Tag Archives: Content Writing Tips

Running out of content writing ideas? 5 ways to never run out of them

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How to never run out of great content writing ideas

Coming up with quality content writing ideas is one of the biggest challenges faced by content marketers.

Content marketing in the contemporary world is unavoidable. Either publish quality content on your website or blog, or you make way for your competitors. There is no other way.

Whether you are writing content on your own or you have hired a content writer (or a team of content writers), you have to come up with exciting and engaging and most importantly, useful content writing ideas.

There is no use publishing content regularly if your target audience doesn’t find the content useful and engaging.

Every piece of content must be useful. It must solve some purpose.

Different Google ranking algorithms have made sure that if you simply focus on algorithms, you don’t get much headway if you want to improve your search engine rankings.

Your search engine rankings can only improve if actual human beings respond to your content, and they respond only if they find your content interesting and useful.

So, it is very important that there is a steady stream of content writing ideas.

But where do interesting content writing ideas come from?

Topics for content writing and come up from anywhere, yes, anywhere.

How to find all those elusive content writing ideas non-stop?

Finding great content writing ideas

In the beginning, usually everything is very easy and hunky-dory. You are bubbling with ideas and you feel as if you’re going to conquer the content marketing world and become its King or Queen.

Then, after having published 10-15 blog posts or articles, you suddenly begin to panic. You can no longer come up with great content writing ideas.

Even if you have hired a content writer, he or she cannot, on his own come up with great content writing ideas. There has to be a mechanism for a continuous supply.

What do other content marketers do? How come other publishers never run out of content writing ideas? How come they are always coming up with great ideas? Are they a bunch of exceptional geniuses?

Not necessarily.

They have a system in place that gives them a never-ending supply of great content writing ideas.

And the beauty of this system is, everyone has access to it, everyone can develop it.

Listed below are 5 ways you never run out of great content writing ideas.

1. Read and enhance your expertise

Writing about your topic on an ongoing basis means you need to develop some sort of expertise. If you have noticed, people who develop expertise in their field, write often.

Blog post after blog post, article after article, book after book, lecture after lecture, nothing seems to stop them.

A big reason why they never run out of interesting ideas is because they’re constantly acquiring in-depth knowledge about their field.

Even small topics and subtopics can be converted into highly engaging articles and blog posts.

There can be umpteen topics in every subject matter.

Even if you are a plumber you can write exciting series of blog posts on your experiences handling various plumbing jobs.

Reading is an essential part of writing. It is like, what goes in comes out. If you don’t feed your intellect with information and ideas, your intellect won’t be able to process new ideas.

Reading is like the seeds that you scatter over the productive land of your mind.

There is nothing wrong in first acquiring knowledge from the others and then creating your own take on what you have understood.

As Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

You can build new knowledge only when you have acquired existing knowledge.

Invest in books on your field. Read blogs dedicated to your profession. Follow people on Twitter and Facebook who constantly write about your field of expertise.

This can be time consuming.

But content marketing isn’t a week-long, or a month-long activity.

It is an ongoing process.

2. Be open to taking risks

People who always play it safe rarely succeed. In business very often you have to take risks.

How do you take risks trying to write interesting content for your business?

Swim against the tide – not for the heck of it, but because you really have something contrary to say.

Suppose there is a popular belief in your profession and it is considered a gospel truth. Maybe you think differently but you don’t want to annoy people and hence you keep quiet.

Make a thorough assessment of your opinion. Gather as much information as possible. Spend ample amount of time presenting your case. And then write a “controversial” post.

Even a single controversial post can present you with many blog writing opportunities with at least 10 more topics.

3. Constantly communicate with influencers in your field

If you continuously interact with influencers in your field you constantly get new content writing ideas.

This is because you are constantly exchanging opinions and ideas with like-minded people. There might be many issues you could have missed that can be brought up in various discussions.

Some people may have more experience than you. Some people may have different opinions. Some may come from different backgrounds serving different audience though the same business as yours.

A good way of keeping in touch with influencers in your profession is by remaining active on social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. For your specific domain you will have to find out on your own which is the best platform.

