Content marketing can help businesses establish themselves as thought-leaders in their industry, increase traffic to their website and drive search engine results. But before you actually start marketing your content, you first need to have some content to work with.
There are loads of different kinds of content — blogs, press releases, advertorials, website landing pages, email newsletters, social media posts, infographics, case studies, e-books, whitepapers, videos, podcasts…
The list goes on.
Blog posts are undoubtedly the most popular form of written content, with nine out of 10 companies using blogs to achieve their overall marketing goals — whether that be to generate more leads or drive traffic.
But where do you start?
Pick a topic
Obvious, right? Before starting any piece of content, you need to know what you’re writing about. Keyword research and tools like AnswerThePublic can help you find out what questions your audience is asking so that you can answer them in your blogs.
Although it can be tempting to pick a broad blog topic (save that for your whitepapers), you’re better off focusing tightly on one aspect of that topic.
Narrowing your focus can help you create clear, in-depth content that provides valuable takeaways. Having a single idea from the headline to the conclusion will also prevent ‘waffle’: aka saying a lot without really saying anything at all.
Write an attention-grabbing title
If your blog title is weak and doesn’t resonate with the audience or make them want to know more, they won’t bother reading the rest of your blog. The best headings offer up specific information and give a little detail to draw people in — but stop short of telling the whole story.
Blog titles should typically be between five to 12 words but no longer than 60 characters. Of course, it’s not just about the length of your title. The words are important, too.
Make sure you include one keyword in the main heading (don’t use it again in the subheadings). You should then tie the rest of the content back to this title throughout the piece to ensure you give the audience the information they’re expecting — no clickbait headlines, please.
Create a hook
Your title turned their heads; now you need to keep them interested. You have just a couple of seconds to keep readers hooked after the heading, so your first sentence needs to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
A question or stat is always a good place to start — or a short, snappy statement that makes them think. Your intro then needs to jump straight into the content you promised in your title.
Write for your audience
If you’re writing for everyone, you’re writing for no one.Even if you have multiple audiences, that doesn’t mean you should try to target all of them through one blog. If you write for all your possible audiences, chances are your content won’t hit the mark with any of them. So, you need to keep a specific target audience in mind when writing your content. Why should they care? And what do they want to know?
Engaging content writing is all about using language your reader will understand and appreciate; don’t oversimplify or overcomplicate your writing just for the sake of it.
Optimise your blog post
Digital content should be optimised for search engines like Google using SEO (search engine optimisation) best practices. For example, each section under a subheading should be no more than 300 words, and you need to include keywords throughout. Just make sure it still reads well and naturally — Google can tell if you’re trying to stuff keywords in anywhere you can.
Backlinks (i.e., linking to those reputable sources you found when you were doing your research) are also an excellent way to demonstrate your trustworthiness. And Google is BIG on trust.
