Tag Archives: Content Writing Tips

How to write original content for content marketing

Getting original content writing ideas

One of the biggest problems faced by people wanting to use content marketing as their main marketing tool, is writing and producing original content.

Original content in itself doesn’t help you much unless it really resonates with your audience – audience that will eventually do business with you.

So, for successful content marketing, you need original content, and also relevant content.

For the sake of brevity, in this blog post when I talk about writing original content, I also mean writing relevant content (this goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway).

Writing and publishing original content shouldn’t seem like a big challenge. You just need to have a strong desire to communicate to your visitors.

For this, you really need to know what you want to talk about.

Have a clearly-defined objective for your content marketing

This is one of the best ways of writing original content. If you have a clearly-defined objective for your content marketing, every piece of content has a meaning.

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing?

You want to grow your business with content marketing

Of course, you’re going to say that you want to grow your business. You want to attract more customers and clients.

That is the end result.

Customers and clients don’t come to you just because you are open for business.

Rains don’t come because they have to water your farms. They come when the clouds reach a region where the temperature is lower and clouds can turn into water.

Many factors collectively work to bring people to your business, make them trust you and then make them become your paying customers and clients.

Content marketing is for these factors. People becoming your customers and clients is just a by-product of these factors coming together to act together.

For companies like Amazon and Apple, it is loyalty and brand presence. People want to buy an iPhone because they want to associate with the brand (aside from the fact that iPhones are awesome).

Recently I purchased a OnePlus mobile phone because one, my sister-in-law is a travel blogger and she has been quite happy with the pictures that she clicks with her OnePlus. And two, the company has built a community around its brand, just the way Apple has been able to.

I needed a mobile phone with a good camera, and many people vouch for its camera on YouTube and various blogs.

I haven’t bought their phone just because they have a phone or even because they have a quality phone (many mobile phone companies have quality phones); I have bought because directly or indirectly, so many people have told me that buying their mobile phone is a good deal. I’ve discovered, it actually is, but that’s another story.

Through their content marketing, OnePlus has attracted people who are looking for a mobile phone with more than average-quality camera. Of course, they’re not lying, the camera is actually good, but then again, as I said, there are many mobile phones with equally good cameras.

The difference is, the company has seeded lots of content that primarily focuses on its good quality camera. This is the audience they have been drawing to their brand.

Interestingly, when I went to buy the phone from a local electronics showroom, the sales man very forcibly tried to sell me an LG mobile phone which, he claimed, has a better camera and in fact, at that moment, it did look to be better than the OnePlus model that I had gone to purchase, but I had read nothing about the LG model. In fact, I rarely come across blog posts and YouTube videos on LG Mobile phones, so, I had no information. At one point, I got so exasperated that I told the salesman that I was going to go back without buying any phone, only then he backed down.

You can find numerous blog posts and YouTube videos where people compare the OnePlus camera with the camera of Google Pixel, iPhone, and many other phones, and then conclude that the OnePlus camera is the best.

So, maybe that was their objective.

For writing original content, it is very important to have a well-defined objective for your content marketing. The moment you have an objective, you can have a long list of topics you want to cover whether you want to write blog posts or create videos.

Provide solutions to problems people actually face, for original content writing

Whenever people access your content, make sure that they learn something that they cannot learn somewhere else.

Of course, the Internet brims with quality content but when you try to solve the problem according to your point of view, you introduce a unique perspective. Your unique perspective will be hard to find on other websites and platforms.

Write content with your unique perspective

Developing your own style also helps. Even if the topics that you are covering have been covered by pretty much everyone, you can always write about topics in your own unique style.

Maybe you are humorous. Cynical. Sarcastic. Scholarly.

Never think that a particular writing style is unacceptable (I’m not suggesting you hurt people’s feelings). But definitely develop your own style.

Focus on quality and not quantity

Publishing a well-written, original piece of content in a week is much better than publishing five pieces of mediocre content in a week.

