CONTENT WRITING TIPS
Guide To Content Writing For Beginners
Know a few tips to polish your content writing skills
Want to make a career out of content writing but don’t know what it is and how it’s beneficial for business and marketing? Let us be the wind in your sails. Content writing is the art of developing various formats of content to educate, engage, and entertain your audience. The idea is to drive business goals such as brand awareness, customer engagement, or sales through content.
Effective content has the potential to make your audiences take action and create a substantial impact on your business. So how can you elevate yourself as a writer and harness the power of content marketing? Read on to get some content writing tips for beginners, learn about the formats of writing, and everything in between.
Types Of Content Writing
Before jumping onto tips and tricks, here are a few types of content writing that you as a beginner should have an idea about. Each format will give you a better idea of how it works differently.
1. Copywriting
Copywriting is nothing but a short written piece that’s intended to compel audiences to take some action. The end goal can be to sell a product/service or just raise eyeballs and create awareness. Either way, it’s about conveying your brand’s message on different online and offline mediums in a clear and concise manner.
2. Long-form Content Writing
Long-form content writing involves writing detailed in-depth articles to inform audiences on a particular topic. The word count for such long articles can range from 1,000 to 5,000 words. With long-form content or blogs, brands get the opportunity to attract a larger audience by virtue of keywords and other SEO practices.
You can also spice up your articles by adding relevant images and videos to keep your readers engaged. Consider your job half done if your content is well structured, covering the minute details of the subject.
3. Scriptwriting For Ad Films
Don’t confuse the Film & Entertainment industry’s scriptwriting with this one. Scriptwriting for ad films involves writing TVCs (TV Commercials) and video scripts for brands that go up on digital mediums such as YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Writing scripts requires good storytelling skills in an audio-visual format as you are supposed to visualize your concept. It’s crucial to understand the industry and the target audience of the brand you’re writing for, so your video can strike a chord with them.
4. SEO Writing
Leveraging search engines such as Google to market your content to a focused group of audience is what SEO writing is all about. With SEO writing, the goal is to ensure your content piece ranks high on Google search for relevant terms your audience looks up. These terms are called keywords and are one of the things that play a vital role in helping your articles rank.
SEO writing also helps you track the performance of your articles and enhance it accordingly. Ultimately, if your blog doesn’t reach your audience and drive relevant traffic to your website, it’s futile. You can get data for the number of people who visit your blog and how long they spend on it among other things to optimize your content.
5. Social Media Writing
It’s no secret that social media platforms give brands an added edge in terms of connecting with their audience. The posts and captions you see on platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. are what a social media content writer is responsible for conceptualizing and writing.
Social Media content can be visual, textual, or even audio based. The focus of social media writing lies on engaging with a large audience in a short span of time, highlighting the products, services, values, personality, or identity of your business. You can achieve several marketing goals once you crack how social media works.
Tips On How To Get Better At Content Writing
Doing Thorough Research Is Important
You can’t start writing an article without researching the topic you are writing about. There needs to be some context so your readers can consume your content easily.
Some questions you can ask yourself before writing your article are:
- What is the article about?
- Why are you writing the article?
- Who is the article for?
- How does it help the brand and the target audience?
Consider these as the foundation for your article. By answering these questions, you understand exactly what information your content piece should contain. If your content is not factual and informative, it’s likely that your content won’t rank well. Plus it can be misleading for your audience and can damage your credibility.
Focus On Formatting And Structuring
Before we get to why formatting and structuring are needed in content writing, let us understand what it pertains to. Formatting is simply presenting your content in a neat sequence to the audience. There are three levels of formatting — characters (font, font size, and spacing), paragraphs, and sections (setting the page, orientation, and margin). All these three levels help in shaping the article properly.
Structuring is the framework or foundation. It plays a huge part in making your content reader-friendly. In fact, it also helps search engines crawl your articles better, which in turn results in your content performing better. Your objective should be for the audience to clearly understand the information displayed in your article.
Write Engaging & Easy To Consume Content
Always keep the end user in mind instead of just weaving complex sentences for the sake of being “creative”. Speak the language your target audience can relate with. Let the information play the protagonist so you can play that supporting cast.
What’s your brand’s voice and identity? A well-defined brand personality and voice help create engaging content for your audience. Of course, you need to keep the readability and relevance of your content in mind at the same time.
Be Clear Of What The Target Audience Wants
You can only know what your target audience wants once you know who they really are. If you can answer the questions below, you can really define your audience.
- Who are they?
- How old are they?
- Where are they from?
- What do they do?
- Why would they engage with your brand?
- What are their interests?
Tailoring your content to meet what your audience desires should be your prime focus. Tap into what interests them, their motivation, and their reason to engage with a particular product, service, or industry. Once you get a clear sense of these things, it will become easier for you to cater your content to them.
Say No To Plagiarized Content
Sure, Ctrl C + Ctrl V might be really convenient to get certain things done, but it doesn’t fly well with content writing. In case there’s any confusion as to what plagiarism is, think of it as blatantly copy-pasting someone else’s work. Or theft of someone’s intellectual property of sorts.
Expect Google to raise a red flag if your content is plagiarized. If that wasn’t enough, there’s always the risk of your business facing legal action for plagiarizing someone else’s content. So no matter what, always focus on creating original content. There are several free plagiarism checking tools online you can use as a safe practice.
Add Call To Actions
A call to action is where the audience is instigated to take immediate action on a particular message. It is often used by businesses to increase their sales, drive sign-ups for membership, or even increase the number of leads. The more effective your content is, the more the users are motivated to click on the call to action button.
Deep Clean By Proofreading & Editing
What’s the point of all that time and effort you put into writing your article if you didn’t proofread it once? Train yourself in a way that avoiding typos, spelling errors, and grammatical mistakes become second nature to your writing.
You don’t want users to immediately leave the page simply because they spotted a typo and felt like you aren’t a trusted source, right? At the same time, it’s also about editing your content with a clear mind, avoiding redundancies, and making your content as crisp and concise as possible for it to be impactful.
Summing Up
Consistency is key when it comes to writing content. Fancy words can only get you so far because ultimately, it boils down to the research, structure, language, and how well it’s tailored to your audience. If you manage to keep these basics in check, you will be fine!
FAQs
How Do I Start Off Content Writing?
If you want to start off with content writing, the first thing you need to do is improve your language and grammar. Do your research on the different branches of content writing to get a sense of what interests you more.
Having some understanding of marketing would certainly work in your favor. Knowing how platforms like WordPress, Quora, Medium, or social media platforms work would also be an added advantage.
What Skills Does A Content Writer Need?
One of the most obvious and important skills would be writing. You need to have a good command over language and grammar. Research is a fundamental skill set that a content writer must have.
A good understanding of various kinds of customer behavior certainly helps writers tailor their content to the specific target audience. Beyond these, a basic understanding of SEO and social media platforms can also give you an upper hand as a content writer.
How Do I Choose A Topic For Content Writing?
When coming up with a topic for content writing, choose the area of interest from the target audience’s point of view. Do your research on what the audience is looking for. At the same time, keep in mind what your marketing objectives are, so you can strategically combine that with the audience’s needs.
