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If you want to grow your online presence, you should publish high-quality content. When you publish quality content that’s informative to people, you can attract many customers. If you’re familiar with content writing, you’ll probably know about the concept. However, if you’re a beginner, you’ll probably be wondering what content writing is. In this guide, we have provided a clear explanation of content writing. Let’s get started!
Table of contents:
- What is content writing?
- Importance of content writing
- Content writing tips
- Best places to publish the content
- Conclusion
What Is Content Writing?
Content writing is the process of creating and publishing high-quality content online for digital marketing purposes. By publishing high-quality content, you can increase traffic to your website and other sales channels. Also, you can build a strong audience presence.
There are different types of content writing. Below, I have explained some of them.
- Blogging: Blogging is the process of writing informative content that’s engaging and optimized for SEO.
- Technical writing: Technical writing refers to writing technical content in a way that it’s easy for people to understand. Some examples of technical writing include how-to posts, technical guides, instruction manuals, etc.
- Copywriting: Copywriting refers to writing the text that’s used in advertising materials. Some examples of copywriting include writing the copy for Facebook posts, social media ads, etc.
- Email writing: As the name suggests, email writing refers to writing content for the email. This includes writing email subject and draft that converts.
- Social media writing: Social media writing refers to writing content for publishing on social media platforms.
Importance of Content Writing
Content plays a significant role in any digital marketing campaign. When you keep publishing high-quality content that’s beneficial to people, you’ll be able to build a strong relationship with your audience. Besides these points, content writing has a lot more significance, and we have listed them below.
1. Helps Get More Customers
If you keep publishing good quality content consistently, you’ll automatically get more customers to your business. Moreover, if your content reaches your target audience, you can expect them to share it with others. Since your content is of high quality, there’s a high chance that others like your content and become your customers.
2. Build Brand Awareness
When you consistently publish high-quality content on multiple channels, you can gather attention from many people, which helps build brand awareness. Later in this guide, I’ll explain the best places to publish the content.
3. Improve the SEO of Your Website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great strategy to promote a business as it’s cost-effective and can yield long-term results. When you keep publishing high-quality content on your website, its SEO can improve.
The following are the tips you can use to optimize your content for SEO much better.
- Include keywords in the content.
- Optimize the internal links. When adding a link, make sure it’s in the form of anchor text and not a plain URL.
- Make sure your blog loads fast because loading is one of the main ranking factors of Google. You can check the loading speed of your blog using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
- Make sure your blog is optimized for mobile. Mobile optimization will also have a significant impact on the ranking of your website in the search results. You can check whether your website is mobile-friendly using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
- Optimize the images you add to your blog. You can do so by compressing the images and adding alt text for them. You can use tools like TinyPNG to compress the images.
- Optimize the URL of your blog. You can add your blog’s focus keyword in the URL. Also, you should ensure that the URL has a good structure.
- When your blog needs an update, do so without delay. Keeping your blog up-to-date can help in improving its SEO.
4. Build Trust Among Customers
If you want to grow your business, you must build trust among your customers. When you publish high-quality content that positively impacts customers’ decision-making process, they will develop a feeling of trust in your brand. When customers trust your brand, your sales will improve both in the short and long run.
5. Customer Retention
Through content writing, you can provide value to your customers.
When you publish good quality content consistently on various platforms, you can retain your customers.
Whenever possible, you can also personalize the content for better conversion and retention of customers. For instance, when writing content for email marketing, you can personalize the subject line and draft.
Content Writing Tips
If you’re a beginner and want to come up with high-quality content, you should keep practicing. You can use the tips listed below to come up with great content.
1. Write a Fantastic Title
If you want people to click and read your content, you should write a fantastic title. The title you create should be short and descriptive. According to a study, titles that are about 14-17 words in length get the highest number of shares.
The following are some other tips you can use to come up with a fantastic title.
- Whenever possible, add numbers to your title. Also, mention the numbers as numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) and not words (one, two, three, etc.).