Focus on quality content writing

When you focus on quantity, when you are in a hurry to cover as many keywords as possible, you lose your focus.

Remember that your objective is not to cover every possible keyword combination.

Your purpose is to provide valuable, engaging content that helps people. It should solve a purpose. People should go back after having taken something.

Solving a purpose is also important for improving your search engine rankings. If people don’t find your content useful, they will immediately leave your website or blog, and this in turn increases your bounce rate, signaling to Google that your website doesn’t have useful content and hence, your rankings should be reduced.

Research other blogs and websites and see what’s missing

I’m not suggesting that you nit-pick. Remember that your audience is unique and hence, its needs too are unique that are perhaps, being ignored by other publishers.

Find something that is missing in other blog posts and videos

Try to find out something useful that is not being covered by your competitors, and then write about it.

Put your energies into doing research for original content writing

Research is something not many are good at. For some, it’s very hard work. For some, even if hard work is fine, it is difficult to find the right data and insight.

Do research for original content writing

Research takes time. This is why, don’t be in a hurry to publish a blog post or an article.

Sure, on many content marketing blogs you read that you must have a publishing calendar and once your have it, you must make sure you stick to it.

Sticking to a content publishing calendar makes sense if you have a big content marketing team and different team members can contribute to different aspects of your content.

But if you are a small business, even if it takes an extra week or two to finish a research-packed blog post or an ebook, don’t rush.

Yes, I repeatedly recommend that you should publish content regularly, but what I mean is, keep publishing content, one topic after another, but don’t insist that if you have decided that you are going to post a blog post on Monday then no matter, what you are going to post it on Monday (unless it is time-critical).

If you want to use good research data, it’s ok if Monday becomes Tuesday and Tuesday becomes Wednesday, really.

Rewrite already written content in your own language

Yes, there is nothing wrong in that. As long as you’re not plagiarizing, there is nothing wrong in rewriting existing content and then adding your own take to it. Remember that everything should be original. Not even a single sentence or paragraph should match that of the original blog post or article.

You can rewrite existing content

Why is it fine to rewrite already published content?

I don’t recommend that you do it all the time because then, you will never be able to come up with your own content. This is just to keep the muscles of your content marketing moving. Publishing something is always better than publishing nothing.

When you are rewriting great blog posts, suddenly ideas begin to hit you and you will be surprised to know that you yourself are getting some ideas to write about.

Maintain an ideas repository for original content writing

Ideas come at odd times and when they come, you should be able to save them, preserve them.

Save and organize when new content writing ideas come

These days I’m using OneNote from Microsoft. Surprisingly, it is better than Evernote. But you can also use Google Keep.

The basic idea is, you must have a place where you can quickly jot down writing ideas. Make sure that it is easier to retrieve the ideas when you need them and this is why I recommend something like OneNote.

In OneNote you can create a notebook (something like, content marketing), and then within the notebook you can create sections (something like, the medium you would like to cover – blog, guest blogging, social media) and then within a section, you can create pages (blog topics and research material).

But ultimately it depends on what you are comfortable in. You can also use a conventional notepad. You can also use a recording app on your mobile phone.

Just make sure whenever an idea comes to you, you are able to save it.

Use content aggregators to get original content writing ideas

For example, I use Google Alerts to get alerts in my inbox when content on content marketing appears on the web.

I also use Medium, Twitter and Flipboard to get content writing ideas. The LinkedIn newsletter is also very useful. Although I’m not as regular as I would like to be, these are very good sources and even spending 10 minutes can give you lots of original content writing ideas.

When you talk of originality, I’m not much concerned about search engine rankings because rankings are very unpredictable. Lots of lousy content still comes up in search results even after many algorithm updates.

Here is another link on A guide to creating amazing content: 5 tips to crafting useful content, from Search Engine Journal.

Contrary to what I have written above, this blog post from Search Journal recommends that you put your energies into focusing on SEO cornerstone content – writing blog posts and articles that give you ranking #1 in SERPs for your chosen keywords.

