Solid Business Blogging: Content Writing Tips For Beginners 

Content writing for marketing is challenging. You have to consider a multitude of different factors such as SEO, keywords, and call to actions.  When you’re thrown into the world of marketing, content writing seems like such a necessary but complex aspect to master.  Though it’s true, it might take a little time to perfect – it’s not as daunting as you may initially believe.

What are the different types of content writing?  

There are various forms of content writing, all that can benefit you in multiple ways. These are:

• Blog writing
• Feature writing
• Copywriting
• Technical writing
• Guest posts
• Social media content
• Publication based and editorial writing
• Reporting

Of course, you can do every single one of these, if your marketing strategy relies on it.  However, each piece of content writing has different requirements and styles.  You should also take into consideration your brand’s voice and the type of content that is relevant to your business.  For instance, if you’re a renewable energy company – reporting on the negative side of fossil fuels would be an excellent option for you.

Without further ado, let’s dive right into all the content writing tips for beginners.

Start With Keyword Research:

Before you even begin writing, you should look into keywords.  You can find the best keywords by using online tools, such as KWFinder and Google Ads Keyword Planner.  It’s also essential to consider long-tail keywords, as well as shorter keywords.  Ultimately, this helps with SEO and brings your piece of writing higher up for search results.  Keyword research lets you know what topics Google, and your target audience finds relevant.

Keyword research also helps to highlight your competitors, which is a great way to find new content, optimize your articles, and bring in more traffic as a whole.  Once you have your keywords, you should plan your article around them.  Find ways that you can incorporate them into an article, while still creating a relevant, engaging, and helpful piece.  Keyword stuffing is something that you should avoid, at all costs. Cramming them all into one sentence will have adverse effects on your SEO, and the number of readers.

Look At What Is Trending:

It’s common that, as a content writer, you’ll experience writer’s block.  In order to stop this, you need to look at what is trending in your industry/niche – and create relevant content.  In order to write great content, you need to research the topics carefully. Look at what is trending, and try to find ways that you can create compelling content.  For your marketing strategy, this ensures that you will reach a bigger audience.  For this, you can use Google Alerts, which is a content monitoring service. It’s a great way to discover new content, blogs, videos, and discussion groups.

Use Powerful Calls To Action:

What do you want your readers to do, after they have read your content?  If you simply want them to read it, it’s time that you started planning your article again. While creating plans, you need to know what you want your readers to do – usually making them click on a link, that’s too compelling to miss.  You call to action should help your marketing plan, overall. For instance, you could encourage them to sign up to a newsletter, download a resource, or make a purchase.  Listicle articles are a great way to advertise specific products and their benefits. These types of blog posts are used commonly by e-commerce stores.  If you offer a service rather than a product, you could encourage your user to sign up to a newsletter or schedule a free demonstration.

Use Hyperlinks:

Always make sure you’re hyperlinking back to the references you use in your content.  Not only does this give credit where credit is due, but it will also help with your SEO efforts.  Citations will also help you get backlinks to your site. It’s extremely common that the websites that you link to will reciprocate the efforts, and do the same for you. It’s content writing courtesy.  Don’t forget to also use internal links throughout, this will help people remain on your site. Of course, it also helps with SEO purposes, and occasionally leads to a sale.

Be Emotive:

All viral content has one thing in common – its highly emotive.  Promotion, timing, luck, and your brand identity all play a role – but you can still go viral without any of these. If you include emotional impact.  If you look online, there are hundreds of different types of content that’s going viral at the moment. From a seven-second TikTok video, all the way to heavy investigative journalistic type content.  Every piece of content, whether it’s filmed or written, should tell a story. Whether this makes the reader happy, sad, enraged, or inspired is up to you and your purpose.

Ask yourself; “if this came up on my Newsfeed, would I scroll past?” Importantly, you should stay away from being “clickbait” – this doesn’t help your marketing plans at all. Of course, a catchy, engaging headline is essential, but you need the story to back it up.  Re-read over your work, and ask yourself if it has enough emotional impact.

Don’t Use Passive Voice:

The passive voice is essentially a less exciting way to give information. That’s what it boils down to.  For example, instead of saying “the children set fire to the shed,” you might say “the shed was set on fire by the children.” The latter is less exciting, purely on the placement of the words.  That’s because the active voice places its attention on the action “set fire.” In the passive voice, the shed is the subject and seem to have the spotlight.

Writing for the web needs to snappy, powerful, and punchy. To achieve this, you need to focus attention on sentence structure, style, and word choice.  Read through your content and try to find phrases that could be re-written and sentences that could be cut down.  On this same note, you should always use new, unique words. Also, try to venture into a topic or avenue that not many people have done before.

Know Your Audience:

While writing your content, consider the target group of people that you’re writing for.  For example, the content that you write for entrepreneurs will be much different from an article written for those planning a wedding.  It’s essential that your audience will not only find your content interesting but resonate with the style and terminology used throughout.

The Structure:

The structure of your content should follow some type of structure, just to help you along.

A popular structure is as follows:

• Introduction
• The issue
• The cause of the problem
• The solution
• How to implement the solution
• Conclusion

Check Analytics:

Once you have a collection of content out on the internet, for your audience to read, you need to track analytics.  Find out what your audience liked to read, and what they didn’t like as much.  Also, look at how your audience reacted to the content. Did they read more content, click on any of your links or check out your e-commerce store?  You can use analytics to improve your content and find out what your audience loves.

Conclusion:

We really hope this helps you in your content writing endeavors. By following the simple instructions above, you’ll easily start writing solid articles and blog entries for your business’s online presence.

About the Author:

Dorian Martin is a passionate writer and book lover, interested in a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from marketing to search engine optimization. He is currently a senior writer and editor at Studicus, along with being a regular contributor at a variety of reputable online publications.

Find Me On Twitter