Tag Archives: Content Strategy

Is content writing and publishing same as content marketing?

Just writing and publishing content is not content marketing

If you are simply writing and publishing content it is not content marketing. Content is the basis of your content marketing so obviously, without content, there is no marketing, but merely writing and publishing content doesn’t deliver you the needed results.

It is like this: you have a TV channel. You are broadcasting high quality movies and series. You don’t aggressively promote your movies and series. You simply produce them and broadcast them. The only viewers you get are those who are randomly channel surfing and accidentally come across your TV channel.

The same happens when you are writing and publishing content without doing anything else.

Marketing, as is the case with any systematic marketing campaign, is a collection of steps that you need to take or follow to get tangible results.

In content marketing, you create content, and then you draw people to that content. The drawing of people can happen through multiple channels. These channels include:

Search engines.
Social media and social networking platforms.
Mailing lists.
Back links from other websites and blogs.
PC campaigns.
E-books, case studies and white papers.

In simple terms, content marketing means publishing content and then not just promoting that content, but also taking steps to make sure that maximum number of people consume that content.

Aside from using the channels above, content marketing also involves using analytics tools available to you to monitor what sort of traffic your content is generating and then streamlining your content accordingly.

Take for example search engine traffic. The keywords and search terms you are trying to target, may not be getting you the needed traffic and people who find your website on search engine pages may be using totally different keywords and search terms. Through Google Analytics, you can find out which keywords and search terms people are using and then make changes to your content. This is also an ongoing activity.

Content writing and content marketing are ongoing activities

These are not one-time affairs. You cannot publish 10-15 blog posts and articles and then rest on your laurels. It’s because almost all your competitors are using content marketing to draw targeted traffic to their websites.

Since everyone is trying to get ahead of everyone, sooner or later your competitors are going to have more content than you have and consequently, more exposure than you have.

They will be able to create buzz on an ongoing basis and hence lap up all the traffic.

Since everybody has an online presence these days, competition is greater than it used to be a decade ago. Everybody knows about SEO. Everybody knows about social media marketing. Most of the businesses use email marketing.

Millions of instances of content are constantly being produced and published in the form of blog posts, webpages, press releases, PDFs, videos, infographics, images, articles and social media and social networking updates, every hour. Amidst this deluge of content, how do people find your content?

Writing content and publishing it and then marketing it constantly may overwhelm in the beginning, but once you begin to follow a pattern, it is just like any other business activity.

Every established business has a sales and marketing department. This means, marketing is required all the time.

The same is the case with content marketing. It is definitely cheaper than conventional marketing, nonetheless, it is an integral part of doing business.

Secret to effective content writing: understanding customer’s pain points

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My every content writing project begins with an understanding of the pain points of, not my own clients, but the customers and clients of my clients.

Email describes my content writing process

Writing for your customers and clients

When I’m writing content for your business, whether it is your website content, your blog, your newsletter, your case study or your e-book, although you are paying me and I’m writing for you, the audience is YOUR customers and clients.

Why effective content writing means understanding customer’s pain points?

The image shows 2 people talking to each other

Effective content writing by knowing customers pain points

By the end of the day, everyone is looking for a solution to his or her problem.

If you are an app developer, your client is looking for an app developer she can totally depend on in terms of writing perfect code and finishing the project on time, within the stipulated budget.

She may also be having problems looking for an app developer who can work in the technology stack she needs.

As an app developer, you need to tell your prospective clients that you have just the right app development solution they are looking for.

Similarly, what are the pain points of my clients when they approach me for my content writing services?

They need well-written, high-quality content on their website or blog.
They want to generate more business and hence, they need content writing that converts.
The need to improve their search engine rankings for their target search terms so, they need content that is search engine friendly and optimized.
They need someone who can write content consistently and with a consistent level of quality.

These are the main pain points.

These are needs. Why am I calling them “pain points”?

It’s just another way of saying what my clients need and what they stand to lose if they don’t get what they need.

A pain point is a specific problem your prospective customer or client is facing.