What is cornerstone content? Something like the “ultimate guide”. It is very comprehensive. It covers the topic represented by your main keyword. It is long lasting. It is going to get you targeted traffic for a very long time.

For my own, this blog post, I haven’t focused much on the SEO aspect of writing original content because improving your search engine rankings should be a long-term strategy, and not something that is to be achieved by writing lots of poor quality articles and blog posts.

The value of the original content is its ability to help you build your readership and consequently, loyalty. When people like your content, they want to do business with you. Even if they don’t want to do business with you, if you want them to promote your content, they readily do it because they have been benefiting from it, and in that process, they help you build your brand presence, which gets you business.

Something that I have observed in most budding content writers

It’s your passion for writing that makes you a good and effective content writer

“Do something that you would love to do even without getting paid, be good in that, and you will be never out of work.”

This is not a lofty ideal. I have actually seen it materializing right in front of my eyes, right in my own life, in multiple ways. Of course, you need to promote yourself, you need to market your skill so that people who can benefit from your skill can contact you.

I’m not a published writer in the conventional sense. I mean, I don’t have books in my name.

But, before I became a professional content writer, I had already written a lot. I have written without getting paid, without even expecting to be paid.

I just wrote for exposure. I liked it when people read what I had written and then praised it. It was very thrilling. I always wanted to show off my writing skills. I was proud of the way I wrote. Although I’m not a Pulitzer-prize-level writer, I’m confident about my ability to communicate.

During my school and college days, my friends used to tease me that I never read books and novels for enjoyment, I read them to polish my language (whether it was English or Hindi) and then later, show off. I did enjoy, though. Still do.

I’m not saying that it is bad to expect to be paid for your writing, I’m just telling you about how I evolved as a content writer – your story may be totally different.

So, I was published a few times in the city newspaper. I had my articles published in local magazines

When the Internet came up and when the concept of publishing helpful content began to materialize, I started publishing tutorials on various websites to promote my web design business.

I have used practically every blogging platform that was started in the 2000’s and this meant lots of writing. I wrote on various forums. I participated in email discussion threads.

The point I’m trying to make is, I wrote a lot.

So, by the time I started receiving professional content writing assignments, writing came to me naturally. Yes, I may have done badly in some cases and I may have done well, but the fundamental skill required to get good content writing assignments was there. The ground had been prepared.

The problem with the content writers that I come across is that without having honed their skills, they want good content writing assignments.

Believe me, this doesn’t work.

Of course, there are many clients who are not looking for quality writing or, they are not aware what quality writing is (lack of knowledge, lack of desire, or both).

You may get work from those clients, but this work is not going to sustain you as a content writer. There are hundreds of thousands of mediocre writers and if you are a mediocre writer, you are constantly competing with them.

You will have to work very hard, put in long hours, and you won’t earn much, eventually giving up.

Enjoy writing to become a successful content writer

Again, this is not a pep talk, this is reality.

Writing is not a skill, as many mistakenly think. Writing is an art, preferably, a performing art.

You are performing through your words and people are watching you perform when they are reading your words.

When it comes to being a good performing artist, you have to lose yourself in your performance. If you’re cautious of what you are doing, you become stiff and instead of performing, you are simply displaying yourself.

Compare it with walking. Do you have to constantly think when you walk? Are you thinking of every step?

No, if you think of every step, very soon you will get tired and you may even fall.

To be able to walk long distances, you need to be able to walk without thinking of walking, without thinking of every step. The same happens with writing. You shouldn’t have to think.

You shouldn’t have to think about writing – you only need to think about the subject, the thing that you want to say, the message you want to communicate.

How can you lose yourself in your work, you may ask, when you’re writing for a business?

By not counting every penny, or every paisa. By not constantly doing clock watching. By not being conscious of much effort you need to put or not.

When you manipulate your writing according to the money you are getting, you are not doing justice to your art.

