7 Commandments: How to Write Content for Your Eco-friendly Business or Sustainability Startup
Seven must-follow rules to write content for your green venture.
How to write great content for your eco-friendly business or sustainability startup?
Copy-paste from Chatgpt!
Absolutely not.
For another industry, perhaps Chatgpt would work. But remember you are in the green industry. You need to prove your business values authenticity. You need well-researched, data-backed content. Shortcuts will be your doom.
Chatgpt is a godsend for ideation, and you can use it for the occasional content rephrasing too. However, relying solely on OpenAI’s offering, or some other AI tool would wreck your reputation, especially now that leading tech companies have pledged to watermark AI content.
AI tools provide an excellent bird’s eye view of topics. The problem is their tendency to hallucinate and present misinformation in a way that seems legit.
Bing AI apologized with a dramatic emoji when I asked why it was producing deceptive info about a company:
I hope you understand that I did not intend to mislead you or deceive you. 😔 — Bing AI
But after the apology it continued generating more fake details nevertheless.
One way to use AI tools responsibly is to write articles yourself first, and then give them to the robot for finessing. Again, DO NOT copy-paste after this, because AI tools often destroy your writing tone and make it sound clunky. Just compare the two drafts and cherry-pick better paragraph structures and more fitting vocabulary choices as suggested by the AI.
One of the reasons people are sceptic about companies purporting to sell eco-friendly goods and services is because the companies aren’t transparent. You need to go into the details of what really makes your business a true ally of the environment. Cheap/free content would make you seem like a green washer.
So, what the heck do you really need content for?
Just like a human body would collapse without a skeleton (imagine!), your marketing efforts will be quite flaccid without compelling content for support.
Your content addresses your customer’s doubts and puts them at ease. Your content effectively reiterates the value you provide. Most importantly, your content communicates your brand’s vision.
Below are seven non-negotiable commandments that will help you craft effective content for your earth-friendly brand.
1. Define your audience
Knowing exactly who your content speaks to is indispensable. It is step number one. It is your compass in your content marketing ship that is bound to journey through a rough sea of trial and error. There is a misconception that more traffic equals more profit. What really matters is attracting your desired audience.
2. Defining content requirements:
What kind of content do you want and why? To generate awareness and rank in search results? — Blog articles are your friends. To establish credibility? — Case studies of past work will showcase the value you provide. To attract investors? — Ultra in-depth white papers will make the big guys shower you with green bills. And if you want to grow your newsletter, what’s better than an ebook to incentivize? Or perhaps, you can utilise all the aforementioned ‘weapons’ together and become invincible!
3. Research
Research is key when you are writing for your Earth-friendly business. You need genuine scientific literature that supports your product or service. You cannot cite low-authority sources. News websites, research papers, articles or posts made by highly credible people in your industry are safe sources of references.
4. The discipline of writing
I have penned over one million words of creative writing in my life, and trust me when I say writing requires a good deal of dedication. You must set time aside every week and write– unless you hire somebody to do the job for you, of course. Train yourself in figures of speech and literary techniques like metaphors, hyperboles, analogies and the like. You will be better able to express your ideas to your readers and command their attention. Develop an understanding of the structures of different content pieces, as well as that of individual sentences and paragraphs. A small change in the order of words can make impactful statements sound like damp squibs. Be careful.
5. The importance of telling your story
Why did you even bother to start an Earth-friendly company? So many green ventures have flimsy origin stories that are not memorable at all. Dig deep into your life. What makes you environmentally sensitive? Just because a bunch of scientists talk about global warming? How has environmental degradation impacted your life? If you look at my ‘About’ page, I have said I started this website with the intention of helping earth-friendly businesses with their content needs. Why? Because I grew up in the green hills, and I felt something was very wrong with the way all the green hills were going bald i. e. losing trees.
6. Bring new perspectives to the table
When you help people look at a topic from a new angle, they remember you. They take notice. For example, there is a common belief that the Earth is round. Did you know this is false? Speaking from experience, people are too lazy to ask questions. When you provide them with new questions (relevant to them) and also take the hassle of answering those questions, you help broaden the horizons of their minds.
7. Don’t write content for the sake of writing content
I see a lot of people are hyper-focused on SEO. While SEO has its purpose, one little tweak in the algorithms by their billionaire owners can render all your efforts useless. You can always bring in visitors through paid advertising, the important thing is to make them stay. Instead, purpose-driven content that is genuinely meant to help your readers in some way or the other has unparalleled staying power and can pay dividends year after year.
Lastly, remember that Warren Buffet’s wealth was not built in a day. Stick to your content schedule regardless of rough or calm waters.
Understandably, producing good content can take hundreds of hours of time and a hefty deal of brain power. It is backbreaking work — or at least backwrecking work — since you must spend long intervals butt in chair typing.
I would be more than happy to take this particular responsibility off your plate!
References
Bartz, D., & Hu, K. (2023, July 21). OpenAI, Google, others pledge to watermark AI content for safety, White House says. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-google-others-pledge-watermark-ai-content-safety-white-house-2023-07-21/
Choi, C. Q. (2007, April 12). Strange but true: Earth is not round. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-is-not-round/