If you feel you are not the talking types you can just track the ongoing conversations. Even reading through various threads will give you many content writing ideas.

4. Maintain a list of ideas

This is an oft-repeated suggestion. Content writing ideas can come to you anytime. They can even come to you when you are not ready to write.

So that you don’t lose great ideas, maintain a list of them. You can maintain a Google Keep note.

You can use a web clipper browser extension from Evernote or OneNote.

You can use a simple Word file or text file.

You can use a voice recording app.

You can simply send yourself an email whenever you get a new idea.

You can use an Excel sheet.

You can use an editorial calendar plug-in if you prefer WordPress for maintaining ideas.

I use Trello these days.

The point is, you must have a place where you can store the ideas and then you can quickly refer to it when you need a new idea.

5. Repurpose your existing content

You may not realize it, but there might be a cornucopia of great content writing ideas within your existing content.

You should anyway keep on updating your existing content to keep it relevant, fresh and topical.

While updating your existing content you can draw many content writing ideas from it.

Sometimes even a headline or a subheadline or a bullet point can trigger a complete blog post or a complete article.

For example, I could write a complete blog post on how to repurpose your existing content. In fact, you can go ahead and read How to repurpose old content.

Sometimes, while reviewing my existing content I come across an expression or a phrase that needs further explanation.

In the context of this blog post, you may wonder, what exactly is “an interesting content writing idea”? In a completely different blog post I can discuss what might be interesting and not interesting depending on a particular business.

Continuously coming up with content writing ideas is very critical for the success of not just your search engine rankings but your entire content marketing exercise. If you think you are all set, good for you.

If you think you may run out of quality content writing ideas in near future, or even after a few months, you should better start preparing a mechanism that allows you to save and track great ideas.

How to improve your SEO by following Google’s “high-quality content” guidelines

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improve SEO-with-Googles-quality-content-guidelines

When it comes to recognizing high-quality content to decide your search engine rankings on Google, whose guidelines it pays to follow? Of course, Google’s high-quality content guidelines. If you follow them you can certainly improve your SEO.

This Search Engine Land update says that these high-quality content guidelines are basically for Google’s internal content creators.

Your web content is not just text. It comprises of everything a web page typically has including the HTML source code, the images and videos and JavaScript and other web scripts. Therefore, Google has different style guides that can be accessed by you to improve the overall quality of not just the content but also the way your website serves that content to people as well as search engine crawlers. These are the style guides:

You must wonder, if there are so many things that can affect your search engine rankings, why put so much stress on writing SEO content?

This is because SEO content writing is a building block. It paves the way for better search engine ranking. Even if you get everything else sorted out, unless you have high-quality content that is search engine friendly, you’re not going to be able to improve your SEO.

Improve your SEO with the following high-quality content writing guidelines from Google:

Here are a few things you can keep in mind while writing content for your website or blog. Nothing much new is there but it helps to always revise the fundamental concepts of writing well for better search engine rankings.

The guidelines from Google below are mostly for writing purposes, after that the Google guidelines also tell you how to use optimized images for your content. First, content writing…

  • Write in a conversational style. It is recommended that you write the way you talk. Since the search engine crawlers will also be accessing your content, try to write very simply so that even a robot can understand what you are writing.
  • Sound authoritative and knowledgeable. Remember that Google wants to present content that represents expertise. Your content should help people solve problems. Yes, you can write authoritative, knowledge-written content using simple language.
  • Whenever possible try to follow the American writing style for grammar and spelling. This is probably because the Google ranking algorithm mostly uses the American writing style.
  • Write simple concise and very short sentences with very simple words so that both your users and robots can understand what you are saying.
  • Use numbers and bulleted list when describing steps or when listing multiple points sequentially.
  • When you are linking to other websites and blogs make sure that they are reliable and trustable and don’t contain inferior quality content.

How do other web page components help your SEO according to Google guidelines?

  • Use svg formatted files or optimized .png files and don’t forget to use the alt text for your image tags.
  • Tables are good for organizing information but use them only when you have multiple columns to show.
  • This is something new. Do you know <strong> and <b> have different meanings? Whereas <b> is for visual emphasis, <strong> should be shown for text of strong importance.
  • Whenever possible keep HTML and CSS separate.