I’m not saying people should exploit you and you should spend hours on work you are not being paid much for, but once you start writing, focus on your writing.

This is exactly what I do.

Although, I quote my writing work per word, per page or per hour, once I’m writing, I don’t hold myself if I have more to say. When I’m writing, at that time, my writing is important, not how much I am being paid. If you have a problem with the payment, don’t take up the assignment, but once you have taken it up, give your 100%.

It is great that you want to become a content writer, but don’t approach me if you are between jobs and you are looking for something to do in the meantime, if you are a student trying to make side income or if you are a housewife looking for “opportunity on Internet”.

Being a student, being between jobs and being a housewife isn’t something bad, what is bad is, you want to be a content writer just because you are in these situations otherwise, you would be doing something else.

You have to be a writer first. Writing must be one of the priorities of your life. Only then you can become a good content writer.

Importance of understanding your audience for better content writing

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Understanding your audience for better content writing

In this blog post you are going to read about the importance of understanding your audience for better content writing.

Writing content is all about giving useful information to your audience to generate more leads and sales.

Regularly publishing content on your website or blog isn’t always about SEO, although, SEO does play an important role in getting you targeted traffic.

Traffic in itself doesn’t mean anything.

You can get thousands of visitors to your website but if these visitors don’t understand what you’re trying to sell, or if your writing doesn’t convince them into becoming your paying customers and clients, your SEO doesn’t solve any purpose.

Why is it important to understand your audience for better content writing?

It is like this: to have a meaningful conversation with someone, you need to know that person. You need to know his or her likes and dislikes, preferences and interests.

Understanding facilitates meaningful conversations

Even if you don’t intimately know the person, at least you need to have a common ground for effective communication.

Goes without saying that you both should be able to understand the language being used.

In terms of selling your product or service, it is also important what the other person is looking for and whether he or she actually needs what you are selling or, does he or she even know that he or she needs what you are selling (can make a big difference)?

This is why, there are different content writing requirements for different phases of a sales funnel.

You may write content for someone who

Is looking for what you can offer,
Wants to do business with you but hasn’t yet made up his or her mind,
Isn’t aware that he or she needs your service or product to solve his or her problem,
Doesn’t know that he or she has a problem that can be solved by you

There can be many such categorizations for which you need to write exclusive content.

To be able to hire my content writing services, you first need to know that you need quality content and for that, you need a professional content writer or a content writing service.

What if you don’t know the importance of quality content writing?

I need to tell you what you are losing by not having quality content for your website.

If you are worried about your poor search engine rankings, I can tell you that maybe it is because of the inferior quality of your content.

If your traffic is good but you are not generating much business, maybe I can tell you that it has got something do with your present text.

Why is it important to understand your audience before you start writing content for your website?

Understand your audience before starting to write your content

For the purpose of clarity and focus.

For saving money and time.

Above all, for generating more business.

Content can be high-quality and still it may not get you business.

Sometimes when your search engine rankings are improving, when you are getting lots of attention on social media, you think that you are doing great.

Maybe in terms of generating traffic you ARE doing great.

But maybe you are writing for an audience who, although, likes your content, doesn’t want to do business with you.

If you keep on writing and publishing content for an audience who likes your content but doesn’t want to do business with you, all your effort and investment will go waste.

On the other hand, through your content writing, you need to target an audience that likes your content but ALSO wants to do business with you.

So, if you know what sort of audience you want to attract and what sort of audience you don’t want to attract, in the beginning itself you will put all your effort and money into writing and publishing lots of targeted content towards that direction.

How to understand your audience for better content writing?

There are many ways.

Here is a nice post on Search Engine Journal on what various things you can do to understand your audience better to be able to generate epic content.

There is a reason big businesses spend millions of dollars on research companies (heard of the controversial Cambridge Analytica company?).

Bigger companies spending millions of dollars doesn’t mean smaller businesses cannot use methods and tools to better understand their audiences. These are some things you can do

Put yourself in their shoes

Evaluate your content from their point of view.