- If you’re writing a blog that contains a list of tips, you can add a sense of urgency to the title. To do so, you can add phrases like “now”, “today”, “right now”, etc., to the end of your title.
- Add attention-grabbing phrases like “facts”, “strategies”, “secrets”, “principles”, “tricks”, etc.
- Make your title specific. Here’s an example of how your title should be; “How to create content for website?”. As you can see, this title is specific, and just by looking at the title, people can know the purpose of the content.
- Add emotional phrases like “happy”, “amazing”, “triumph”, etc.
- Add your keyword in the title.
2. Write a Fascinating Intro
The intro plays a significant role in making people read your content. If your intro is boring, people won’t be interested to read further. On the other hand, if you convey a story or add other hooks to grab people’s attention, you can make people read your content further. The transition between the intro and the first point should be smooth.
3. Make Your Content Easy-To-Read
If you want people to read your content, it’s obvious that it should be easy to read. When writing your content, you should note that not all your readers will be native or fluent English speakers. So, you should structure your sentences in a way that even a layman can understand. Also, the paragraphs in your content should be short and to the point. You can also add a break between paragraphs and add headings (H2, H3, H4, H5, etc.) for easier reading.
4. Write Uniquely
The content you publish should have a unique tone to it. It should well represent you and your business. For instance, say that you’re writing content for a school. In this case, your writing tone should be more formal. While, if you’re writing content for promoting a book, you should make your tone a mix of both formal and informal. When writing any type of content, don’t be too formal or informal unless necessary. This is our suggestion.
5. Use Keywords Effectively
When publishing content on your website, you should ensure to use keywords in the right places. When your content is keyword-optimized, it can rank high in the search results when people search for that keyword. Ok. But, how can a content writer know the keywords people search for?
Good question!
You can use SEO tools like SEMRush, Ubersuggest, etc., to perform keyword research. By analyzing the data given by the tool, you can shortlist a list of keywords and add them to your blog. You can choose the best keyword from the list as the focus keyword (primary keyword).
You can include the focus keyword in places like:
- Title
- Headings (H2, H3, H4, H5, etc.)
- Introduction
- Image alt text
- URL slug
- Meta description
6. Edit Before Publishing
As humans, we may make errors when writing. There’s nothing wrong with it. However, the content should be perfect when publishing. Before publishing your content, you should check it at least two times for errors. Also, you should check whether anything is difficult to read. If you find a sentence difficult to read, you should polish it by conveying the message using easier words.
Regardless of your writing experience, we suggest using a writing assistant tool like Grammarly. This helps you avoid making spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors to a great extent. Moreover, with Grammarly, you can also check your content for plagiarism. But, you should be on the premium version to do so.
Best Places to Publish the Content
There are various places where you can publish your fantastic content. Some of them include the following.
1. Website
The website is one of the primary places where you should publish your content. If you’re new to content writing, you won’t probably have a website. However, don’t worry! Creating a website is pretty easy, thanks to WordPress. Moreover, it doesn’t cost much either. Many reputed hosting providers like HostGator are offering shared hosting services at an affordable price. Thanks to them and WordPress, it’s made it easy for new business owners to create a website. Once you have chosen a domain name and purchased the hosting for your website, you can start working on creating your website.
The following are the tips you can use to come up with a great website.
- Choose an attractive theme for your website. However, ensure that it’s easy to use.
- Depending on your niche, use the right set of visual elements.
- Ensure to leave enough white space. This can help in increasing the appearance of your website.
- Use a responsive web design. In other words, optimize your website across all devices. In WordPress, most of the available themes are responsive by default. So, you won’t have to worry about it much.
- Add Call-To-Action (CTA) wherever necessary.
- Ensure that your website doesn’t have broken pages. This can help avoid 404 errors.
Having created the website, now it’s time for you to publish great content and bring customers. You can publish blogs (articles) and technical posts on your website. However, the content you publish should be relevant to your niche and exceed people’s expectations. Moreover, you should optimize your content for SEO and use other promotional techniques to bring in more visitors and increase your sales.
For your information, here’s a statistic that shows the number of bloggers in the United States.