For example, if you don’t get a professional content writer who can improve your conversion rate as well as SEO, you stand to lose business.

That’s a terrible thought. Hence, a pain point is, not being able to find the right content writer.

In terms of my content writing services, the pain points can be further explained as:

Not getting a good writer within their budget.
The current writing is lousy, ineffective, and even unprofessional.
The current content is not selling and increasing business.
They need to publish more content but are not able to do so.
They or their current content writer cannot strike a perfect balance between quality content writing and search engine optimization.
The email campaigns generate no response.
The blog posts generate no traffic.
There are no queries from their website.
People don’t share the content on social media.

As a content writer eager to get business, my job is to address all this pain points and explain to my clients that they are going to get solutions to their problems when they hire me as a writer.

The same applies to your content.

For effective content writing, you need to understand what you provide, how you help people solve their problems, and what solutions you deliver.

For your content writing to be effective, it needs to be multifaceted.

When people are on your website, they should be able to easily understand what you’re trying to communicate.

Your writing should be able to convince them.

To be able to generate traffic from search engines, you must optimize your content according to the queries your target audience uses.

If you provide hair treatment services people won’t just look for “hair treatment services”, although, in this case, they may look for exactly this search term.

But anyway, they may also look for something like “how to stop losing hair”, or “treatment for dandruff” or “help with alopecia” and so on.

Hence, if you are writing content for a hair treatment services website, you need to write content addressing all the pain points of prospective clients.

Is knowing pain points only relevant to content writing?

Not at all. Yes, knowing the pain points of your customers and clients certainly helps you make your content writing effective, but every product or service in the market succeeds when it is addresses the right pain points.

Take for example word processing.

The developer of a word processor needs to know what difficulties the users face when working on documents.

If the developer goes on his own tangent and instead of focusing on the text he begins to obsess with graphics and video, he is not providing what his users are looking for – quality proofreading, formatting, real-time collaboration and inserting other design elements into the document.

Pain points play an important role in the success of every product or service.

Even your house takes care of the pain points of your need to live somewhere comfortably and feel protected.

How to know the pain points of your customers and clients for better content writing?

This is not as easy as it sounds. But you can do the following:

Talk to people

Talk to people and note down how they talk about the problems and hurdles they are facing in their day-to-day lives, especially pertaining to a particular facet of their lives that may be impacted by your product or service.

You need to make this interaction an integral part of your content writing and content marketing strategy. Constantly talk to people and understand how they converse about your industry in general and your product or service in particular, and then use that language to write your content.

Seek advice from Google

Google isn’t just good for searching for information. Once you search for a string, it also presents you with numerous suggestions to improve your search.

Google search for effective content writing

For example, if you search for “effective content writing”, at the bottom Google also gives you the following suggestions you may like to try:

content writing format
how to write content writing samples
marketing content writing examples
introduction to content writing
content writing tips for beginners
content writing tips for beginners pdf
content sample
content writing tutorial

These suggestions may seem totally disconnected for this particular phrase, for your phrase, they may give you an insight into what other searches people are using to find information on your product or service.

Keep a tab on social media

People use social media to vent out.

Even when they are not venting out, they are constantly posting interesting and thought-provoking questions and these questions can lead you to better understanding the pain points your customers and clients have.

You can use Quora, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to track conversations about your product or service (or whatever social networking thing is going on right now).

Concluding remarks on effective content writing and understanding pain points

Content writing is all about improving conversion rate and drawing targeted traffic from various sources including search engines.

People convert (become your customers and clients, or subscribers) when they are convinced that you are offering the right solution to their problem/pain point.

This means addressing the problem at hand and presenting a solution through your writing.

Even on Google, if the searcher doesn’t feel that you are offering the right solution, he or she won’t click the link and visit your website.

Similarly, unless people are satisfied with your solution, they won’t share your links on their social media profiles.

Understanding pain points of your customers and clients also helps you come up with highly useful content on an ongoing basis. This is because, your customers and clients are always going to have one or another problem and you constantly need to provide solutions.