If you were looking for your service, what would you try to find?

Suppose you are promoting a task management app.

Think from the point of view of the person who is having difficulties managing his or her tasks.

Also think from the perspective of a person who may have already tried many mobile apps for task management and is looking for better or more suitable options.

You can further narrow down to someone who likes to be able to maintain tasks very easily and may also like to rearrange them by drag-and-drop rather than manually having to change time and date.

Then there is a whole, bigger market of people who are not aware of how important it is to use the right tool for managing tasks.

Targeted content writing can be done for all these individual audiences if you are able to understand what they are really looking for.

Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics

A tool like Google Analytics can tell you what sort of people convert and what sort of people don’t convert.

If you are promoting your links on social media and social networking profiles there also you can generate unique links to track how much traffic they are generating and from that traffic, how much business you are generating.

Observe which keywords and search terms on search engines improve your conversion rate and which pieces of content are ranking well for these keywords and search terms.

This isn’t something that you will be able to achieve in a few days. It may even take a few months to gather enough data from which some usable intelligence can be drawn.

The trick is, understanding the nature of quarries and incoming traffic that gets you more business and then writing more content to cater to that audience.

Creating personas when writing content

Personas can be very helpful.

Persona is a complete or an almost complete profile of your ideal customer or the ideal person who satisfies your KPI.

Understanding your audience and then writing content accordingly doesn’t always mean just writing for your customers.

Although, eventually, every person you target should become your customer or client, but through your content writing, you don’t always have to target people who are ready to do business with you.

You can also write content for someone who isn’t aware of the fact that he or she may need your product or service.

Suppose you have just launched a website and you think that once you start getting traffic from search engines, your business will grow in leaps and bounds.

You have prepared a list of keywords and search terms and then you have started creating content to target those keywords and search terms.

You are generating traffic but the business isn’t growing.

The next best thing you know is, investing in PPC advertising.

You realize that the ROI is quite low and you are spending more money than you are making.

Even Facebook and Instagram campaigns are not working.

You are in your mid-30s. You have a great business idea. You know there is a great market for what you are trying to promote.

But, why aren’t people buying? Even when they come to your website.

So, I have this persona of a person like you who is feeling frustrated and has no idea what to do.

I know the solution is targeted content.

But you don’t know.

So, I start creating content that educates you.

When I write content that educates you, I am mindful of the fact that I’m writing content for you – someone who has a business that can do well with content writing.

I’m not targeting people who want to learn content writing and then become content writers.

I’m not saying that I’m not going to attract such people, but my main target are people who don’t want to become content writers but who need professional content writing services to improve their search engine rankings as well as conversion rate.

Concluding remarks on understanding your audience for better content writing

There are many other ways you can gather intelligence on your audience and then write content that is purposeful.

You can ask questions to your visitors. You can conduct a survey. You can also ask your friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The basic idea of this blog post is not to tell you how to understand your audience, the basic idea is, it is very important to understand before you spend your time and money on content writing.

Don’t publish what you want. Publish what your target audience is looking for.

How to use the scrum concept for incremental content writing

The benefit of using the scrum methodology for content writing

If you use the scrum methodology writing lengthy blog posts and web pages will not seem daunting.

You will know that you are not going to have to sit for a few hours and create a killer blog post in one go.

You will also know that even if you publish just a few paragraphs, you will be delivering something valuable to your visitors.

Besides, they will be no lag in your publishing process.

The biggest benefit that I see is that you will get more time to add valuable information.

Normally what happens is, we write a lengthy, comprehensive blog post or article, publish it and then move on to other topics.

After that we rarely get time, inclination or chance to revisit existing content and work at refining it.

The scrum methodology of content writing can help you develop the habit of continuously revisiting the content that you have already published.

This will in turn help you publish longer blog posts and articles packed with lots of valuable information even when you hadn’t initially planned to write long content.

