content writing expertise Archives

How To Write Headlines For Your Articles That Scream “Click Me”!

Write headline for your articles as if your life depended on it, which in a way it does! My first and greatest boss, David Ogilvy, used to tell us: “95% of people read only the headline. The rest may read the body copy”. He was, of course, talking of advertisements which were short anyway. But what he said then applies to 2000-word content even now, especially in these times of information overload and people with the attention span of a less than a goldfish!

Every day, businesses, organizations, and individuals publish 2 million blog posts collectively. That’s a ton of content. It’s also a ton of competition. Hardly any reader will have the time or bandwidth to make it past your headline. That’s a truth we all have to face. Furthermore, if a headline doesn’t grab them, they’ll dash out at speed in search of juicier content. Some marketers – especially those with Content Writing Expertise – say headlines can influence traffic by as much as 500 percent. That is to say, if you currently drive 10,000 unique users to your website per day, a terrific headline may get you 50,000 visitors instead. But what are these kinds of headlines that do the trick? Read on …

[Read more…]

How To Help Your Customer Cut Out The Noise And Hear Only You!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

How To Help Your Customer Cut Out The Noise And Hear Only You? Given the information overload hitting the customers these days, it was only a matter of time before every solopreneur content-marketer had to ask himself or herself this question. Increasingly we now see blog posts and articles by very important organizations and experts about “noise-cutting” becoming the next big preoccupation for content marketers.

So much of content is being produced every day that the word “content” has become synonymous with “claustrophobia”. It’s become easy and affordable to hire Content Writing Expertise, so marketers are tempted to offload vast amounts of money to freelancer-bloggers who are willing to grind out “listicles” hour after hour, day after day, and month after month. No matter how much content we all churn out, though – or perhaps because of it – the customers collectively seem to have spaced out. What’s worse, sometimes, we want to gnash our teeth, because customers only hear the mediocre competitor, while they turn deaf ears to our content masterpieces. Now, we content marketers are left wondering less about what content to produce – and more about how to “blur out” the competing noises.

[Read more…]

Content Engagement Vs. Content Consistency Vs. Content Variety!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Content engagement, content consistency and content variety … where do you think your brand’s content is lacking? Which is your area of maximum challenge? You have to try and identify the weak links in your overall content strategy and try to rectify them because without all three of these factors working together, your content plan will not fire as well as it should. Consistency is what you put into creating content, variety is what content gets from being on diverse but related topics and on different devices and formats, and engagement is what the customer should want to experience from it.

Content Writing Expertise demands that every content creator should include all the three factors, so that each piece of content produced meets its many goals. Not always are all these three factors equally needed, though. Sometimes you may have to give one of the factors a bit more weightage over the other two. But which factor you give prominence to depends of the content campaign objectives. Remember, that customers value content highly when all three factors are present. Here’s a quick enumeration of all the factors to consider when you aim your content towards engagement, variety and consistency, and to wrap up let’s look at a case study.

[Read more…]

Writing content for customers versus writing for influencer outreach!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Content for customers versus content for influencer outreach? Are these two different? Do they need to be? As a marketer have you ever given it a thought about what kind of content a potential customer may find useful, and what type of content an influencer or another blogger may find worthy of linking to or sharing? The issue at hand is that, unless you write some content specifically for influencer outreach and get backlinks and shares thereby, your content for potential customers will not work as hard, as you may not get the Google rankings for it that comes only with a good number of backlinks. Often content written specifically for influencers is known as “link-bait”. And link-bait content isn’t really what your customer may find to be what he is looking for!

There are a lot of articles online showing you how to write “link-worthy” content. In fact, Brian Dean the backlinks guru, says he started getting any traction at all, when he stopped writing for “consumers” and started writing specifically for “linkreators” i.e. other bloggers who had a blog to link to him from. Whereas his consumers were new bloggers without the traction yet to give him worthy links! So should it be an either/or situation? Or do we find a way to write for both audiences, without your brand sounding like it’s in two minds? I am a votary of the idea of making one piece of content go a longer way with both types of audiences. I think Content Writing Expertise demands that you have to be able to write with some versatility and cleverness. Read on to see how you could strategize for this, and how to implement some intelligent content tactics!

[Read more…]

Learn To Write Content Like A Pro With Force And Authority!

By Shobha Ponnappa 2 Comments

Writing like a pro for content marketing gets easier with time and practice. Most content-marketing solopreneurs struggle initially, but become adept soon enough. There was a time, a few years ago, when the raging debate was whether we should write for the search engines (and stuff keywords into our articles) or whether we should write for people and sound natural and not made-for-Google. Fortunately, Google became more intelligent like a human, and so we can now write articles for our content marketing aimed at people – and Google, in fact, values that!

When writing like a polished pro, it’s not so much about grammar, headlines, being a good copywriter or having a journalistic background. Content writing expertise is a bit different. All good writing qualities are important, but most important of all is to know your audience very well and to write what they want to hear. And added to that,you have to find the fun in writing, and to find your “mojo. When you have to write a lot, day after day, writing elegantly had better become one of your joys. It’s not a science, it’s an art. Be true to yourself, be empathetic with your audiences, and go have fun. That’s the small secret to big writing!

[Read more…]

How To Create Truly Original Content – And Not Be A Copycat!

By Shobha Ponnappa 2 Comments

Original Content adds immensely to your brand; being a copycat content marketer blows your pretence of authority. That’s the truth. By following those are successful at Content Marketing, you may believe you too can easily acquire Content Writing expertise. Maybe that’s why you also always try to start your posts with “8 points that work” or “12 points that don’t” … but then, why does it work for those others and not for you? Why do “content creation formulas” not produce the kind of results that people tell you they will?

The short answer is that to be a success yourself, you have to be aware of a formula just in order to break it! You should see what makes others tick, but instead of being a copycat, you have to try and avoid what they did, so you can be an original. The world is so full of formula-based content, that to succeed you have to be unlike most of today’s successful people in order to succeed yourself!

[Read more…]