Effective Content Writing In 2021

Effective Content Writing

Do you want to learn how to start effective content writing in 2021?

Writing content is a dream work for many people and no matter how much effort you put in, some writers are better than others. What makes these writers good at their work is the difference in how they research and function.

In this digital era, where there are numerous content websites online, only writing what is on your mind is not enough. Pairing your exceptional talent with the right way of processing is what makes your writing remarkably good.

Content is as important as the design and aesthetics of your website because it drives search engine results, increases traffic to your page, and establishes your organization as an industry leader.

What Is Content Writing?

Content writing is the process of planning, writing, and editing web content, typically for digital marketing purposes. It can include writing blog posts and articles, scripts for videos and podcasts. Effective Content writing refers is of great importance in boosting your business presence online. With content, businesses can attract leads and foster positive connections with their audience, ultimately pushing them down the sales funnel.

Marketers use content to guide their prospects through different stages of the buyer journey. They leverage different content formats for each stage of the journey, from brand awareness to purchase decisions.

Types of Content

Content writing encompasses many different forms of text-based content.

Here are the most common formats used:

• Articles
• Product descriptions 
• Website content
• Email newsletters
• Press releases
• EBooks

These different content formats can reach potential customers at different stages of the sales funnel.

Research

Your content should reflect factual, research-based information. Organizations that spread false or misleading information are vulnerable to backlash from both search engines and consumers.

Misleading content will ultimately lead to negative company and product reviews and once that occurs, a reduction in sales is a likely outcome.

Factual content, however, helps to establish your business as an authority in its field.

Here is what you should research:

1. Business Goals

Think about the business goals you want to meet, and how you plan to use effective content writing to do this.

You should know:

• What type of content format do you need.
• The style/tone you want your piece written in.
• Your goals  for each piece.

If you want to convert readers into leads, you may need to create more middle-funnel effective content designed to capture high-intent users, and ultimately send them to a relevant lead magnet like a downloadable template or a webinar.

2. Buyer Persona

As our guide to creating a buyer persona notes, a buyer persona is an abstract depiction of your ideal customer. It is founded upon qualitative and quantitative data from market/competitor research and existing customer profiles.

How to create your buyer persona:

SEMrush:

While data and online analytics tools can help you establish your customer personas, there are other methods for getting to know the most common traits exhibited by your customer base. To find them, consider:

• Creating online customer surveys
• Conducting customer interviews (by phone or in-person)
• Talking to sales staff about their customer impressions
• Using form fields on your website to request customer information (such as what products they may be interested in)
• Mining social media for persona-related information
• Focusing on a specific person when creating content can guide the writer and designer towards using the right language and style – your message won’t get watered down from trying to address too many different needs.

3. Search Intent

Users often have very different expectations when using search engines, and, in its guidelines, Google talks a lot about how to understand what users are looking for when using different queries.

Search intent can be broken down into four distinct types:

• Informational – the searcher is looking for specific information on a topic.
• Navigational – the searcher is looking for a specific web page or site.
• Commercial – the searcher is considering a purchase and wants to investigate their options.
• Transactional – the searcher wants to purchase something.

To understand the search intent of your users, you need to look at the keywords that you target in your piece.

4. Keyword Research and SEO

For a business, it’s important to remember that, in today’s digital era, effective content writing is closely aligned with SEO. Google and other search engines play a vital role in sending organic traffic to websites, and they value quality content.

To ‘encourage’ Google to rank your business page highly in the search results, you need to offer content that is optimized and designed to render your business relevant for keyword searches. If your business website is loaded with generic or scraped content, it could be penalized by Google and buried three, four, or more pages back in the search results.

SEO is important not only for ranking in search but also for proper communication with clients. 

You’ll want to conduct thorough keyword research for each topic you want to write about. Ideally, you should create a list of the most important and relevant keywords associated with your chosen topic.