Content marketing strategies that always work

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Content marketing strategies that always work

In this blog post you will read about content marketing strategies that always work and bring you success.

Want to ensure that your content marketing does not fail and always succeeds?

Here is a nice blog post published in Entrepreneur that lists a few strategic approaches that you can follow when carrying out your content marketing strategy.

Before proceeding, you may like to read 11 things that make your content marketing successful.

The above listed Entrepreneur blog post talks about the following strategic approaches when writing and publishing content:

Write authoritative content: I have written a lot on my blog what authoritative content is and how it benefits your business. Writing and publishing authoritative content means conveying to people that you have full knowledge of your business or your stream and you are the right person to do business with.
Write and publish evergreen content: This type of content lasts. Of course, you should also write on topical trends but write high-quality content that can be used by people for many months, many years. This way, your content is always relevant. You can also keep it relevant and evergreen by constantly updating it.
Write in an easy-to-understand language: Write in a manner that freely flows. When you’re writing for a business website, you’re not writing a literary novel. Keep your sentences short and simple. Focus on the benefits. Be conversational. Stay to the point.
Give your readers something significant: Give them something that really solves their problem like no one else does. As the above blog post says, “focus on one big idea”, which means, give them something that is irresistible.
Connect with influencers in your field: Influencers are those who have already built an audience for themselves, who have built a platform. They can influence people. People listen to them. If they promote your content or one of your links, you can get lots of attention.

How to Create the Content Your Audience Desires?

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Create content your audience desires

How many times have you found yourself without inspiration and feeling unsure whether the content you want to create is going to attract your audience? Everyone has moments when we run out of ideas. Moreover, you may already publish content constantly and still feel that you don’t have the results you expected. One explanation might be that you create your content based on your assumptions and not on clear research.

This article is going to help you make your audience “hungry” for your content. It doesn’t matter if you own a small or medium business. These strategies work in any scenario. You just need to listen to your audience and you will see how easy it is to create “craveable” content. So, let’s get started!

Create Content Your Audience Craves For

Do you know how to use your analytics?

Analytics are the best tools to tell you what your audience likes best and how they react to different posts. Social media analytics will tell you exactly what type of content was preferred the most by your audience. For instance, it is very easy to check which were the most appreciated posts on Facebook. Just go to the Insights feature and you will immediately see which posts had the highest engagement rates. If you want to become viral on Instagram, then you should consider creating a business account. Once you have set up your account, the analytics icon will tell you which were the top posts that were sorted on different criteria like impressions, engagement, reach, and so on.

What should you do next once you identify your top posts? Of course, you cannot copy them and post them again. Your audience will become disappointed if you do so, discovering that you lack inspiration and you have nothing new to tell them. Therefore, if you want to follow the positive pattern, you should ask yourself the following questions before you create the next posts:

What is the common topic among your top-rated posts?
What is the source of your top content? Is it coming from your blog or from a specific publication?
Is there a particular type of content performing much better than the others? For example, do the photos have bigger engagement rates than the videos?
Which were the most interesting comments your followers left on the popular posts?

Find what your audience thinks!

Your analytics tools might be great, but they don’t tell you everything. So, what better source there is to tell you how to create content your audience desires if you don’t ask them directly? There are many ways you can find your audience’s opinion. For example, you can publish a poll on your social media profile and ask your audience to vote the type of content they like the most. Based on the results, you can adjust your content strategy.

On the other hand, you can also ask open questions. These questions will give you a lot of ideas for new topics you can address in your next posts. Furthermore, you can email your subscribers periodically and ask them about the type of content they liked the most on your website. This is how you will show your audience how important they are for you and how much you value their opinion.

Learn from your competitors!

If you don’t have enough time to use analytics tools and create an entire content strategy for success, then you can have a look at what your competition is doing. You did it when you created your products, so why not do it also when it comes to your content? Your competition already puts a lot of efforts into creating shareable content for their products. So, who says that you cannot have a look as well? There are plenty of tools you can find online to help you have a sneak peek on your competition’s most engaging posts.

