High-quality content has great value in the modern world and hiring a professional copywriter costs a fortune for a small business. If you manage a low-budget project and don’t have money to get assistance from a qualified content creator, you still can succeed. If you are really passionate about your company, you can handle this task on your own!
Using your writing skills, creativity, and advanced tools, you can become a great content creator. Let’s check what steps you should take to achieve your goal.
Choose your niche
If you want to create killing content, you should focus on a very concrete target audience. You should conduct market research and design an ideal customer profile. When you understand the problems and preferences of your target audience, you can create content, which will be extremely useful and valuable.
For instance, if your company operates in the fitness industry, you should target a specific group of sporty people. You can create content for young mothers, which exercise to get back in shape after pregnancy, or for busy students, which try to fight obesity.
When you have more information about your customers, you can provide them with exclusive content. There is no room for a doubt that mommies will be happy to get more information on the topic “A Postpartum Diet and Exercise Plan While Breastfeeding”. And students will be more interested in reading the article “How to Balance Healthily Lifestyle with Successful Studying”.
You create content in order to attract the target audience’s attention to your products, so you should make sure that you promote the right brand’s values. You should choose the words, tone of voice, and writing style, which are suitable for your very company. Your content strategy is a part of the overall marketing strategy, so make sure that it is customized correctly.
Tell a story
If you want people to trust your products, you should be honestly in providing them with information about your business. Your company has a unique story, which you can share with the world. You can use storytelling techniques to create various types of killing content.
You can start with a tale, which outlines all stages of company’s development: starting from the day of its establishment and ending today. Tell about all the challenges you overcame and the goals you achieved during all these years. Make your story sounds sincere, and you will be able to improve the customers’ loyalty.
After that, you can tell your target audience about your best employees. You should write how they contributed to the company’s success and why you are so proud to work with them. This is another great way to improve your company’s reputation.
In addition, you can consider the stories of your favorite clients. You can compose fascinating articles about their positive experience of your products/service usage. Real-life examples and honest reviews greatly influence the buying decision of potential customers, so this approach to content creation will help your company to boost sales.
However, you shouldn’t make your stories too serious and too detailed. If you will overload your text with dates and other boring facts, then visitors will run away from your website. So, you should better add humor where it’s possible in order to entertain your target audience.
Add visuals
Visual content always works more effectively, so you should never post plain text. Even if you publish a short update on your website social media profile, you should always attach an eye-catching element. Depending on the preferences of your customers, you can utilize various kinds of visuals:
- Photos
- Vector illustrations
- Videos
- Infographics
- Charts and graphs
- Memes
- Gifs
- Collages
- Images with quotes
- Banners.
Visual elements help to grab attention and make visitors stay on a webpage for longer. People need only 3 seconds to make a decision on whether they like your website or not, so you should try your best to impress them at first sight.
If you think that you have to hire an expert on visual content creation and there are no other options to consider, you are wrong. You can design everything including infographics and memes by yourself. There are plenty of user-friendly online services, which you can use for little to no money.
Ensure high-quality content
Whether you create textual or visual content, its quality should be a priority. It means that every article you publish should be free from spelling errors and typos. People don’t trust the posts, which have plenty of wrongly used words and unnecessary punctuation marks.
You can polish your texts with the help of the automatic grammar punctuation checker, which can point out your major mistakes. Also, you have an option to check online editing services reviews and find an expert, which will assist you with proofreading. Moreover, you can always ask your friend or family member, which has a degree in English, to edit your posts.
When it comes to images and videos, quality is really important. You can use only high-resolution photos, which are free from any defects. If you want to promote your business online, you can’t take a picture on your old smartphone; it’s time to buy a good cam.
Use catchy titles
The trick is that after the creation of a fabulous piece of content, you should also come up with an unordinary catchy title. Otherwise, visitors will not read an article that starts with a boring tagline. You should choose the words, which will intrigue your customers.
As you know, brevity is the soul of wit, so you should express a major idea of your blog post in one short sentence or phrase. It’s a pretty challenging task, so it’s likely that you will need assistance from an expert with a marketing background. You can check reviews of the companies, which could help you with this issue.