There are various other recommendations in the guidelines but these are the basic ones. You may feel that some of them are for aesthetics but they actually help you create more clear and concise text.

You may not be able to apply all the guidelines when writing content for your website or blog but you can at least stick to the standard guidelines such as using simple language and arranging your information in such a manner that it is easier for the Google crawlers to access your content.

Does following these Google guidelines really help you improve your SEO?

I wouldn’t say no. The guidelines are for the internal Google content creators so the company wouldn’t like to give wrong guidelines to their own content creators. That’s one thing.

The other thing is, in these guidelines there is nothing that goes contrary to writing, creating and publishing quality content. Everywhere it is recommended that you use simple, conversational language while writing content not just for the search engines but also for your visitors. You should use the language that is used by your prospective customers and clients, especially when using the search engines. Images should be optimized and the loading time should be minimized.

Don’t get too bogged down by these guidelines, but inculcate them in your day-to-day content writing habits and you will see an improvement in your SEO by default.

10 SEO Content Writing Tips for Your Small Business

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10-SEO-content-writing-tips-for-small-businessDo you know that being a small business SEO content writing can easily be the strongest tool available to you? Some tips listed on this blog post can help you to great extent. Remember that these tips are not written in stone and every business may have its own unique requirements. But they can get you started in the right direction.

Content writing for SEO can cut down your advertising and marketing costs. It can significantly improve your search engine rankings. It can increase your business without increasing your costs. It can make people trust you more.

What is the difference between SEO content writing and normal content writing?

In terms of creating high-quality content for your website or blog, there isn’t much difference as far as the list of tips goes. Well-written, relevant content is automatically search engine optimized. Search engines like Google love quality content that solves people’s problems. Just the fact that you are publishing lots of content that solves people’s problems, can significantly improve your search engine rankings.

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Other than that, the fundamental difference between SEO content writing and normal content writing is, you take search engine guidelines into account when creating search engine optimized content so that it becomes easier for search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms to access your content, process it, and then rank it for related keywords and search terms.

You can write high quality content without caring about search engine guidelines. Although your content will be good and once people can access your content and your content may even be able to convert visitors into buyers and customers, you won’t be able to get good search engine traffic, especially if there is lots of competition.

So, normal content is good content, and SEO content is content that is good but is also search engine optimized.

Why SEO content can work wonders for your small business?

As a serious small-business you might be spending lots of money on advertising. If you seek traffic from search engines you must be bidding on different keywords using AdWords. This can be very expensive for your small business.

In AdWords, you may have to pay $2-3 per click for your main keywords. And the problem sometimes is, your main keywords may not even get you much business compared to your secondary or longtail keywords. Still, you spend money on non-performing keywords simply because you want to see traffic to your website.

Looking for an SEO content writing for small business?

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SEO content writing can increase search engine rankings of your small business website organically. Once your search engine rankings improve organically by diligently following these tips, you start getting traffic from search engines without having to pay for every click. Once you have gotten one of your links featured in the top 10 results on Google, whether you get 10 clicks or 10,000 clicks, it’s all free.

The good thing about organic search results is that people prefer to click organic results rather than advertisements. So even in terms of getting more traffic from search engines, organic listings are much better than paid listings.

But how do you make sure that your small business website or blog gets good search engine rankings through your writing?

Listed below are 10 SEO content writing tips for your small business that will increase your search engine rankings, and also improve your conversion rate.

1. Do keyword research before writing content

What keywords do people use to find your website or your content? What search terms do they use? This is one of the most important tips.

You can make a list of keywords and search terms using common sense and little bit of research. You can also use paid and free tools to do keyword research.

One of the most widely used free keyword research tools is the Google AdWords keyword research tool. Although most of its suggestions are intended to encourage you to bid on as many keywords as possible and hence, the suggestions are not as accurate as they should be, it gives you a good beginning, and lots of ideas.

Even if you don’t want to use any tool, do a broad search and then scroll down to suggested searches on Google. This tells you what search terms people are using that are related to your main search term.