You can also choose to create a semantic core. Building a semantic core means collecting all keywords related to the resource’s topic, clustering them, and optimizing all pages for groups of collected keywords.

keyword research – how to create a semantic core

Opt for keywords that are realistically attainable for your brand, based on the domain authority of your site concerning keyword difficulty. Tools such as SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help you get insightful data, enabling you to research the entire market by starting with a seed keyword.

The tool generates topic clusters, as well as lists of related terms and questions people search, which is perfect for creating a semantic core.

 5.Content Strategy

To effectively engage with your audience and outperform your competition’s marketing initiatives, it helps to construct a comprehensive content strategy plan. This plan refers to how you intend to manage your marketing content (i.e. where and when you plan to publish). Your content strategy should include:

• Your content formats (i.e. social media posts, articles, etc.)
• The channels you will publish on (i.e. your business website, social media networks, etc.)
• How you will manage the content (who will do the posting and manage the customer engagements)
• Content construction (who will do the writing? If outsourcing, what firm will you use?)
• Content performance (who will analyze how your content is performing and report back to you?)

6. Topic Research

Take the time to carry out thorough topic research for an effective content, so that you can come up with strong, strategic ideas for your content that will resonate with your audience and drive results.

When doing topic research, consider using the following tactics for idea generation:

• Find your audience’s biggest pain points. You can do this by looking at online reviews, Google’s “most asked questions”.
• Run a survey on social media. Ask your followers what they’d love to read about, or what questions they may have.
• Conduct a content gap analysis. This looks at the keywords your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t, and for the keywords in which you are being outranked by your competitors.

Planning

Once you’re clear about your goals, topics, content formats, respective funnel stages, and marketing channels, you can work out your content calendar.

• The goals you have for the post
• Marketing promotion channels
• The chosen content type
• The topic
• Deadlines and publication dates
• Task owners or other team members involved in the process

Writing

You’ll want to find a writer or a group of writers that can quickly and seamlessly integrate with your marketing team to develop content that’s on point with your brand and marketing goals.

• Focus on a Single Purpose. 
• Write in a Unique Voice. The content you publish is the voice of your company and it should be unique to your company’s personality.
• Optimize Digital Content. The best digital content often consists of short paragraphs, short sentences, and bulleted lists.
• Write a Head-Turning Headline. The headline determines whether audiences will read the rest of your work. 
• Hook your readers from the first line. Start your copy with some exciting data, a one-sentence story, or a question. Make people hungry for the details after reading the first line.
• Make your copy scan-able. Most people skim read, so use descriptive subheadings, bulleted lists, and white space between paragraphs to ensure that the text is easily scan able.
• Use visuals. Videos, images, presentations, charts, infographics, and social media stories are highly effective ways to communicate with your audience.
• Be consistent.
• Choose an interesting angle.
• Tell a story. 
• Use data. This is an excellent way to add credibility to your words.
• Repurpose old content. You can find excellent topic opportunities when repurposing content; for example, a list-based article may work well as an infographic, or an old blog post could be turned into a video for social media.
• Use calls to action (CTAs). Add a short, action-oriented phrase that convinces your consumers to act in a particular way.
• Avoid spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Don’t forget the importance of grammar and spelling for readability and for creating trust.

Content Writing Tips for Beginners

If you have never tried writing anything before, here are some specific content writing tips for beginners:

• Striking Headline: As already discussed, the headline of the content should be given utmost importance. Beginners should specifically take care of how they frame the heading.
• Valuable Content: The content should be valuable. Your audience should be able to take away something from the content piece.

You have to keep your audience in mind. If you are writing for youngsters, write more engaging and catchy content. For business professionals and CEOs, the content should be formal and to the point.

• Great Conclusion: Conclude with a powerful note. Let the end-thought linger in the minds of your users. 
• Feedback: Not many people will tell you to take feedback seriously. However, there is no better way to improve your writing than paying attention to the critics to begin your journey. When your client gives negative feedback, check what you are doing wrong. Take help from fellow writers to know how to write content and get to the core of the issue.

You can also check out other online job opportunities here.