This guide outlines the 12 key strategies to improve your content writing and make it an easier task into the bargain.
“I don’t have time to write.” That’s what we all say when it comes to keeping up regularly publishing our blog, features, case studies, and profiles. As women, we often find ourselves pulled between many priorities, struggling to fashion the time for ourselves that we know, in our hearts, we need.
I’m no different. I struggle to give myself time to write about what I love. The two things I love most are writing stories and urban life (in all its complexity and possibility). So why do I struggle to create the time to write about my twin passions, and how can I rediscover the creative moment?
12 Tips to improve your content writing
1. – Always write with a previously defined objective. If you do content writing as a perfect hobby, you do not have goals but you simply seek to satisfy your need. But if you write to convince and sell you need to set goals. What do you want to achieve through your texts? Create engagement, increase the number of visits, sell a product or service, increase your visibility … Be clear about these goals from the beginning to adapt the content that you are going to write according to them.
2. – Before writing a post you must inform yourself and document yourself well on the subject to be discussed using all the resources that you have at your disposal both online and offline (books, press, blogs, websites, interviews, contacts, …). Always use reliable and quality sources of information for content writing. The information you obtain will support or refute the original idea that you want to raise in your text. In this way you will enrich the vision that you are going to tell about the subject.
Do not copy a text from another website and paste it on yours. Google is a staunch enemy of duplicate content and is in love with unique and original content. If you think it is necessary to use a small fragment of a text by another author to illustrate the topic either because it supports the idea you are explaining or because you are offering a personal assessment of that text, you should always cite the original source and link it if possible when you do content writing.
My grandmother always said “It’s nice to be grateful,” apply it. If the work of another person has helped you, you must acknowledge it, you will favor link building and also enrich the user experience by complementing the information that you are giving by providing another source of information.
4. – Before starting to write directly on your computer, it is very useful to put our ideas on paper. A script or scheme prior to the preparation of the text will help us to structure the post or article and not to forget anything we want to name.
5. – The physical space that surrounds us when content writing is very important. The temperature, the workplace, the noise, the light, … are a series of factors to adapt to be able to perform at the best. The time of day we dedicate to writing is also very important, since some people have inspiration peaks at certain times of the day that must be taken advantage of.
6. – Always use a simple language, without artifice, natural and close in content writing. If you offer general content on your website that may be of interest to many users, you should try to use simple words so that everyone can understand you.
On the other hand, if your website is intended for a very specific audience of a certain cultural level, you should use a more concrete and technical vocabulary since if you simplify the language it can cause those users to consider the text too simplistic and without crumb. So that you understand I give you some examples.
7. – Watch the density of keywords in do content writing. Yes, you have to use the terms and words with which you want to position your website but you should not abuse them. Google does not like the over-optimization of texts at all and it could penalize you.
What is the correct keyword density? Google doesn’t really offer us a percentage calculation. So I propose that you use your own intuition. Use words naturally throughout the text without making it cluttered or artificial.
But how do you know which are those keywords that you should use? It’s simple, you just have to listen to your audience and do a little introspection exercise. Find out what your readers / buyers want to know, what doubts they have, what queries they make on the web and what terms, phrases and expressions they use to search.
In this way you can adapt your writing to those keywords or keywords. Social networks are a good source of reference to know what your target audience is talking about. The use of tools such as the Google Adwords keyword planner or Google Trends can also help you, which will allow us to know search trends.
But don’t forget that the best tool to know what your audience is saying is yourself. If you are an expert on a topic or a product and you want to write about it, no one better than you to locate what words and terms define you.
I propose that you do the test. Write down in a notebook the main word or phrase that defines the topic you want to discuss and from that term start looking for synonyms or expressions that mean the same thing. Don’t forget the singular and plural!
If you start this little exercise you will see how many possibilities come to mind. All those words and phrases that you extract are the ones that you should use in your text. This way you will have more options for people to find you with the words you have used because there is more variety.
EXAMPLE: You want to write about breastfeeding. The root keyword will be “breastfeeding.” We started looking for more terms with which people can search for information on the net on this topic and voila!: we already have our list of keywords.
8. – Always do content writing with correct spelling. Spelling mistakes are not liked by your readers or Google. If you write with mistakes, your audience will perceive of you an image of slovenliness and little credibility and you will lose their trust and attention. In addition, Google penalizes content written with bad spelling. What to do to remedy it? Check the text to verify that there are no spelling errors. Use automatic correctors if you need it and you can even ask a reviewer to look at it.