2. Start writing SEO content around the keywords you have finalized

Remember that the most important aspect that Google considers for ranking is the quality of your content. No amount of SEO content writing is going to help you if you don’t have quality content on your website. If it is difficult for you to create compelling content using your keywords, in the beginning, just focus on the quality aspect.

Just make sure that the keywords or search term you are targeting appear, most preferably, in the beginning of your web page or blog title. After that, let your creative juices flow.

Once you are satisfied and you feel you have written whatever you wanted to write, start incorporating your keywords. Ideally, if you’re focusing on the core topic, most probably you will automatically end up using your keywords. If not, you will have to creatively incorporate them. Don’t overdo it. Your total number of words to your keywords ratio should be around 3-4%. Overuse of your keywords can get you penalized.

If you use WordPress for managing your website and blog, there is a good add-on called SEOPressor. It gives your content an “SEO rating” and if you are over optimizing – over using your keywords – it lets you know.

Having said that, it doesn’t actually matter how many times you use your keywords as long as you contextually use them. Just don’t overuse them.

3. Create a compelling title for your web page or blog post

Remember that it’s your web page title or blog post title that initially draws people to your website or blog. In the search engine listings, it is your title that appears as hyperlink. In fact, one of the biggest reasons why you should use your keywords in your title is because when people see the keywords they have just used in the title, they tend to click the link more. Even when you share your link using your social networking profiles, it’s your title that appears as the main hyperlink. People will come to your website after you title grabs their attention. Consequently, coming up with keyword-rich compelling titles is a big part of effective SEO content writing.

4. Also focus on longtail keywords

When writing SEO content, don’t ignore your longtail keywords. In fact, you should create dedicated webpages and blog posts dealing with your prominent longtail keywords. But even on your present piece of content, use a mix of your primary keyword and longtail keywords. This will prevent you from over using your main keywords.

It is also recommended that you use LSI keywords. LSI stands for “latent semantic indexing”. In terms of SEO content writing, it means using alternatives to your main keywords. You can use synonyms. You can use alternative expressions.

Read How does incorporating keywords increase your search engine traffic.

5. Mostly focus on providing answers to questions

provide-answers-to-questionsWhen using search engines, people don’t use specific keywords. They normally type questions (or say, if they use voice search). So, provide answers to these questions. Make a list of all possible questions your prospective customers and clients may ask before doing business with you and then publish all the answers using questions as titles.

6. Use conversational style in your SEO writing

use-conversational-style-when-writingPeople don’t use novelish language while surfing the web. They use very common, conversational words. A good example: when people are searching for “bananas” they don’t search for “an elongated yellow fruit”.

Even when they are searching, they use very common words pertaining to your business. You should also avoid using jargon because whereas jargon may make you look cool, it may lose you customers.

You can use a tool like Hemingway Editor to grade your writing. It says that content writing with grade 6-8 is better and gets you good search engine rankings. “Grade” here means, writing with grade 6 can be easily read by a 6th grader.

7. Use a well-defined structure

Use a well-defined structure means using headlines and sub-headlines wherever needed. Organize your thoughts in bullet points. Use quotes wherever necessary. Write simpler sentences and smaller paragraphs. Link to inner pages with appropriate anchor text. Use bold type a few times to highlight your main expressions. Stick to a particular length.

8. Use images to graphically convey your feelings

Long streams of text seem to bore people no matter how informative your text is. Insert images at crucial points. They act as a welcome distraction. They also help people refocus. Don’t use totally unrelated images. If you are comfortable using an image editing tool, create a mix of graphics and text.

9. Focus on something unique when writing SEO content

The more generic your content is, the harder is the competition it faces. Narrow down your targeting as much as possible. Search engine optimization for the search term that isn’t being used by many is much easier.

Also, focusing on something unique will help you avoid writing duplicate content which can attract penalty from Google.

Even if it is not possible to offer something totally unique, address a very unique perspective of your product or service and write about that.

10. Keep optimizing your existing content

SEO content writing doesn’t just mean continuously publishing fresh content. You also need to take care of your existing content. Over the years your website or blog must have collected a ton of content. If this content remains unattended, all that effort goes waste.