At the content writing level, I see 2 immediate benefits of using the scrum methodology:

You can publish content with greater regularity because it’s very easy to create blog posts of just a couple of paragraphs and hit the publish button.
Writing and publishing longer blog posts becomes easier because the process is spread across multiple days, even multiple weeks.

Avoid these 10 content writing and content marketing mistakes

Why content marketing is so powerful no matter what size your business is?

It is due to its scalability.

If IBM can use content marketing so can a local computer repair shop.

All one needs to know is, choose an audience and then publish and disseminate appropriate content.

People love to do business with you if you

Offer them something valuable on an ongoing basis.
Provide useful information that they can use immediately for their benefit.
Solve problems for them.
Regularly engage them in meaningful conversations.
Become a pleasant part of their lives.

Benefits of Content Marketing

This is easily achievable, isn’t it?

Provided that you know who your audience is, you can write and publish highly targeted content, and you will get a better response.

Why content marketing fails despite being almost failsafe?

Why does content marketing fail?

No clarity. Impatience. Erroneous targeting. Haphazard content publishing.

Just like everything else in the world, content marketing can either be strategic and consequently, result-oriented, or it can be random, giving you random results, and you all know what happens when you depend on random results.

For your content marketing to succeed, two attributes are very important, most critical:

Clearly knowing what you want to achieve.
Publishing/writing content that helps you achieve that.

Take for example my content writing and content marketing business.

It’s a given that I want more leads, more queries, and eventually, more clients who pay me.

But, in a world replete with “content writers” who are ready to write $ 5-articles and blog posts, and in a world replete with clients who actually believe that they can ride the wave of content marketing with such articles, how do I convince them into investing in quality content?

Therefore, through my regular content writing, content publishing and content marketing, I need to not only reach out to clients who understand how important content writing is for the growth of their business, I also need to convince them that I’m the content writer they need.

Read 5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

What do I do?

Well, this blog post is not about this topic, it is about the content writing and content marketing mistakes that we commit that make even a failsafe marketing opportunity, fail. Are you committing these mistakes?

1. Not having a long-term plan for your content marketing strategy

Have a long-term content marketing plan

Content marketing is never a rush job. Although you can say that in 2 weeks you want to launch your website and before that you want to implement a content marketing strategy, it is not going to help you much. Better rely on conventional advertising for that.

For your content marketing to succeed, you need to have a long-term vision.

Content marketing is like a fruit tree. If you want to have your own fruit tree, you need to grow it. You need to get a sapling or you need to sow a seed. You water it. You take care of it. Eventually when it grows into a tree, it begins to bear fruits.

In the same manner, your content marketing bears results when it has blossomed into a considerable presence. When people begin to recognize you for the quality of your content. When you have enough good quality content.

Takes time. Takes patience. Takes perseverance.

2. Not having a content writing and a content marketing strategy

Build a content marketing strategy

I mention content writing because I provide content writing services. Writing content is a big part of providing content marketing services for my business.

Anyway, most of the content marketing strategies fail because there is no strategy.

Every successful content marketing campaign is backed by solid strategy

Strategy vis-à-vis content marketing means

Knowing what your core audience is looking for.
Knowing exactly what you want to achieve through your content writing and content marketing.
Strictly defining your KPIs.
Writing content strictly within the framework of 1., 2. and 3. above.
Distributing your content through the most appropriate channels.
Analyzing data and drawing intelligence.
Making changes in your content marketing according to data.
Creating a sustainable cycle of 1.-7. steps.

Why is it important to have a content writing and content marketing strategy?

Strategy gives you a direction. It tells you what you need to do and what you need to avoid.

Read How your typical content marketing evolves

You may have the following goals and KPIs for your content marketing:

Brand awareness
Lead generation
SEO
Customer acquisition
Customer retention and customer loyalty
Thought leadership
More website traffic
Better engagement

For example, if this year you want to increase your newsletter subscribers from 1000 to 10,000, you will need to observe what sort of content gets you more subscribers, and then publish that content more often.

