By Melissa Strle
May 1, 2021
Figure 1: Content Writing
Content writing educates and entertains readers through the creation of content for digital channels. It generates organic traffic (visitors coming from search engines) from search engines with high-quality, valuable content.
Since content writing and content marketing generates more traffic and potential customers, it increases your businesses exposure and potential for increased sales. But, to achieve this, content writing needs to be done the right way.
This form of writing helps to provide “speech” to your website and digital marketing efforts and this article discusses how you can use content writing to increase the profitability of your business.
"Write so that people can hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart"
- Maya Angelou
Content Writing Examples
1. Blog posts
2. E-books
3. Articles
4. Press releases
5. Website content
6. Social Media Posts
7. Email newsletters
8. Video tutorials
9. White papers
10. Case studies
11. Customer success stories
12. Infographics
13. Product descriptions
14. Testimonials
15. Comparison Sheets
16. FAQs
17. Awards
18. Guides & manuals
These different content writing examples or tools should be used at different times throughout the sales process or funnel. These tools help to move customer’s through the funnel and toward the end goal of a sale.
Topic Clusters & Pillar Pages are Key to SEO
Whatever sector your business operates within, you should have an idea of what general topic area you would like to convey as your business expertise. These general topic ideas should be the starting point of your online communications efforts to optimize SEO. They can be set up as 'pillar pages' on your website, that provide general overviews of the topic.
These general topics can then be further divided into different topic clusters that each have various content ideas regarding the broad topic.
Hubspot Topic Clusters
For example, a bank may have different general topic ideas, or pillar pages, of investing, borrowing and accounts & services. Investing could then be further subdivided into the topic areas of GICs and savings accounts, and each of these can be further subdivided into various content articles, blogs or other content tools.
Creating the overall topic idea of investing and then subdividing this topic into various topic clusters and content helps to improve SEO. In other words, it is important to write content topic ideas rather than simply writing for keywords.
When your content is structured in this way, you will be able to link various articles to each other on your website, which will in turn increase your SEO. Organizing your content by topic, rather than keywords, increases overall SEO.
Top 14 Tools for Creating a Content Writing System
You can use many tools to help you develop your content writing system, but we've compiled a list of the most valuable tools that help you with this task.
The tools below help you organize your files, website and blog, research trending topics, analyze search engine optimization, create and analyze competitor comparisons, create graphics, create topic alerts, access social media and much more.
1. Google Drive
2. WordPress
3. MOZ
4. BuzzSumo
5. SEMRush
6. Google Trends
7. HubSpot
8. Ahrefs
9. Google Alerts
10. Trello
11. Canva
12. Venngage
13. Twitter
14. Google Calendar
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Wouldn’t it be great if you could attract a large number of visitors and potential customers to your website? The goal of content writing is to improve your internet marketing strategy through effective search engine optimization.
Ahrefs content writing for SEO
Search engine optimization means improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website. This is an unpaid form of attracting and converting visitors into customers, since it is achieved through content writing.
SEO considers what people search for and the frequency of actual search terms or keywords that people type into search engines. If you know what search terms and keywords people use to search for a topic related to your business or the services you sell, you can focus your content writing efforts to include these keywords and phrases to attract more visitors and customers.
Your website will receive more visitors when it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, the goal of most companies is to rank on the first page of SERPs. Ranking in the top three results of SERPs or in the coveted google featured snippet spots of SERPs can attract many visitors to your website.
Google’s featured snippets appear at the top of Google’s search results pages and display a quick answer to the searcher’s query. The snippets describe the page and are featured above the link to the page. Whereas, Google’s other search results display the link first.
How to Tell a Good Story
Figure 2: What is your story?
Oftentimes, content writing involves telling a story. For example, you can write a successful story about a customer that used one of your products or services. Your story can describe the characters, a conflict and a resolution.
The conflict will drive the main idea of the story. A conflict should present a problem or need that your customer might be experiencing and how your products or services can help to present a solution to this problem. Additionally, you can present a call-to-action (CTA) that identifies steps that your customer can take or additional content they can use to help solve their problem.
Most Popular Search Engines
Figure 3: YouTube, Amazon & Google search engines
Undoubtedly, google is the most popular search engine in the world. But, there are other very popular search engines that you shouldn’t overlook when developing your SEO strategy. According to Search Engine Journal, the following websites ranked as the most popular search engines in March 2021.