Make a list of all the URLs that contain marketable content on your website. Check their search engine rankings for the targeted keywords. If over the weeks, months and years their rankings haven’t improved, start rewriting the content from SEO perspective.

Maybe you used some bad practices like needlessly using your keywords and search terms, and you would like to remove them. Maybe over optimized your content in enthusiasm. Maybe you created thin content.

It is a time-consuming activity, but go through every link, check its rankings, and if it doesn’t rank well, rewrite it.

Concluding remarks

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I personally know a client who has cut down his advertising budget by 70% ever since he started relying more on SEO content and less on advertisements.

A good thing about SEO content is that sometimes the same web page begins to get ranked higher for multiple keywords or keyword combinations. If you use AdWords, you have to pay for every combination, but not for a link that ranks higher organically.

Yes, more effort is required. Content writing for SEO take some time to show results, especially when you have lots of competition. But the rewards are great. You get more targeted traffic. Your marketing cost comes down significantly. Your conversion rate improves. Your brand value improves because people begin to find quality content on your website.

Want to know how you can improve your search engine rankings as well as conversion rate of your small business website through targeted SEO content writing?

How to improve your content writing by properly understanding your customers

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improve-your-content-writing-by-understanding-your-customersFrom your business perspective, what is the objective of content writing? Why is it important to understand your customers to write effective, compelling content?

When you are writing content for your website or blog, you are communicating with your visitors – in the case of a business website, you are communicating with your present and prospective customers and clients.

Why do you communicate? Just for the heck of it? Just to keep them on your website? Just to improve your search engine rankings? Just to make them share your links on their social networking profiles?

These things are important, not the “heck of it” part, but the other parts like engaging people, improving search engine rankings, and encouraging people to share your links.

Ultimately, you want people to become your customers and clients. You want them to use your product or service. You want them to pay you, spend money on you. Why would they?

A good thing about the Internet from your point of view is, setting up business is very easy. Just like it is easy for you to set a business, it is also easier for others.

On the negative side, this gives rise to tough competition. In the mid-2000s I was among the very few content writers and I faced very low competition. For some years I got busy with something else and by the time I got my senses back, there were literally thousands of content writers and content writing companies competing with my business.

A good thing about the Internet from your customer’s point of view is, he or she has immediate access to tens, or even hundreds of businesses like you. He or she can compare you with others. He or she can also ask around their friends on Facebook.

When your competitors vie for the attention of your customers, when thousands of distractions keep your customers distracted, it is your content writing (or your content writer) that comes to your rescue.

5 Content Writing Tips to Win Over Your Customers

But content writing cannot deliver in vacuum.

Effective content writing requires you to properly understand your customers. Only then you will be able to create content people will relate to.

Unless they relate to your content, they are not going to do business with you.

customer-going-away-from-your-business

This is a reality that you can accept now, at this very moment, or, you realize it later, when you have lost much business and your competitors are much ahead of you.

For your content writing to work, why is it important to understand your customers?

Whether you want to write engaging content to improve your conversion rate on your website or you want to improve your SEO, at the core of your content writing exists your understanding of your customers’ needs.

What does “understanding your customers’ needs” mean?

It means understanding what they are looking for, and then providing it through content writing.

People are looking for answers. Before they buy something, they want to go through as much information as possible. They want to read reviews. They want to get opinions from their friends. 81% shoppers do online research before buying.

Research means, they go from link to link, reading about the product or service they are about to purchase, as much as possible.

How much content does your customer need to read before doing business with you

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What if all the information they are looking for is present on your website or blog? You can easily publish that information. This way, they won’t have to go anywhere else. When they find what they are looking for on your website, when they finally decide to go ahead with the purchase, they will purchase from your website.

How do you know what they’re looking for? How do you know what sort of questions they have in mind before buying your product or service? Do you have a list of questions they may search for? Do you know what are their concerns?

Do you know how to answer their “whys”, “hows”, “whens” and “whats”?

This, is why it is very important to understand your customers. You have to look at your business from their perspective. Don’t get swept away by the greatness of your product or service. Try to understand what your customers want.