On the other hand, you can learn from other companies even if they are not your competition. You most probably have your idols. You can learn from their success stories and discover what is their strategy to keep their audience engaged. You can have a look at general ideas and patterns and then adapt them to your brand specifics.

The sky is no longer the limit

The internet is full of mediocre content. Your competition is also producing average content which doesn’t make their audience vibrate with every word they read. So, you need to do something more than them and adopt the skyscraper technique. You should try to get out of the ordinary and become known on the market with amazing content. How do you do it? It’s not that complicated!

First, you should find which is the most popular content. Once you have identified it, use that content to create a better version of it. If you know which is the topic that attracts your audience, then you can enhance your content with relevant keywords. Therefore, you increase your content’s visibility. Keywords will also help you identify even more popular content which you can then enhance and surprise your audience with useful and informative content.

Create marketing personas

Creating a marketing persona will help you identify exactly what your audience wants to receive from your side. You already know what type of products your audience wants to buy from you. So, now you need to find out how to make them follow your page and come back for more products and information. Without a marketing persona, you will only guess what your audience expects from you in terms of content. This might affect your inspiration as you might be creating content around the topics that you know best. A marketing persona, on the other hand, will help you get out of your comfort zone and create content that wows your audience.

If you really want to have success with your content, you need to separate yourself from the competition. They might be doing an excellent job. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything new to say. On the contrary, their ideas can be an excellent source of inspiration for you. Your content is an excellent tool which you can use to express your personality, humor, and ideas.

How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs

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How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs?

This blog post will explain to you how to find the right content writer or the right content writing service for your business.

Once you know what sort of content you want to publish on your website or blog, the greatest dilemma that your content marketing campaign faces is, how to find the right talent for your content writing needs.

Typically, your search for a professional content writer may begin with the following activities:

Search on Google
Go through freelance websites
Search online forums
Mention the need on your website if it is a high-traffic website
Mention on your social media profiles that you are looking for a content writer
Look within your own organization
Put up an advertisement in the classifieds section

Why is it extremely crucial to find the right content writer?

The content that you publish on your website or blog is going to stay there for a long time. Whether you get 10 visitors or 1000 visitors or even 1 million visitors, they are all going to consume the very same content that has been written by your content writer.

Hence, it is very important to choose or find the right content writer for your content writing needs.

Your content writer is going to help you

Improve your search engine rankings
Improve your conversion rate
Enhance your brand presence on the Internet
Write case studies
Write white papers
Prepare social media updates
Prepare email campaigns
Write blog posts and guest blog post
Write informative articles for your website

It is through your content writing that people will recognize you and form an opinion about your business and ultimately, decide to do business with you, or with someone else. The right content writer can provide you high quality content on an ongoing basis.

High quality content means more business

So, high-quality content – good business; low-quality content – less business or worse, no business.

Personally I feel any web content writer with decent skills should be able to help you improve your search engine rankings provided you target the right keywords and you are ready to spend enough amount of money and time into regularly publishing unique content on your website or blog.

The problem is not SEO, the problem is the conversion rate.

The problem is often not search engine rankings.

The problem is your conversion rate. And the right content writer understands this.

How many people actually do business with you after coming to your website?

Although there are many factors that affect your conversion rate, content writing, or the copy on your website, is one of the most important factors.

A content writing service like Credible Content can give you content that can improve your conversion rate.

Hence, even if your online content writer is not able to improve your search engine rankings, if he or she can improve your conversion rate, that’s what you need.

You can get targeted traffic to your website in multiple ways, but if the traffic does not convert, nothing matters.

I don’t mean to say you should settle for a website content writer who is unable to improve your search engine rankings. In fact, an experienced and capable content writer should be able to achieve both for you:

Improve your SEO
Improve your conversion rate

It’s all about finding the right talent. How do you do it?

Jot down the following to settle on the right talent for your content writing needs:

How are the communication skills of the website content writer you are evaluating?

Communication skills of your content writer

Communication skills of your website content writer

Writing, after all, is all about communication. The ability to communicate the right message at the right time is more so important during online content writing.

