Quality Writing Advice For Online Content Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes writers make is writing online content marketing for what they want to write and not what the intended audience wants. If you don’t understand your target audience’s tastes, you won’t make them feel like yours is anything worth reading. If this sounds familiar to you, follow these five simple steps and learn how to market yourself as a writer that understands their readers.
Know the content first.
It’s easy to start executing your content first and then ask yourself what you want to write about it afterward. This approach, however, leads you to follow the same formula over and over. This leads to patterns that can be noticed by your audience members just as easily as they can be noticed by search engines and social media platforms. The best way to avoid this problem is to ask yourself: “What topics does my target audience care about? What do they need help with?” Then, use this target market data you’ve collected to create a spreadsheet of potential topics and put them in order of relevance.
Get inspired.
While a spreadsheet helps you organize the content you’re going to write, taking a step back will help you come up with ideas on how to make this content more interesting. If you’re having trouble coming up with topics on your own, there are plenty of resources online that can help. Try looking through online forums for people asking questions about problems they’ve encountered in your industry. Look for articles that offer advice on how to fix these problems. From there, try converting their advice into something more detailed and concise. Once you have the basics of what your article will be, try brainstorming on how it could be made more interesting or better organized by labeling each topic as either Essential or Extra Detail.
Write the content.
Once you have your ideas organized and your topics filled out, start writing. Make sure you write in a way that shows who your target audience is and what they need from you. This is the place where you can show that you understand them by using words or phrases that they would use in their own language, or by using similar language to how they talk about these topics. But remember: keep the length of your sentences short and use simple words so people can easily follow one topic at a time and not be overwhelmed with information for an extended period of time. Use bullets and lists to break up this information without having to add unnecessary text.
Marketing your content.
After you’ve written your content, it’s time to figure out how people will be able to read it. Use analytics tools that will help you understand which topics are the most popular, which keywords are being used by search engines, and so on. Once you have enough insights about what they want, put these topics in an order that makes sense to them so they can better follow along with your article. Use subheaders if the article has a lot of subtopics or subheadings that help readers move around the article with ease. Remember: customers want to buy something when it’s easy for them to find what they’re looking for and use their time more efficiently.
Above all, remember that if you’re not doing your research and you don’t understand what your target audience is talking about, you will end up frustrated and discouraged. Focus on understanding who is reading your content and how they react to the words they’re seeing on their screens. Start small by writing short blog posts with a few thousand views and work your way up. The more valuable content you produce, the more readers will increase in numbers and the more you will attract attention from search engines and social media platforms.
