Content Writing Tips
Content marketing is an essential and integral aspect of internet marketing, and can fundamentally enhance your website’s online reach. By creating high-value content that readers share, interact with and enjoy, you can establish a readership of potential customers who will be more likely to share your content, purchase your products or make use of your business’ services when they require so. Content marketing is fundamental to the success and growth of any website, and in this article, we’re going to look at some content writing tips you can use to enhance your content marketing game.
Brainstorm and Create Content Within Your Business’ Domain
In order to get ideas for surrounding content, you should brainstorm around multiple arrays of topics within your business’ domain. To do so, you can use the Google Keyword Planner, which is a tool available when you sign up for Google AdWords. If you have a Google account, you can sign up quickly and easily for the Keyword Planner.
Simply enter keywords related to your business into the Planner, and the planner will display monthly searches and related terms similar to the keywords you have entered. As a result, you will get ideas for new content you can create, which are on a similar thread to your business’ niche or domain.
You can create content in a variety of formats, including infographics, articles, videos and so forth – all of which span around the topics you have generated from the Keyword Planner.
Write In-Depth Articles
Articles are an essential format to include in your content marketing strategy, and will greatly increase Google’s trust with your website when they see long-form and in-depth content around your business’ niche.
Google strives to only showcase the best quality content on the web, and as a result, will only feature articles that go into great depth about the topic at hand. These articles will have multiple sub-headings, may take various angles, will include excellent research and will have writing in a succinct and engaging tone.
Ensure that all articles you write are greater than 1000 words, at a minimum, as longer word counts will demonstrate to Google that the article is of excellent quality. Low quality or “spammy” articles tend to have less than 100-200 words, even though this is not always fully the case.
When indexing your content, Google’s spider bots will also look for long-tail keywords. When users type searches into Google, they often use descriptions or lengthy phrases; these are long-tail keywords and can include more specific queries rather than short, general keywords.
Encourage Readers to Share Your Content
The primary goal of content marketing is to create high-quality content, and by doing so, you are laying the foundations for the content which can be shared by your readers. You can add a plethora of options to allow readers to share your article, including share and like buttons. However, readers are more likely to tweet about your article, if they discover quotes or snippets of text in your article that are enlightening, inspiring or would entertain their Twitter followers.
Therefore, within your article, scan for phrases that are striking, concise, and shed light on the topic you’re writing about. Then include a “Tweetable” which is a rich embed that features this snippet of text. When readers come across your content, they’ll be more likely to re-tweet this Tweetable, thus sharing your content with more readers.
Made for Pinterest Graphics
You can also create graphics for your content, which feature text or statistics surrounding your content. For example, you could create a graphic that features the title of the article, similar to the “thumbnails” seen on YouTube or those on Pinterest. These succinctly describe the topic of your article and can entice users on Pinterest or other social media platforms to click on your article. You can use Canva to create these graphics, which is what I regularly use for creating high-quality social media graphics. They contain a variety of templates that you can use to quickly create these graphics.
Include Video and Imagery
To decrease your site’s bounce rate, and lengthen the time a user spends reading your content, you should include a variety of multimedia to illustrate your points and further explain the topic to readers who are interested. For example, you can add relevant YouTube videos that go into further detail about the topic at hand. Since most videos are longer than a couple of minutes, users will then stay on your site much longer, and this will boost your page on-time metric, leading to enhanced trust from Google and possibly higher search engine rankings.
You can also include imagery in your article, however, don’t search for images from Google Images and assume this is legal; you should only use images which you are fully entitled to use. Images in the Public Domain can be used and modified, without attribution to the original owner, and are generally my go-to when I need to include images in my articles, as I don’t need to worry about attribution or licenses, etc., You can find Public Domain images from Unsplash or Pixabay.
You can also create mini-infographics using Venngage or Piktochart to feature statistics about your content; infographics have always been incredibly popular since they display data in a rich and engaging manner.
However, it is always important to also include a textual representation of multimedia content for blind users; it also helps Google to index your content more easily since there will be the text for its spider bots to scan.
Convert to Customers
Always include a Call to Action (also known as a CTA) at the end of your articles, as readers who enjoyed your article may purchase your business’ product or service.
CTAs can include a phone number, along with a short paragraph as to why they should call your business (whether for a quote, to enquire, etc.,) – especially if you’re a local business – or a link to a product purchase page.
Share on Social Media
Make sure to set up social media pages for all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter so that you can share your content with your followers. You can use tools such as Buffer to schedule the release of certain posts, but ensure that you don’t spam your followers’ feeds with constant posts from your website’s blog, as this can quickly spur them to unfollow your company. Instead, share other entertaining or informative content from other pages and companies to mix this up with your own company’s content.
Conclusion – Content Writing Tips
Content marketing is an essential strategy to help bring more customers to your business, once you create content continually and in a schedule. The key point to remember is that converting your readers to customers is also a key facet to content marketing.
If readers enjoy your articles and content, they are much more likely to purchase or become customers in the future, since you have established trust with them through your content. Gaining the trust of major search engines such as Google is also incredibly valuable, and will help your website rank higher in search results, leading to more traffic and improved conversions.
For more information on Content Writing Tips see the post on Expressly SEO, which provides a guiide to wothwhile content writing and marketing.
