Tag Archives: Content Writing

How to maintain a content writing schedule

Once you have decided that publishing content on your blog or website is critical to the success of your business you need to maintain a well-defined content writing and publishing schedule. But why do you need a content writing schedule?

I wouldn’t exactly call it a problem but the problem with content writing to promote your business is that it doesn’t show results immediately. When you keep publishing content you begin to feel an effect after a couple of months and it can be very difficult to continuously do something when you know that you are not going to benefit from it in the near future. This becomes more difficult if you need to take out time or budget at the expense of another business activity that can manifest an earlier result. I totally understand the compulsion of putting content writing and publishing on the back burner in order to take care of the imminent necessities.

Even if you outsource your content writing requirement you may need to spend at least some time figuring out exactly what you want. Additionally you will have to pay the person who is writing content for you and you might think why spend money on this activity?

Nonetheless, you neglect content publishing at the cost of your business because if your competitors are doing this they are definitely at an advantage and you must already be lagging behind if they have been publishing regular content for a while now.

It is not necessary to run a tight schedule when it comes to writing content and getting it published under your website or blog. The crucial point here is setting a rhythm. Cannot publish everyday? No problem, publish every alternative day. Cannot achieve even that? Fine, publish something once in a week. Some sort of weekly content is better than having no content at all. You need targeted content to improve your search engine rankings, increase direct traffic from social media and other websites, and above all, improve your conversion rate. You don’t need to rush. Focus on the most important first. What are the topics that can make a quick impact on your bottom line? Make a list of keywords and search terms you would like to get more traffic for and start generating content around them. If you’re working with the content writer you can discuss with him or her what content you immediately require, and then accordingly you can draw up your content writing schedule.

As mentioned above, start with the most important and try not to miss the scheduled postings. Avoid being ambitious in the beginning if you know you’re not going into content writing and content publishing in a big way. Gradually, as you observe your business growing you can increase the intensity and frequency of your content publishing strategy.

Your content helps you attract the right people to your website

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The greatest challenge people face while doing business online is getting the right people to their websites. But what do we mean by “right people”? They are the people who would like to do business with you. What sort of people would I like to get to my website? People who would like to hire me to avail my content writing services.

Once you get to it it isn’t as easy as it seems especially when billions of people are constantly going through millions of web pages processing millions of terabytes of information. For instance, how do I make sure that people who are looking for a content writer can easily find me when they need me? Since there might be thousands of content writers doing business on the Internet how do I make sure I get ample amount of exposure and consequently, attention.

And even if I get the sufficient amount of attention how do I make sure that the right people are getting attracted? I can do it by creating a noticeable presence on the Internet. My content helps me do that.

You can publish your content on your own website/blog, on other websites/blogs, online forums and social media and networking websites. It gives you the needed visibility. Of course your content has to be about the product or service you offer. It is no use writing about scooters if you’re selling cars. And even if you’re selling cars it is no use talking about Mercedes-Benz if you’re selling Ferraris.

What sort of content you want on your website/blog in order to attract your prospective customers and clients? It depends on what sort of traffic you are trying to attract. Search engines, for instance, are looking for lots of informative content and consequently they rank higher content that teaches rather than the one that sells, especially Google. But it doesn’t mean it indexes and ranks only content that teaches: it just prefers it.

In order to attract right people from search engines you have to focus on keywords and search terms that help people find you for the exact service or product they are looking for. I would like to be found for “content writing services”, “freelance writer”, “website content writer” and such terms. Since I am continuously writing content on how to write content better or how to improve your business through content marketing and content strategy it may seem like I’m trying to attract an audience that is more interested in “learning” and less interested in doing business with me. This happened when I was offering web design services back in 2002: instead of attracting clients looking for a web designer my website was majorly attracting people who wanted to learn web designing and web related programming. When I started my content writing business and again started generating content for this website I made sure that I didn’t repeat the mistake. Although even now a majority of my traffic constitutes of people trying to figure out things and exploring career options I get sufficient number of business queries due to the content I continuously publish here.

The basic idea behind generating content to attract the right people to your website is getting lots of people for the right keywords. I may be getting lots of traffic for “website content writer” and 60% of that traffic may be those people who are simply trying to explore the field (want to try out this “content writing thing”) or researching for their own articles, 40% still are looking for someone to write content for them. In my specific case I have concluded that it is difficult to change this ratio and the only thing for me to do is increase the numbers so that this 40% becomes a bigger number.

While generating content for your website/blog (on your own or by hiring content writer) try to cover as many keywords as possible. Generate your business pages using those keywords first of all. If you’re providing content writing services then generate sufficient number of pages explaining that you actually provide this service. Once you run out of such pages don’t keep repeating them. From then onwards you can start creating instructional content. You may attract people who are trying to “learn things” but the brighter side is you will be covering all your major keywords and their various short and long combinations. Keep your focus on the relevant keywords and keep publishing all sort of content around them. Just make sure that your primary/business pages are visible from every possible page on your website/blog.

The importance of content writing for small business

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Normally small businesses, understandably, have small budgets and that means having less money to spend on marketing and promotion. When you’re working on the Internet it is practically impossible to survive without promoting your business. This is because there is lots of competition on the Internet and this is because anybody with a decent Internet connection and a little bit of dedication can run a marginally successful business and just imagine what sort of competition you may have to face if there are, let us say, 15,000 businesses offering the same kind of service that you are offering.

