type of content writing can help you target specific buyer intent?

To be able to write content targeting buyer intent, you need to know what would turn your prospective buyer away. It must be some information or lack of some information that sends your prospective buyer away.

Hence, you need to fill that gap.

When a prospective customer or client comes to your website you must provide all the answers he or she may need to make up his or her mind.

What questions or apprehensions a typical client may have before hiring my content writing services? Let’s go through a few points:

Will I be able to write quality content specifically for his or her business?
Do I have enough knowledge and experience to write content that can generate business?
Can I help him or her improve his or her search engine rankings?
Can I write the amount of content that is required?
Can I stick to a schedule?
Will I write completely original content?
How expensive or affordable am I?

There can be many more questions. But what you need to pay attention to is the fact that these are all questions that a prospective client would ask.

What sort of content do I write to address to this buyer intent, or rather, these questions?

I’m constantly sharing my knowledge and experience on my blog and therefore, a prospective client should be able to get enough information about that.

I also blog a lot about how to improve one’s search engine rankings through SEO-friendly content. You may like to read How do I write search engine friendly content for my clients?

I have an FAQs section that describes my content writing process.

I have testimonials from other clients. I have also obtained testimonials on LinkedIn and Google Business.

I have explained why I charge what I charge on various pages and blog posts.

Hence, from my side, I have tried to provide as much information as possible to my visitors with buyer intent.

Similarly for your business, you need to figure out what questions or apprehensions your prospective customer or client may have and then write content addressing those questions and apprehensions.

Repurposing blog content for social media

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Here is an interesting post on how and why you should repurpose your existing content for your social media updates.

I have been doing this of late. There are many listicles on my website and blog. Take for example this LinkedIn post where I published a carousal from one of my existing blog posts.

Sometimes I simply pick a sentence or two from one of my existing web pages or blog posts and use them as image captions for LinkedIn and Instagram.

Repurposing my blog content gives me lots of opportunity to generate new content for my social media profiles. This way I don’t have to depend on new ideas, which can be hard to come by sometimes.

There is already so much that I have said on my website and on my blog. A few years ago, I did a small blog post on how to repurpose your exist content.

In fact, you shouldn’t just repurpose your existing blog content for social media updates. You can also get new blogging ideas from the subtopics.

Should content writing be done in-house or outsourced?

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Should you hire in-house team for content writing or outsource?

It is very important for your content marketing strategy to know whether you should do content writing in-house, or you should outsource it.

A few days ago I advised a client to hire an in-house content writer even when she was eager to outsource her organization’s content writing requirement to me.
Initially I had agreed because I thought it was a one-off assignment.

They wanted me to work on a document of around 22-25,000 words. I agreed to work on the assignment because initially she had said that they would be providing the research material and I would just need to compile the information in a “writerly” manner.

But the next day she said that they also wanted me to do the research.

The problem with the research was that it needed to be verified from multiple sources. Another problem was, they wanted to pay a fixed price – per word.

Yet, another problem was, they were finding my content writing service a bit expensive, although, considering the quality I was providing them, they agreed to pay me my price.

I was about to start the work when I got another message from her that she was interested in outsourcing 10-15 such assignments every month.

I told her that they needed to hire an in-house content writer for such a job, and politely declined to work on the current document.

I couldn’t afford to spend so much time on research and writing for an ongoing project for which they were eager to pay a fixed rate. One never knows how much time such research is going to take. Especially when research needs to be verified and confirmed from multiple sources.

How to decide whether you should outsource your content writing or hire an in-house content writer?

To be frank, I have a content writing and copywriting business. It is in my interest when people outsource their content writing needs.

One needs to take multiple factors into consideration before deciding whether hiring an in-house content writer is the way to go or it makes sense to outsource.
I don’t take bulk content writing assignments. Most of the clients who hire me go through my website, like my writing style, and hire me expecting that I’m going to use the same style and the same quality for their websites or blogs.

Therefore, often, it becomes difficult for me to hire multiple writers or outsource my content writing further. I need to manage most of the writing myself.
If the content writing agency can handle the volume of content writing work that you have, well and good, you should outsource.

Outsourcing definitely has its benefits. But if lots of research is required and you don’t want to pay a variable rate (according to the number of hours spent on your work), it is better to hire an in-house content writer. Or a team of in-house content writers, if you need to publish a lot of content.

Take for example the above case of writing documents containing around 25,000 words. And they need 10-15 such documents every month. Add to that research. Sometimes research takes as much time as the actual writing. Sometimes, even more time.

Even if cost-wise paying per word works for you, it doesn’t work for the content writer. If I had taken the assignment, I would have ended up spending all my time on their work, neglecting not just the work from other clients, but also neglecting my own marketing that I need to do to keep getting assignments.

Outsourcing is good when you don’t need lots of content. Cost wise, if you need to publish hundreds of thousands of words in a month, you either work with a bulk content writing agency (and compromise on the quality in the process), or you hire an in-house team that is going to spend all its time researching and writing content. You will get quality content, and the writers will be compensated according to the pay scale they have agreed to.