9 – Whenever possible, illustrate the content writing with examples , they will help your audience understand the ideas you present. It is also useful that you support your text in other types of complementary content such as images, videos or infographics, this will help to argue and complete your idea, it will also help you improve visibility.
Content on the Internet is like food, it enters our eyes. The text must be of quality but we must also “make it beautiful.” A good structuring of the text using paragraphs, subtitles, bold and italics will help us to make it more visually attractive and to facilitate reading. You have to check that the message you want to convey is clear, to do this, read the text slowly. It also helps that someone you know read the text before being published and explain what they have understood to know if you have done it well.
11 – As important as writing quality content is to spread it. Today we have countless channels that allow us to show our texts: social networks are the best example. Share your text on all possible social channels and invite all those who have read it to do so on their respective networks. If you have content of interest to your audience, it will not be necessary to ask for it since your users will share it by themselves, favoring Social LinkBuilding.
12.- Write for people, not for machines. Yes, the positioning , the keywords, the links, … all that is important. But in the end, the one who acts as the true judge of your content writing is not Google but the user, the reader who is the one who has your text on his screen and he is the one who you have to please, rather seduce. And what is the main ingredient of seduction in real life? THE PASSION. For this reason, always write with love, dedication and a lot of passion, in this way you will transmit these traits to your content writing.
Nurture
The secret, I am discovering, is in nurture. For me, it comes back to giving myself time to actually do the things I love first, and then writing about them is easy … or at least easier.
For me to truly love writing a story, I need time to think of lots of ideas, pick a good one and research it, find experts or ‘passionionados’ to talk with me about it, find the heart of the story – the drama or controversy – and then sit down and pull it all together into a pithy punchy piece. Then I want to have time to send it to a sub-editor for a fact and grammar check before it’s published.
But if I work too hard, even writing stories that I love, I miss out on revelling in life in the city – my other passion. I’m working on a project to restore a common garden area in my block of flats, and create a communal garden. To write about urban life, I need to be deeply experiencing, from digging my communal garden to talking to the great thinkers in the field of urban design, to going to festivals and galleries, and walking in parks with friends.
Vulnerability
I’ve spent my life writing other people’s stories. I still love to do that, but it’s safer ground that writing about what I love. To really bear my heart on the subjects of writing and urban life demands a vulnerability that my life as a journalist did not really prepare or train me for. Content marketing is different from journalism in that way. As a journalist I was paid to write about anything. As a content marketing practitioner, I put more of myself into what I write.
Why do I love city life, for example? Because I have lived without it, on the seaside of South Coast New South Wales, and in the deserts of Central Australia. For all their beauty, they didn’t offer the connections that I find in the city, with like minds, like souls and with the creative expression that is really my life blood.
Kindness
I don’t know about you, but I whip myself along, working at a blistering pace. I never seem to get enough done. My To Do list rules my world. From the moment I open my eyes, it’s hovering there, like a spectre that will not be vanquished.
To write about what I love means I have to be a little kinder to myself, take my foot off the pedal and slow my trajectory to cruise mode. Brainstorming, researching, interviewing and writing take me into a zone of absorption, and I cannot get there without treating myself to a bit of kindness, permission to indulge my creative imperatives, and to protect myself from the busy work of everyday life.
Power
It’s not as easy as one might think to be comfortable with the sense of power that I derive from writing about what I love. When I bring together all the elements – nurture, vulnerability and kindness – I experience a kind of holistic satisfaction that becomes a surge of energy and power. This is a wonderful feeling, but it can quickly runs off the rails if my ego gets holds of it. Instead, when life allows me the time to bring together everything I need to truly write about what I love, I have learned to foster a sense of gratitude rather than self-satisfaction. Even with my best efforts, it is not always possible to find the time I need, so when it happens and I experience that burst of energy, I have come to realise that this is a blessing. This keeps my ego in check.
Conclusion
Nurture, vulnerability, kindness and power seem like a strange recipe for writing a regular blog. And yet I have found this to be very effective. In my journalism days, I was protected from many distractions to focus on my writing. As a content marketer, I need to afford myself that protective space to keep my love of writing flourishing. Take some time today to make time for writing content.
