Implement These Four Tips When You Are Doing Your Writing

No compromise on quality

One of the primary objectives of content marketing is to help your brand or your product, list among the top search engine results. To achieve it, you need to incorporate keywords and key phrases into the content. The problem arises when keywords take precedence over the actual content, i.e.: you focus on inserting as many keywords are possible and ignore the quality of the written material.

What you should know is that with Google’s Penguin and Hummingbird updates, the search engine can now differentiate between content that has quality information to offer and content that is simply spammy or that overuses keywords. The former is more likely to rank better than keyword-intensive text.

Give adequate attention to headlines

The first thing that your reader sees is your headline. If it fails to grab their attention, it does not matter how well your article is written or how useful it is to them. Invest enough attention in writing headlines that convey a message, pique the curiosity and draw in the reader to invest more time on the page. A good tip is to convey how the reader will benefit from reading the blog or article or web page. For example, “Want to take YouTube by storm? Here is what to do?”

Add visual breaks for easy reading

You may have great content to share, you may even have an attention grabbing headline ready, but unless your content is easy to read, none of them really matter. Visual breaks make it easy to read text and it is simple to add them to any content. Break up the content into logical paragraphs and use subtitles to convey what the reader can learn from each of them. Make use of bullet points when you have a number of arguments to present or many points to list out. They make it easy to communicate the maximum amount of information with the minimum number of words.

Use direct language

Using simple, direct language to get your point across to your reader is another often forgotten aspect. Active voice is the best choice for you because it keeps the content uncomplicated and easy to comprehend after a quick glance. Make sure you add call to actions at appropriate intervals and also at the end of the content to inspire your reader to act, at once. Three Common Content Marketing Challenges You Should Overcome

No present day business can survive without investing enough attention to digital marketing. The success of digital marketing hinges on quality content and effective content marketing. Although most business owners understand this universal truth, not all manage to set in place a truly efficient content marketing strategy. The challenges that arise are key reasons for the failure.

Challenge 1: Creating shareable content that is also entertaining and engaging

Content marketing works best when you get your audience involved in “distributing” the message by sharing your content with their circle. To ensure that your content is shared, it is important that it is interesting, informative and entertaining to your readers. Creating content that satisfies these aspects is a challenge that may seem difficult to overcome. What you need to do is identify what your target audience is interested in, at present, by keeping track of their purchase behavior, their social media conversations and their feedback to you. Identify the topics that seem to be ‘in trend’ and create content around them to garner maximum attention and maximum shares.

Challenge 2: Making content visible

Millions of new articles and blogs arrive on the internet every week and yours is just one of them. Making your content visible in the crowd is a challenge indeed, but one that you can easily address with efficient search engine optimization. Research the keywords that your audience appears to be using most of the time and utilize them in your content to the right degree. Make sure that keyword usage is not taking priority over content quality and you are on track to get your page ranked high in Google search results.

Challenge 3: Writing effective content that results in conversions

The objective of content marketing is to enhance your overall sales efforts. It means your content should directly influence your readers to take another step into your sales funnel. In the best case scenario, your readers should immediately head to your site and make a purchase as soon as they read your content. To achieve it, your content has to fulfill two criteria: one, it needs to highlight a need that your reader has, two, it should convey why your product is the right answer to the need. The content has to give a clear message that prompts your readers to view your product favorably or make up their mind about buying your product immediately.

Content marketing success hinges on how well you can overcome these challenges and consistently deliver content that entertains and informs your audience.
Points To Remember When Authoring Self-help Books

When you have succeeded in overcoming a big challenge in life or you have dealt with a difficult situation or event that crushes most people, it is natural that you would want to share your experience so that others can benefit from it. Writing a self- help book is a great idea in such situations. However, it is not easy to write one that is commercially successful as well as truly beneficial to your audience. These are some points you should keep in mind to make your self- help book useful and informative to others who find themselves in your situation.

Is the topic relevant, current and really useful?

The first thing to do is to review your topic and take a call on whether or not it is useful for others. Some situations that you have experienced and overcome may be common to many people across the world, but others arise only because of a unique combination of circumstances that may not be duplicated in anyone else’s life. A self-help book is a success when it talks about a problem that affects many people, and there is no evident, tried and tested way to deal with it. Another thing to keep in mind is to research if the subject has already been extensively covered by many other authors. If so, your audience may be highly restricted.

Retain focus on your core topic

Finding your focus and then staying focused as you progress through the book is a huge challenge when it comes to writing self-help books. These are typically based on your personal experiences and it often becomes a drawback because you tend to meander into experiences that do not have direct bearing on the topic of the book. A good way to overcome the problem is to start the project by making a clear, well-defined outline for your book with chapter headings and a short summary of each chapter’s contents. Get someone to give you an objective assessment of the outline before you finalize it.

Build trust

Credibility and trust are keystones to success when you are authoring self-help books. Your audience should feel confident about placing trust on you and there are several ways in which you can do it. One, you can highlight your credentials that show why you are an expert on the topic. Two, you can share your life story to show how you have experienced the same problem and worked your own way out of it. Sharing anecdotes, stories from your life as examples works well to enhance your credibility as an author who knows what he/she is talking about. Lessons on Writing from Stephen King

The Master of Horror has been very generous in sharing writing tips through his textbooks and memoirs. If you haven’t yet discovered his tips online, these pearls of wisdom from the prolific author are guaranteed to give you inspiration and point you in the right direction.

#1 : Dump the telly. Read as much as you can.

Stephen King famously said ‘if you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others : read a lot and write a lot’. Television, he believes, is a hindrance to creativity, preventing writers from looking inwards and tapping into their latent reservoirs of imagination.

If you’re just starting out, television can be a distraction that keeps you from hitting the ‘x’ number of words you’ve planned to complete each day. It can interfere with your original ideas or make you mentalize too much, affecting the quality and quantity of your output.

#2 : Write for yourself.

Would you rather write a story that interests you and compels you to read, or pleases someone else – say your potential target audience? King’s answer to this conundrum : write for yourself first, worry about the audience later. As part of the rewriting exercise, he suggests stripping off all the things that are not harmonious to the story.

Catering to a particular audience or cashing in on the ‘in’ themes (vampires stories have been done to death) often result in copy-cat works with little or no creativity or novelty. It’s when you go against the grain or find the magic inside you that you can create something unique and exceptional.

#3 : Go after things that are most challenging to write.

We often struggle to put our most significant thoughts into words. You cannot afford to discount the most important things you want to say by not researching (King draws an analogy between writers and archeologists) and thinking enough about them. A lot of the great works of writing have involved hours of thought.

#4 : Avoid adverbs.

‘The road to hell is paved with adverbs’ tells you how much Stephen King loathes them. He advises against their usage especially after ‘he said’ and ‘she said’.