1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Amazon
4. Facebook
5. Microsoft Bing
6. Baidu
7. Yandex
When you create your content writing and SEO strategy, keep in mind that you should optimize for google along with these other popular search engines. YouTube's popularity has increased significantly in the last few years and using this search engine to help increase your business exposure can pay off substantially.
Creating a Content Editorial Calendar
You might be brainstorming and researching different content ideas, and it is important to record these ideas down and plan a short term and long term content calendar. A content editorial calendar ensures your content is consistent and effective over time.
Hubspot’s Content Marketing Planning Template will help you to strategically assess your content marketing strategy and decide how to plan your overall content calendar.
Hubspot has also created many free content creation templates for social media, blogs, ebooks, infographics, press releases and more. These templates help you to design and manage your content planning strategy.
The blog editorial calendar helps keep your blog organized by listing topics, publish dates, authors, content details, keywords and calls to action.
Another favourite is Hubspot’s social media content calendar. This calendar provides detailed dates, messages, times, links, images and character counts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram content messages.
Generating Content Ideas
Figure 4: Ideas
There are a variety of ways to come up with content ideas. You might simply think of ideas on your own, but you can also come up with ideas when you read other content, search up trending topics or look at what competitors are talking about.
There are a number of tools you can use to come up with topic ideas. For example, Google’s “autocomplete” and “related searches” functions help to expand the search terms that you type into the search engine. These functions can give you new ideas related to your topics.
Reviews XP listed the following tools for generating blog topic ideas.
10 Best Tools for Generating Blog Topic Ideas (2021)
1. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
2. Alltop
3. Ahrefs Content Explorer
4. Buzzsumo
5. Ubersuggest
6. Quora
7. Google Trends
8. Portent’s Content Idea Generator
9. Twitter
10. Moz Keyword Explorer
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging on different, related websites to your business is a great way to boost exposure. When you guest blog on a different site, you gain exposure to a whole different group of customers and followers. Semrush's guest blogging guide for SEO can give you some tools to start this process.
MOZ ranks websites on their domain authority. This is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages. Domain authority scores range from one to 100, and the higher the score, the more likely a website is to rank higher on SERPs.
MOZ recommends writing for blogs of websites with a domain authority ranking of between 21-70. It will be harder or more competitive to write for websites with a higher domain authority.
You can type in specific searches in Google to find guest post opportunities. You can also research influencers, research on twitter and research competitors’ blogs. There are also tricks to uncovering emails if you are attempting to reach out to someone that you want to create a business relationship with.
Promoting Content Writing
Figure 5: Twitter, Instagram & Facebook
There are various ways that you can promote your content and you can pay for promotion or use other free forms of promotion. Social media, website, email and podcasts are just a few ways you can promote.
Another way to promote content is to republish your content on other websites and to repurpose your content. For example, if you created an online ebook that explained how to create a comprehensive personal investing strategy, you could then share parts of this content across social media channels. Instagram might feature an infographic of the average savings amounts that a personal investor could save over 20 years.
Repurposing content means that you can get as much out of your content as possible across various channels. Plus, don’t forget to update this content from time to time. This can also give readers a fresh perspective on different topics.
Google Ads lets you market to visitors who are searching for businesses like yours on google. You only pay for actual clicks to your website or calls to your business.
Analyzing Content Writing
Various analytics tools provide ways for you to analyze your content’s reach and effectiveness. In turn, this allows you to adapt your content writing strategy to improve content writing analytics. Google analytics, Google search console, Facebook analytics and SEMRush all offer analytics. However, most platforms, including social media platforms, allow you to delve into analytics.
Top 9 Skills Needed to be an Effective Content Writer
Not everyone is able to be an effective content writer. In fact, it takes a special skillset to succeed in content writing. Most successful content writers develop niche topics that they write about. For example, some content writers specialize in business writing while others might specialize in health topics. It is also fine to have more than one topic that you specialize in.
1. Curiosity
2. SEO knowledge
3. Social media knowledge
4. Ability to write in different styles & for different audiences
5. Out-of-the-box thinking for unique ideas
6. Ability to grab your readers attention
7. Knowledge of best tools to use to help plan, create & analyze content
8. Willingness to continually update skills and stay in tune with changing trends
9. Specialize in certain topic areas or niche topics
About Us
Melissa Strle Communications Inc. provides business content writing, business content marketing services and journalism services. Writing, editing and proofreading of all internal and external corporate content, including print, social media, website and blog. News releases, articles, presentations, annual reports, videos, fact sheets, blog posts, reports, intranet stories, internal messages, memos, speaking notes, key messages and brochures are some of the items we specialize in.