Can your website writer communicate convincingly?

Of course, if you are not sure what exactly is communicative writing, it will be difficult for you to judge your writer, but go with your gut feeling.

How do his or her emails sound? Does he or she take care that there are no spelling and grammar mistakes in the emails he or she writes to you?

Does he or she articulate in clear sentences without unnecessarily using words?

Is he or she too pushy?

Does he or she seem to be agreeing to every possible condition just to get the job?

Is his or her writing style conversational?

Is there a consistency in the manner in which he or she has written his or her profile on the website and the way he or she writes emails to you?

Does he or she understand your business needs?

Does your content writer understand your business needs?

It may be important, or it may not be important whether a writer has some sort of expertise in your business field. Still, a professional, established content writing service can be invaluable to your business.

I get to write a lot on technology – web design, server management, programming protocols and Cloud technology.

So, you can say that I’m comfortable writing on technology-related topics and my clients don’t have to spend lots of time explaining the specifics to me. Even when I don’t understand certain concepts, I know how to look them up on Google and then write about them in my own language. You can say that if you want an experienced tech writer for your business, I’m the right content writer for you.

I’m the right content writer for you also because I have been writing content for websites since 2007 and in all these years I have written for different businesses, from fashion to real estate to cooking to advertising and marketing to healthcare business to network marketing to accounting to financial consulting to house maintenance, and more.

Nonetheless, recently a client approached me who needed some knowledge of finance for his content writer. Although I told him that I can easily write on financial matters, he was reluctant because he needed a writer who has been writing financial articles for a while. I forwarded his message to another writer.

As a professional content writer with lots of experience, I know when I am the right content writer for you or not. I’m not here to get your work by hook or by crook. If I feel I’m not the right match, I will either let you know that you should look for the right content writer for your business somewhere else, or I will try to find one for you among my own group of writers.

Go for someone who you think can deliver your content for your business need.

Can he or she write search engine friendly content?

SEO-friendly content writing

There are many ways you can do business on the web without minding much about Google and Bing, and in fact, I advise my clients not to put all their eggs in the search engine basket. But, a big source of targeted traffic to your website are going to be the search engines.

Your search engine rankings are based on the following:

The age of your domain.
The number of genuine incoming links to your website.
The quality and the authority-factor of the websites linking to you.
The quality of your content.
The formatting of your content.
The relevance of your content.
How easy it is to access your content.
The frequency with which you publish fresh content and update existing content.
The timeliness of your content.
The sort of buzz your content creates on social media platforms.

As you notice, after the first three factors, it is all about your content, and in fact, without your content, the search engines have nothing to rank.

Your content writer should be able to write search engine-friendly content.

Don’t confuse search engine-friendly content with stuffing keywords into your writing senselessly. This is counter-productive. More than doing good, keyword-stuffing can bring you irreparable harm. The search engines can ban you for life.

Think it this way: there is a reason Google is called “the search engine giant”.

The company uses innumerable brains to make sure that you cannot trick the search engine into ranking your content higher even if your content actually does not deserve to be ranked higher.

Once I read that at a particular time, 240 math PhDs are constantly tweaking the Google search algorithm so that only quality content comes up when people use the search engine.

Too many people spend lots of time and money on trying to “trick” Google.

Even if they spend half of that time and money on publishing high-quality content on their websites, they will get better results.

Anyway, find out if your website writer can write search engine-friendly content and your content writing service can improve your SEO.

What is search engine-friendly content?

Keywords must be strategically used in the title and the body.
Keywords must be a part of the overall content rather than being forced here and there just for the sake of using them.
Content must be authoritative: as much information should be packed as possible in a single link.
The content is formatted so that it is easier for the search engine crawlers to analyze the content: various parts of the content should be arranged under the appropriate headlines and with bulleted points to make it “scannable” and understandable.
Various sections of your website should be interlinked strategically. No need to repeat the same content again and again if it can simply be linked to (within your website).
The sentences must be very simple, straightforward and clearly-formed. A 6th standard student should be able to understand what has been written.