If there is some type of content that does not get you lots of newsletter subscribers, then maybe you shouldn’t spend too much time on that content.

This is, assuming that your sole purpose is to increase your number of subscribers from 1000 to 10,000. Of course, you may have different key performance indicators.

In the absence of a content writing and content marketing strategy, you go on publishing content, without ever finding out whether the content is helping you OR not and then, mistakenly, you are disenchanted with your content marketing.

3. Not promoting your content aggressively

Promote your content

Even when you are publishing high-quality content unless you promote your content it is going to be difficult for your core audience to find it simply because there is too much content on the Internet.

People may never come to your website directly unless they need to purchase something from you or do business with you or get something that is only available on your website and nowhere else.

With so many channels available these days (sometimes I get clients directly from LinkedIn and they never even visit my website), even when doing business with you they may never visit your website.

This is why, it is important that you make your content available through the channels they use.

If most of your audience is on Instagram, then you need to promote your content on Instagram.

If your audience is on Facebook, then you need to promote your content on Facebook.

Build your audience, and promote your content.

4. Not focusing on SEO

Content marketing to boost your SEO

Searching on search engines is a big part of trying to find something. If you want to find some information before you make a purchase, you go to Google and not to Facebook.

If my clients want to find a competent and professional content writer, they are going to use Google and not Facebook although, they may find my content on Facebook.

This is why it is very important that they are able to find my content on Google and other search engines.

Now, ideally, we all want better search engine rankings for our target keywords and search terms.

Some people overdo it and hence, get penalized.

Some people completely ignore it, living in denial that they don’t need it.

Some get it and reap the benefits.

It is very important for you to get found on search engines because one, it is a never-ending free supply of leads and sales, and two, it brings you exposure that further improves your SEO.

If your product or service is of such type that people need to do some research, they need to acquaint themselves with the nitty-gritty of your product or service, when they need to read reviews and opinions, they’re going to use Google or Bing.

Optimizing your content writing for search engines isn’t as difficult as it seems. It becomes difficult when people are in a rush and want to push their way into the top 10 results. This doesn’t work if you face competition.

Provide value. Write in a language people use.

Check out Professional SEO content writing services.

5. Ignoring mobile audience for your content writing and content marketing strategy

Write and publish content for mobile audience

Mobile-friendly content writing means writing very short sentences and organizing the sentences in short paragraphs.

Usually, you must have noticed these days, people write a single sentence in one paragraph.

It may seem odd, but it looks good on mobile phones.

Using simple words.

If you go on and on and on, writing a very big sentence and then you have multiple sentences in a single paragraph, your readers are going to end up distracted.

On mobile phones, they want to be able to read quickly. Write accordingly.

Read How to do content writing for the mobile-first experience

6. Not working with an experienced content writer

Work with an experienced content writer

Now, you may think that I’m writing this because I provide content writing services, and in a way, I won’t blame you if you think that way.

Content marketing, and consequently, writing content, is an ongoing job.

You need someone who can write good content regularly, without compromising on quality.

Quality is of paramount importance.

Without quality there is no engagement. There is no value addition. Very bad search engine rankings.

Can write well yourself? Good.

Can write well, regularly? Marvelous.

No? Then you need a content writer. Don’t waste time.

7. Not building a dedicated content writing and content marketing team

Build a dedicated content marketing team

The need to build a content writing and content marketing team may differ from business to business. Some businesses need lots of content and lots of marketing, some don’t.

But if you think that lack of manpower is stopping you from moving on to the next level, then you need to build a dedicated content writing and content marketing team. Without it, your entire strategy crumbles.

As your content marketing scales and matures, you will need people with diverse talents including

Content writing & copywriting
Graphic design
Video and animation skills
Social media marketing
Data analytics
Strategy
SEO
Web design

Putting off the decision to build a dedicated content writing and content marketing team, especially when your business is on the path of growing, is going to cost you dearly.

