4 Tips for Creating Great Content

Writing content doesn’t seem tough on the face of it. After all, how hard it could be to put together a few words and ideas together to get our message across. But, is it enough to just make your message known in the digital world where content is created at a mind-boggling rate?

Not really!

Then, how do you, as a writer, make sure that your content is not only found, but also read, and appreciated in a manner that would help you meet your goals, business or personal?

To understand what makes a great content piece, let’s firstly try to figure out why it’s even important to write great content.

Everyone loves great content! Here’s why:

• Businesses want it for lead generation and brand positioning.
• Audiences appreciate it as it’s engaging and valuable.
• Search engines rank it high for its originality and SEO value.
• Writers need it for achieving all of the above and differentiating themselves from average writers.

It might seem a lot of pressure to achieve all of the above. After all, you have to make your clients happy and ensure your content is well received by readers as well as search engines – and all this while being staying true to your craft. While striking a balance between all these standards might seem far-fetched, it isn’t impossible. And to help you along the way, here are four essentials of great content that you should keep in mind in order to produce something truly epic.

Writing great content is possible! Here’s how:

1.     Establish your marketing goal

Isn’t it obvious that a writer should know the client’s business goals clearly before even starting to plan what and how to write to achieve them? Sadly, no matter how obvious it sounds, a lot of writers don’t even have a clue about content marketing goals. If you don’t know what your client’s business goals are, chances are your content will neither hit the right chord nor bring profitable results – and well, those chances are high.

Establish your content marketing goals or know your client’s marketing goal(s) thoroughly. This will help you know the ‘why’ of writing content, that will, in turn, enable you to create a clear story for your audience. Businesses or content marketers usually expect the content to encourage readers to take a particular action, like ‘subscribe to the blog’, ‘get a free trial’, ‘check out the app’, or ‘simply know more’.

Thus, various types of content, like Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) cater to various stages of marketing. You need to know for which stage you’re writing the content, that is, to boost awareness (ToFu), generate leads (MoFu), or drive conversions (BoFu).

Sometimes, it also helps to know where the content will be distributed. This lets you match your tone and message to that communication channel. For example, your content for a LinkedIn post would be different from a tweet in its tone and length, even if the message is more or less the same.

2.     Know your audience

Knowing your audience should go in parallel with understanding business goals as it’s equally (if not more) important. In order to make your content valuable, you shouldn’t write for everyone, but for a set of people who would be genuinely interested in what you say and/or offer.

For this, you should recognize your target audience’s educational background, gender, age, and location can also help you personalize your content for them. For example, if you’re writing content for a gadget-review blog, your audience might have a good working knowledge of how gadgets work, but might come to your blog to find out more in-depth features or functionalities of a particular gadget. This means your tone and use of language shouldn’t be targeted at noobs, but rather at techies with a good level of tech knowledge.

In addition to demographics, you should also understand your audience’s psychographics, like their pain points, values, opinions, interests, hobbies, and spending habits. These factors can help you become an emotionally compelling brand from a barely recognizable brand through content. Suppose you’re writing content for a fusion restaurant. Content and branding strategy for such type of content should be lively and thrilling to attract and excite the audience that would like to try something unconventional.

3.     Write in-depth, valuable, and original content

Remember how much content is daily produced and published online? Well, to stand out among that volume of content, you need to provide your readers with something noteworthy and detailed, and not to mention, valuable and original.

Imagine you’ve got a travel blog and you want to write about the best places to visit in your city in autumn. There are two ways to go about it.

One, you enlist the top places in your city that you feel are worth paying a visit during the fall season, with a little description and an image next to each destination. With images and descriptions, you might think that you’re good to go. But how would it differentiate your content from the content of any other travel blogger? Your content runs an even higher risk of getting lost online if your city is a popular one, which means a lot might have been written about it already.

Two, you decide that you’re going to spend a good amount of time and effort to produce something original that is also truly valuable and interesting for your readers. As you know your city quite well, you decide to not only enlist the places worth visiting with their high-quality images and vivid descriptions but also to provide your readers with something they might not get anywhere else. For example, a ‘how to get there’ route information, a ‘things to do’ checklist, or a ‘food and drink’ guide.

It goes without saying that the second type of content will not only get much praise and acceptance from your audience but will also be ranked higher on search engines, which brings us to our last but not least essential of great content writing.

4.     Focus on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the secret to ranking high on a search engine in organic listings. Most of the people when looking for a specific type of content usually go to a search engine (which, in 92.18% cases is Google) online and type in the related search keywords.

Say you’ve got a blog on yoga and its benefits that you use to raise awareness about your yoga studio in Berlin. Now, you can achieve this goal only if you get a considerable amount of traffic to your blog. And this is where SEO helps you. The more SEO-friendly the content, the higher the chances of it getting ranked on top in search results. Thus, your content needs to have keywords, like “benefits of yoga”, “yoga studio in Berlin”, “yoga to relieve stress”, and so on. To find relevant keywords, use Google AdWords: Keyword Planner. It’s a free keyword tool and is a favorite of content writers and marketers around the world. Keyword research can also give you inspiration for topics of your next articles.

Good SEO techniques also include writing original and valuable content, along with well-labeled images and relevant links and references. Overall, it’s a good practice to keep an eye on Google’s latest search algorithms. Visit this page to see how search algorithms work and related guidelines.