What are the problems they are going through? How can your business solve their problem? How do you communicate to them that your business can solve their problem better than your competitors?

Before writing content, how to know what the customer is looking for?

Content writing is an ongoing process. It is not possible to know everything about your customers from the beginning itself. In fact, your content can help you in this regard.

But here are a few observations you can make to understand your customers better:

  • Talk to people outside of your business: Talk to people who have nothing to do with your business. They don’t know anything about your product or service. But it would help if your product or service could help them in some way. Ask them what would stop them from doing business with you or what would encourage them to do business with you? What would be their concerns?
  • Closely follow other blogs and websites in your niche: Lots of good content is published in almost every niche, almost every day. If possible, even join members-only communities (for which you may have to pay) to get the insights of people who have already created lots of content in your niche.
  • Do keyword research, especially suggestions by Google: Search for keywords on Google. When you search on Google, in the end of the search results, you see other suggestions from Google. These are the search terms being used by people and you can use them to create content for your blog or website.
  • Use Google Analytics: The Google Analytics data will be available to you after a few months of continuous content writing. The Analytics dashboard will be able to tell you what search terms are people using to find content on your website. By studying this data you can know whether your content writing approach is right or wrong.
  • Get feedback: Getting feedback directly from your customers and clients is very easy these days. You can interact with your customers and clients on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and thousands of other platforms available these days. You can also encourage people to leave comments on your own website or blog.
  • Create a comprehensive FAQs section: Creating an FAQs section is the best way of writing targeted content. Using your common sense, try to figure out what questions your customers and clients may have before deciding to do business with you. Address all these questions in your FAQ section.

Credible Content can help you understand your customers and clients and then write targeted content

As a team of professional content writers at Credible Content we can write content your audience is looking for. Randomly writing content to cover all your keywords and search terms doesn’t do you much good. Of course, optimizing your content is necessary, but you can do it even while creating targeted, well-meaning content that improves your conversion rate.

Our content writing service will help you get higher search engine rankings and improve your conversion rate.

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5 Content Writing Tips to Win Over Your Customers

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5-content-writing-tips-to-win-over-your-customersThe entire purpose of effective content writing is to win over your customers. If your content writing isn’t winning over your customers, even if it is improving your search engine rankings and it is able to create some buzz on social media websites, it isn’t working for you. Your content writing is only effective if it can get you more customers on a consistent basis.

The content writing tips to win over your customers that I am listing in this post are not something extraordinary. They are common sense. These tips are applicable in every situation because they take care of the fundamentals of empathizing with your customers and solving their problems.

Why do you need to read about content writing tips to win over your customers?

Interesting question (patting my own back here). Many people actually want to read, and should read these content writing tips because although they are writing and publishing lots of content on their website and blog, they are not getting customers. Why is it so?

This is because many people want to use content writing without understanding its real meaning. They get confused.

You see, taking a shortcut is a natural human proclivity so it isn’t like, people are nasty. It just happens. Even if I didn’t know how important content writing is for winning over your customers I would do all sorts of silly things assuming that they are the right things to do.

In fact, so much junk content was being written to win the SEO game that Google had to come up with updates like Panda and Penguin to weed out content that was published solely to get better search engine rankings. Again, I’m pretty sure that most of the people indulging in such activities weren’t even aware that they were not right practices. Many were prompted by their the so-called “SEO experts”.

If you don’t follow these tips (the tips that I have listed here) then you run the risk of spending lots of time and money on a wasteful activity. No matter at what stage of content writing and content marketing you are, even if the harm is done, it can be undone.

Why content writing plays an important role in getting you more customers?

To be frank, there is a trust deficit on the Internet. Not everybody is out there to get your money, but many people are. Also, since there is practically no entry barrier when it comes to setting up shop on the Internet (you can do it practically free), there are many “businesses” that are not businesses.

One of the greatest reasons why you need content writing to get more customers is that advertising is growing less and less effective. As you must have experienced yourself, people don’t want to see ads – even you don’t want to see ads when you’re looking for information or when you are entertaining yourself. People even use ad blockers these days to make sure they don’t encounter ads.