How active your content writer is on the Internet?

Is your content writer active on the Internet?

No, I don’t mean that you should check out whether your content writer regularly posts cute cat videos on Facebook or the pics of his or her breakfast on Instagram. You don’t want a content writer who whiles away his or her time like that.

What I mean is, is he or she actively contributing to his or her field through constantly publishing high quality blog posts, articles and social media updates?

This is not a necessity: maybe you have come across a content writer who is so busy that he or she only gets enough time to write for his or her clients and he or she never gets time to write otherwise. That’s fine. There are always exceptions.

My personal experience is, content writers who only want to write for their clients are generally not good content writers. Many writers who approach me for work are very stingy about publishing content to showcase their services. They just want paid assignments. This makes them desperate and this has a direct impact on their writing quality.

Again, this has been my personal experience because I am often working with other content writers too.

Content writers who don’t blog often, who don’t write articles and blog posts on different topics, even non-paying topics, aren’t very interesting writers. They are lazy writers. Even greedy. They won’t write a single extra paragraph just for the love of the craft.

The case scenario can be opposite too. Is your writer so busy working on his or her own stuff that he doesn’t turn in your assignments on time?

There must be some balance. When you search for your writer on Google, you should be able to find lots of blog posts, articles and social media updates from the writer telling you that he or she actively participates in discussions relevant to his or her field. This shows that he or she proactively tries to grow his or her skill and he or she is also communicative and interactive.

How are his or her writing skills?

How are the writing skills of your content writer?

The most important quality to have for a writer or a content writer – writing skill.

Although there might be different styles of writing and different writers follow different writing guidelines, there is wrong writing and there is right writing, and your writer must be able to distinguish.

The following must be impeccable:

Sentence formation
Spelling
Grammar
Flow
Vocabulary

If the language in which you want the content writer to write is not a strong point for you, initially you will need to get the writing reviewed by someone you can trust (someone who knows the language well).

When looking for the right service provider for your business, keep in mind that good writing abilities are very essential to being a good content writer.

When the writing is well, proficient and error-free, you seem professional and you show respect for your visitors. It matters what image they form of you and hence, it shows that you pay attention to every word that you publish on your website or blog.

Is your content writer going to stick around for your ongoing content writing needs?

Is your content writer going to stick around?

The more your content writer writes for you, the better he or she gets. This has been my personal experience.

Organizations and individuals don’t want to let go of me once I have been writing content for them for a few months (provided they need quality content on an ongoing basis).

Comfort level develops.

Your writer knows more about your business after a while. You also begin to trust him or her. Your website or blog begins to adopt his or her writing style.

Although one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your content writing needs to a content writer or a content writing agency is that it is very easy to change your content writer, make sure that you settle with a writer who is going to stick with you for a long time.

How do you know that your content writer is going to stick around?

Frankly, there are no guarantees in life. But there are some signs that you can pick to make sure that the content writer you are hiring is going to write for you for a long time. Some of them are:

If you contact your content writer from a freelancing website go through his or her profile and see for how long he or she has been writing content.
If you are contracting a content writing agency like Credible Content, just check for how long the person or the group of people have been providing content writing and content marketing services.
As mentioned above, check if your content writer is serious about his or her profession and if he or she continuously writes articles, blog posts and social media updates about his or her profession (that is, content writing).

Again, there is no guarantee. A company can go down no matter how impressive its website is, and a lone freelancer providing his or her content writing services from a freelance website may go on providing content writing services for years.

Conclusion

Whether right now you believe it or not, quality content is as important for your website as the web design itself.

Most of the entrepreneurs don’t realize that due to lack of quality content their websites don’t convert well and after a few months or after a couple of years, they have to wrap up their businesses. They think their idea was not good or people didn’t understand what they were trying to deliver.

The problem, more than 99% of the cases, is with content. They either underestimate the value of a good content writer or they don’t even realize that they need high quality content for their websites.

Note: Most of the images above are from https://unsplash.com