8. Ignoring email marketing

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing

86% business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes, according to Hubspopt.

According to a Radicati report, by 2020, 3 billion people will be using emails (just in case, this is December-end, 2018, when I’m writing this). The report also says that 205 billion emails are sent every day these days, and by the end of 2019, the count will be 246 billion.

Anyway, these are big numbers, but the point is, people still use emails.

It is the best way of making it possible for them to discover your new content and re-appreciate your existing content.

How does your email marketing help boost your content marketing effort? It’s a self-serving relationship.

Email marketing is only effective if you build your own mailing list.
You build your own mailing list only when people subscribe to your updates on their own.
They will subscribe to your updates only when they think that they are going to receive something valuable.
They think that they will receive something valuable only when they find valuable content on your website and hence, are driven to subscribe to your email updates.
You will need to publish valuable content on your website.
You will need to make it possible for them to discover your valuable content.
You will need to publish content they don’t want to miss.
Hence, you will be continuously publishing high-quality content.
This will boost your content marketing.

Frankly, there is no meaning to content marketing without email marketing.

Read Importance of segmentation in email marketing

9. Thinking that publishing blog posts is content marketing

Simply blogging doesn’t mean content marketing

Although blogging is my favorite form of content marketing, it isn’t the only way you disseminate your content.

Content marketing also means publishing

White papers
FAQs
Press releases
Case studies
Infographics
Social media posts
Long and short videos
Memes
GIFs
Podcasts
Graphics and images
Animations
PDFs
Slides

and a horde of other things.

I’m not suggesting that you put your energies and budget into all forms of content listed above. You will have to find what interests your audience the most.

White papers are preferred by those who want to access substantive content that educates and informs. This is a good way of showing how deep you have gone in your profession.

Case studies tell how your product or service solves problems and benefits businesses and individuals.

Memes allow you to participate in ongoing trends.

You will have to know how your audience reacts to different formats and then once you have found that out, you need to focus there.

10. Thinking that content marketing is a one-time affair or it is a single campaign

Content marketing is an ongoing commitment

Content writing and content marketing is an ongoing affair.

The simple reason is, if you are publishing blog posts and articles and then disseminating them using various channels, so is your competition. So are numerous other businesses that may not be directly your competitors, but have content that can compete with your content.

Take the example of traditional advertising. Do you see Johnson & Johnson’s ads on TV? Do you see Intel ads? McDonald’s? Pepsi? The iPhone?

If these are renowned brands, why do they still need to advertise constantly?

Because there are scores of, if not hundreds of, alternatives on the market. It just takes a couple of seconds for the customer to get distracted and end up purchasing another product and then switching to that product for ever.

Similarly, in content marketing, thousands of blog posts, web pages, articles, press releases and social media updates are being crawled and indexed by the search engines on a daily basis.

You need to maintain a presence. You have to convey to the search engines and your prospective customers and clients that you are still in the game.

Of course, you’re not a publishing company and like my business, you are also not into content writing and content marketing. So, you don’t have to publish every day.

Still, you need to have a schedule. And this schedule should continue and then scale according to the growth of your business.

Conclusion – what makes content writing and content marketing work for your business?

Persistence. Clarity. Persistence.

Over the years I have seen many content marketing efforts fail because they’re not persistent.

They had the clarity. They had the vision. They also had the needed enthusiasm in the beginning.

Then they lost steam.

As I have written above, the benefits of content marketing manifest like the benefits of growing a fruit tree.

In the beginning you need to invest before you can see results.

It’s like, to be able to use your office to do business, you first need to build the office, or purchase the office and then set up the paraphernalia. Until these basic steps are done, you cannot start doing your business.

Similarly, content marketing means creating a presence through high-quality content. You cannot build a presence with 5-10 blog posts and web pages and then spreading them across your social media profiles.

Strategy doesn’t happen in a week or a couple of months. And there’s a reason why it is called content marketing strategy.