Continuous content publishing, on the other hand, helps you establish relationships. This is because, effective content writing means providing solutions to people’s problems. When do you use the search engine? When you are looking for some information. Even when you want to buy something, even when you want to hire a service, you look for things in the form of a question, something like “is there a content writing service for my boutique?”.

Continuously writing and publishing content in today’s context means providing solutions to people’s problems. If you can consistently solve people’s problems (directly, or slightly indirectly, pertaining to your business) they begin to trust you, and when they trust you, they do business with you.

Also, there is lots of noise on the Internet and your important messages tend to get lost. People’s attention span has come down drastically. This means you have to constantly be in front of them. Your updates should constantly appear in front of them. There must be some way you remain on their radar. When they need something they should know that you provide that thing.

Tips for writing website content to win over your customers

Your website content should be all about helping your customers. The more you help them, the more you get them. A good example would be the Open Forum Blog maintained by American Express. The multinational financial service doesn’t use Open Forum to promote its business directly, but indirectly. The forum is full of useful information for business executives and managers. The information is so good that it can be used to build an entire business. This information and its usefulness generates goodwill for American Express. People who use this information to grow their businesses and careers, when they need financial services, whom do they choose? Of course American Express.

You may think that American Express is a very big company so it can afford to experiment with various forms of marketing. But this sort of success through content writing can also be achieved at a micro level. Just follow the tips below.

  1. Provide answers to people’s questions: Everybody has questions. There is a complete website dedicated to questions – Quora.com. If your prospective customer wants to improve his search engine rankings he will be probably looking for “how can I improve my search engine rankings?”. Provide this answer. Giving answers builds trust. It helps to solve people’s problems. When you solve people’s problems they like your content writing. When they like it, they appreciate it. When they appreciate it, they readily do business with you. This way you your business gets new customers.
  2. Focus on SEO content writing: On this webpage titled SEO article writing service I have written that there is no such thing as “SEO content” because every piece of well-written content is actually “SEO content”. Nonetheless, you have to take care of your SEO while writing content. Here are a few links that you may like to check out to improve your SEO content writing: 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website; 5 content writing tips to improve SEO; and 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing. Improving your SEO with effective and quality content writing is very essential to bring targeted traffic to your website.
  3. Write consistently and regularly: Content writing isn’t a one-time affair. Millions of webpages and blog posts are being crawled and indexed and, ranked, every day by just Google. You can easily imagine how much content is being published and how much content your content writing has to compete with. If you don’t do content writing regularly, you will be left behind by your competitors because many of them are doing content writing regularly. When you write content consistently and regularly you increase the probability of covering all your topics and also increasing your overall keyword density. Plus, Google likes to index fresh content regularly.
  4. Write longer blog posts and articles: Actually, this is a part of writing SEO content. Google and other search engines these days prefer blog posts and articles over 1000 words. To make things difficult for people who just want to spam search engine results without working hard. If you do some research you will notice that longer blog posts and articles rank higher compared to shorter ones. I would like to stress again that getting good rankings is very important because unless you get your prospective customers to your website, how are you going to make them do business with you? Although there are many other ways of getting your prospective customers to your website (PPC campaigns, for example) the most effective way of getting them over is through effective and passionate content writing.
  5. Talk about benefits and advantages instead of features: Your prospective customers couldn’t care less about how great your product is. What is in it for them? Is it going to solve their problem? Is it going to give them what they want? Is it going to make their life easier? If you want to win over your customers your content writing should focus on benefits and advantages of your product instead of cryptic features. You may like to read Online Copywriting: difference between features and benefits.

Here is another very important point that I missed: create realistic personas before writing your content.

Personas are the profiles of your ideal customers and clients. People will react to your content according to their mental state, their financial state, their age, where they live, what professions they are in, whether they have kids or not and sometimes, what gender they have. If you have a clearly-defined persona laid out in front of you, you can target your content writing in a better, effective manner.

These content writing insights to get more customers for your business are not all-encompassing. I may have missed out a few great tips. But these tips can give you a head start. These tips will stop you from taking a wrong direction.