As you can see, the numbers have grown tremendously from 2014 to 2020. It has grown further, now, in 2022. Many people start a blog because there’s a potential to make a good amount of money from it.
2. Email Newsletter
As you might know, email marketing is a fantastic digital marketing strategy with one of the highest returns on Investment (ROI).
If you want to grow your online presence but haven’t tried email marketing yet, we highly suggest giving it a try. Getting started with email marketing doesn’t require much money. All you need is some marketing skills to make people subscribe to your email list and then convert them into customers. You can use email marketing software like GetResponse for email marketing. Also, make sure to utilize the 30-day free trial that GetResponse offers before purchasing the software.
By sending great email newsletters, you can engage with your subscribers and keep them informed about your company, products, etc. Once you build a good relationship with your customers, you can promote your products to them through email newsletters. Since you have already built a relationship with them, there’s a good chance that they purchase your product.
The following are the tips for writing fantastic email newsletters.
- Write a compelling subject line. Nowadays, people receive a lot of emails. If you want your email to stand out among them, you should write an attractive subject line. Also, it should be clear. If possible, you can also personalize the subject line by adding the person’s name. This helps to increase the open rate.
- Write beneficial content. If you want people to take the desired action, you should provide them value. If you just keep sending your subscribers promotional emails without benefitting them, they won’t purchase your product.
- Add a CTA. You have written a fantastic subject line and draft; that’s great! Now, you should add a CTA at the right place to convert your subscribers into customers. You may add one CTA per email. If you add too many of them, your email will start appearing to be too promotional.
3. Ebook
Ebook is one of the best places to publish your content. Moreover, many businesses are using ebooks for content marketing and are making a lot of money. Through ebooks, you can promote your products. Moreover, you can educate readers about a specific topic, which helps position yourself as an expert. When you do so, people will trust your information.
The following are the tips you can use to write a fantastic ebook.
- Choose a topic and prepare an outline. Before you start writing your ebook, you should research and choose a topic. Make sure to keep your end goal in mind when choosing the topic. Once you choose the topic, you should prepare an outline. This helps to make the writing process much easier.
- Add table of contents. As you know, ebooks are lengthy. So, if you add a table of contents, readers can quickly access the part they want to read.
- Provide lots of information. People usually read ebooks to get immense knowledge about a specific topic. So, make your ebook detailed. You can also add statistics and other data to provide your readers with additional value.
4. Press Release
A press release is newsworthy information sent to journalists. You should write your press release in a way that attracts journalists to write about your product or service.
The following are the tips to come up with a great press release.
- Use templates. Not all people know how to write a press release template. In this case, you can use a template to get an idea of how the press release should be.
- Convey the information shortly and clearly. Your press release should contain the answer to the following questions (or other similar questions):
- Who is involved?
- What is happening?
- Where is this happening?
- When will it be happening?
- Why is this important?
- Write an attractive headline. The headline is the first thing people will read in your press release. So, you should ensure that it’s good enough to make people read your press release further.
- Add your contact information. Toward the end of the press release, you can add your contact details to let journalists know how they can reach out to you.
5. Social Media
Nowadays, many businesses have started using social media to improve their brand awareness and sales. As you know, people spend too much of their time on social media. So, if you grab their attention through your high-quality post and caption, trust us, you can significantly improve your brand awareness. You need an eye-catching image or video post to gain people’s attention. Next, you should write catchy captions that can make people take the action you want. Initially, you may not see many conversions through your posts. But, when you keep publishing high-quality content consistently along with following the right strategies, you’ll see your followers grow.
Conclusion
Publishing great quality content is essential to improve your online presence. To improve the quality of your content, you should write. We agree that writing can sometimes be boring. But, this shouldn’t make you fall into the trap of procrastination. We suggest that you create a proper plan for content writing and execution. When you do so, you’ll have an idea of what to do next. This helps you stay motivated. If you aren’t able to create content yourself, you may consider hiring experienced freelancers. Otherwise, you may also hire a content writing service provider to help you.
