Content writing has become one of the most important practices in the digital age we live in now. Even though it seems easy at first, this should not be taken lightly. If you want to become a professional content writer, the tips and advice below will help you get there.
Content for a reader could be anything that makes their life better. High-quality content gives value to the audience and helps build relationships based on trust and credibility, which leads to making money in the long run.
One study found that the average person only spends about 20 minutes a day reading, while the best-performing articles are about 5,700 words long.
Corporate executives are increasingly using digital publications to get more people to visit their page and show that their company is well-known and trustworthy.
Because of this, it is important to work with a skilled content writer who can help improve your brand’s image.
What is a content writer?
You need more than just good writing skills to be successful in content writing. Content writers need to be able to take any piece of information and turn it into something interesting and easy to understand.
A content writer is also responsible for writing the well-written text for your blog, social media account, newsletter, white paper, e-book, or even brochure.
This copy could be made for any of these types of media. When it comes to marketing, anything that is written down is content writing.
The job is an important part of a marketing team, but its main job is creating creative and interesting stories for the target audience.
How to be a good content writer
Many people think there is no magic way to become a great content writer. But if you have certain skills, you will be a big asset to any digital agency particularly in a marketing team.
If you can get good at these skills and use them in your work, you will be ready to start a career as a content writer.
Hook readers from the very first sentence
People think that the average person can only pay attention for eight seconds. Your content will be useless if people who could be interested in it see something that doesn’t grab their attention right away.
Because of this, it is crucial to start any piece of content with a headline that gets people’s attention and a hook that makes them want to read more.
Pay attention to details.
What would you do if you were reading an article and saw a mistake? As soon as you start reading, you can tell that the content’s credibility has been hurt, at least a little bit.
We’re sure you don’t want your audience to feel that way at any point. It’s important to edit and polish any words or sentences that might seem unclear or suspicious so that your organization comes across as honest and trustworthy.
Understand search engine optimization (SEO)
In the Internet age, a big part of your content depends on how well it does in search engines.
Getting your post to rank high on the search engine results page is one of the best ways to get people to read it (SERP).
Recruiters will like you more if you know the basics of SEO, WordPress, and coding languages.
Be creative
There are billions of articles on the internet, and many are just copies of other articles.
So, a content writer needs to be able to turn boring facts into new ways of looking at them that can grab a reader’s attention and keep them interested in what they are reading.
It takes a lot of creative work to come up with unique, valuable content that stands out from the crowd.
Make your content easy to read.
Your content needs to be laid out to make it easy for people to read and for search engines like Google to understand.
It can be hard to read long pages of text on the web, especially on small screens like smartphones. Most people who read online content do so by scanning it to find topics that interest them rather than reading long articles all the way through.
Instead of writing three or four-sentence paragraphs, try writing one- or two-sentence paragraphs. This will make your writing easier to read.
Use subheadings in bold to divide your information into topics or ideas so that readers can easily find the ones that interest them.
Popular styles include numbered lists and stories with bullet points because they are easy to read. This way of putting your content together also makes it easier for Google to index it, which means it will show up higher in search results.
Focus on the topic, not keyword stuffing.
The basic rules for making content are a lot like the rules for writing that you learned in school. However, the two sets of rules have a few key differences.
You should use keywords, but your main goal should be to provide well-written, high-quality content that covers the subject completely.
Search engines will punish you if you use keywords too much in your content. Instead, you should only use your main keyword three to four times and your secondary keywords no more than twice.
Word count matters
A basic rule says that longer content will get a higher search rank. The content should have at least 1000 words to get the highest search score possible. However, the best number of words is between 1500 and 2500.
A recent study of search engines showed that the highest-ranking content had an average of 1890 words. But you should be fine with writing such long content.
Google will be able to index content at least 500 words long and give it a good search rank if it is long enough.
Proof your content
Proofreading your content may seem like something that can be removed from this list of writing tips for beginners, but the internet is full of blogs and other content containing spelling and grammar mistakes.
If you want people to take your writing seriously, you need to take the time to check for mistakes.
Because your online content represents your business and a customer’s first experience with your brand, having information that hasn’t been properly proofread can hurt your business’s reputation.
You should use a word processing program to check for spelling and grammar mistakes, but doing so may cause you to make homonym mistakes.
If you want your work to be as good as it can be, you should have someone else check it for mistakes.
If you can’t do that, a free tool called Grammarly does a good job of finding common mistakes.
Practice, practice, practice!
Writing content is like practicing any other skill; it gets easier the more you do it. You can find free programs on the internet that look at your content and tell you how to improve your writing skills.
The Hemmingway app tells you how to fix your writing so that it is clear, short, and easy to understand.
If you’d rather focus on running your business than writing content, you can trust Blue Interactive Agency to do it for you.
As an interactive digital marketing agency in Singapore that offers a wide range of services, we can give you high-volume content authoring services, analytics, distribution services, and more. In short, we can give you everything you need for a successful content marketing plan.