Take a look at the Instagram caption by New York Daily News: “Author of How to Murder Your Husband arrested for allegedly killing her husband”. It seems that this headline will not leave the target audience indifferent. Everyone, who sees this title, can’t resist clicking a link and reading an entire story.
Watch the trends
Your content should discuss the most interesting and provoking issues and events, which get trending on the world wide web. Today, this task isn’t as challenging as it seems. To come up with brilliant content ideas, you should analyze users’ activity on social media.
You should define a social network, which your target audience prefers to use, and take a closer look at it. If you have enough time, you can monitor all social media channels:
- Google Alerts. It can provide you with information about digital influencers and popular terms.
- Pinterest. This resource creates an overview of the overall users’ activity and points out the tendencies of the global digital market.
- Instagram. Explore tab showcases the best posts grouped by numerous topics: music, travel, humor, style, food, dance, art, fitness, etc.
- Facebook. It provides not only a list of the personalized topics but also displays a short description of why these topics are trending. You can find this information at the top of the newsfeed page.
- LinkedIn. Members of the reputable groups create discussions of the most topical issues related to the industry or specific niche.
- Twitter. It displays the most widely-used hashtags and trending topics.
Some business owners believe that social media trends are not really important for their niche, and most of them are wrong. Every important event influences almost every industry. Let’s consider an example of how different companies can use the same trending topic to create killing content.
For example, if Twitter users posted more than 77 thousand tweets about the category1 of the upcoming hurricane Florence in a few days then this issue is worth a blog post. You should find a link between your business and this topic:
- If you manage a bookstore, you can create a list of the best books to read at home during the storm.
- If you are an owner of a building supply store, you can write about the possible damages, that hurricane can cause, and materials, which people will probably need for the fast house reconstruction.
- If you work in the fitness industry, you can recommend people a grocery list, which will help them to stick to a healthy diet while waiting out the storm.
- If you own a drugstore, you can advise people on medications, which they should have at home in case of an emergency.
If a particular topic is trending on social media, it means that people want to get more information, which relates to it. So, you should watch the trends attentively and never miss an opportunity to write an urgent article for your website’s blog or publish a short post on social media.
Understand how SEO works
If you want your website benefits your business a lot, you should clearly understand how SEO works. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should learn the basic rules and follow them while writing. Even more, you can use SEO plugins, which will provide you with useful advice automatically.
The first thing you should know about search engine optimization is that all content you create should be unique. It’s not enough to rewrite a fabulous article, which you have read in Forbes – you must come up with your own ideas. If you would ever decide to steal a piece of content, Google never places your website at the top of the search results.
This is the greatest challenge to compose a text, which will be interesting for customers and will meet all technical requirements. Obviously, your primary goal is to satisfy the visitors, but people will never find your site on the worldwide web if you will ignore SEO rules.
You can always check the top sites’ rating reviews list to find a professional writing services, which will help you with optimization. But if you want to complete this job without outside help, there are a few useful tips for you:
- Write short sentences, which contain 15-22 words.
- Create a clear structure and use relevant subheadings.
- Start a new paragraph every 2-3 sentences.
- Add bulleted lists to make text scannable.
- Try to write sentences in active voice only.
- Find focus keywords and use them in the text.
- Write a title tag and meta description for every single page.
With this in mind, you can ensure great text readability, which is important for both: readers and search engines. Also, you should learn how to use Google Statistics, so you will be able to analyze the effectiveness of SEO optimization.
Encourage guest posting
If you have neither skills to create content, nor the money to hire an expert, you still can hit your goal. You can encourage guest posting, so professional writers will compose great articles for you for free. You should only let them include a few relevant backlinks in the text.
However, you should be careful and cooperate only with reliable blog writers, which have a good reputation in your industry. If you will accept articles from anyone, who sends you a free sample, you risk spoiling your brand image. Only high-quality content is worth the attention of your clients, so you should never post meaningless and valueless texts.
Final thoughts
If you have plenty of time and patience, you can create killing content without hiring a professional. You should simply start with research, which will help you to learn the preferences of your target audience. In this way, you will be able to understand what kind of information is in demand online.
You are responsible for the company’s prosperity, so you should use all your skills, knowledge, and imagination you have. Try your best to create catchy textual and visual content, which will catch the attention of your target audience and improve brand loyalty.