Doing business on the Internet is all about visibility and credibility. People should be able to find you, they need to be familiar with you and after all this they should be able to trust you. Creating this kind of atmosphere is an ongoing exercise because again, everybody is continuously performing this exercise – at least those who are really serious about their business. Everybody is trying to stay ahead of the game whether it is search engine optimization, online marketing, or social media and networking websites. There are scores of channels you need to compete for.

This is where content writing can come to your rescue. Whatever is there on the Internet it is in the form of content: you have text, videos, images and interactive presentations everywhere and they are being generated and promoted in billions in number. The easiest among them is text, of course.

Content writing can be performed on your own or you can easily hire a content writer, and through content writing you can publish new content almost on a daily basis. This advantage is not there if you want to publishing video or graphic content unless you have the needed hardware, software and expertise.

Content writing benefits for small business

Search engines primarily focus on written content

The current search technology doesn’t enable search engines to look for keywords and such expressions among videos and images. You can use tags but they work only to a certain extent. Through content writing, on the other hand, you can create, keyword-rich content all day if you want to. You just need to know what you want to write about.

Even if you are unable to write yourself you can easily hire a content writer who is adept at writing for humans as well as search engines. It won’t cost you much. The more content you have on your website the more keywords and their different combinations and permutations you can cover. Of course it doesn’t mean you always create content according to search engines because eventually what matters the most is how your human visitors react to your content.

It is easier and cheaper to create written content

I know, I have already mentioned this above. But since this is also one of the factors that may affect your content decision it deserves a separate heading. Even if you have videos and images as your primary content you will need to resort to generating some search engine optimized textual content in order to enable the search engine crawlers to find and index (and then accordingly, rank) your content. Again, as I have already mentioned, you can either write content on your own or you can hire a content writer. I wouldn’t advise you to go for an extremely cheap content writer because then you will be compromising on the quality. I always suggest to my clients that go for less, if you have to, but don’t compromise on quality.

Your written content helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field

You can continuously interact with your visitors through your written content. Share your knowledge, your wisdom and your experience with your visitors so that they feel enriched when they visit your website. The more they read and accept your writing the more they trust you and the more they trust you the more eager they are to do business with you. Again, it is an ongoing process because you constantly need to attract new visitors to your website/blog and you cannot achieve this by having a fixed number of pages or blog posts.

You seed new thoughts on your social media and networking profiles

Whenever you publish new written content on your website/blog you can post your links to your social media and networking profiles and invite comments from your friends and followers. This will give rise to lively interactions whether they agree with you or not and this will help generate buzz around your product or service. Although you can keep your social media and networking streams live by finding interesting and compelling content from other sources and posting it, sometimes you also need to post your own, unique content in order to become an authority in your subject.

You get lots of back links from other websites

Just as you find interesting and useful content on other websites and post it to your social media and networking streams or link to it from your own website/blog, so do other Internet users. People are constantly looking for new and interesting content to share with their friends and followers through their social media and networking accounts and blogs. They may also like to use your content to add value to their own content: if you already have a good explanation of “SEO content” they may as well directly link to it instead of writing it from scratch.

As you can see, there are lots of benefits of content writing for small businesses.

Increase your influence with your content

Does your content tell a story?

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We all love stories don’t we? They excite us, engage us, attract us, fascinate us, antagonize us and motivate us. Whenever there is a story we have readers and listeners. Why do stories captivate as so much?

We can relate to them. They strum the chords of our emotions, attitudes, sense of wisdom and life experiences. We share the emotions present in the story one way or the other. That is why we all have our own indigenous folk tales, anecdotes and historical stories; they bind us together.

Stories can exist in any form. They don’t always need to adhere to a particular form of narration. Even a journalistic account of some event unfolding can be a very engaging and enlightening story. This is precisely why free press is curbed by authoritarian and repressive regimes — effective storytelling can move people into doing things they otherwise would never do.

The same concept can be applied to content writing and copywriting. Whenever you are writing you are trying to move people, you are trying to make them do something. Create a story around the product or service you are offering or describing so that people can empathize with you and really absorb its importance.

When you tell a story instead of a monosyllabic harangue about how great your offer is you get your readers’ undivided attention because whenever we are reading a story we always want to know what happens next. Remember the last time you read a page turner? How eagerly you wanted to know what lay ahead.

Of course not all of us are storytellers but describing a product or service in an interesting manner can be easily achieved by creative content writers and copywriters. Your story needn’t always have esoteric characters; you just need to have a theme and you can center your writing around that theme.

When I’m looking for a solution, frankly, consciously, I am not interested in reading a story. I want to know how this particular product or service can solve my problem that I am facing in my business or in my personal life. A story can definitely help me visualize. It gives me a three-dimensional picture of exactly how your offer can make my life easier — it has a live example I can relate to.

Another great benefit of creating a story is that it has a beginning and then an end. The beginning can be the initiation and the end can be a business transaction that takes place between your visitor and your organization. By storytelling you can change the event of buying a product or service into an experience. It is difficult to remember events and it is difficult to forget experiences.