Love writing? Have you always been eulogized for your writing skills – personally and socially? How about giving it a shot professionally? How about fine tuning your writing skills and niche to make some earnings out of it? How about taking up writing as a career? Professional content writer is your thing – all you need is to know the right skills and knacks to make the content sellable, relevant, and consequential to the real life.
Being a content writer comes with its own perks, benefits, and responsibilities. It depends on your position in a certain organization, your responsibilities of the position, and the writing tonality required for a particular write-up or client, which actually make the difference. Also, the topics that you need to write on, the works published, and the generation of real value intended while writing the content do have certain ideals that a content writer must know and process.
Even if it seems like, the job of content writing is not at all an easy one. There are several areas of expertise you must need to have expertise and skilled professionalism to be a great content writer. There are certain skillsets that you, as an aspiring content writer, must learn to continue to hone over their career.
Before that, how about brushing up the concept of content writing?
To begin with, content is a broad term and content writing means much more than just a wordplay. As a content writer, your aim is to put your words in reader-friendly, engaging and informative way to walk the path to be a great content writer.
By content, we mean the use of words to convey things to others and that includes everything about your business, your idea, your project and anything that is relevant. As a content writer, you would be assigned ideas and topics, or maybe you will have to come up with your own, to create contents that your target audience would love to hover around, read, react, and share.
These content can be digital to go on websites, blogs, ads, social media platforms, etc., or can be for offline purposes like stories, presentations, projects, technical papers, research papers, etc.
Do remember, that content is the heart of marketing and king of marketing strategies – be it digital or traditional. There can be multiple marketing materials such as brochures, leaflets, hoardings, billboards, print ads, etc. where you can develop content for promotional marketing purposes.
So, before you get ready with your pen and paper, or rather your laptop and keyboard to pen down your content, learn that content writing is not about writing whatever comes to your mind, or writing from your own knowledge base. In fact, a good content requires a fine balance of diligent research, wordplay, sound expertise, and of course, good vocabulary and grammar.
Additionally, a content that would serve the purpose well for promotion and marketing is never created in the first go. It actually calls for incisive editing, rewording and fine-tuning to ensure that every single word is on point.
Here we go, let’s start off with the things that you must keep in mind to be a successful content writer:
1.Know your reader and target audience
Communication is a two-way activity and no writer should ignore any of the ways and writes deliberately without bothering much about the readers’ point of view. Understanding the need of target audience and the reading taste of your reader is of prime importance to frame an effective content. You may start off with a market study of your audience by using several methodologies.
Understanding what your readers want to read and being able to align your content in the same manner that your audience wants, is certainly among the most important factors to be an amazingly skilled content writer.
Also, do keep in mind whether you yourself enjoy reading your own write-up. Only when a writer loves reading his own blogs or write-up, can be sure that the target audience is bound to love it too. To do this, do make sure to read your content from the readers’ point of view, and not as your own as a writer.
2. Follow the readability principles
To cut things short, your content must be able to speak to your reader in the simplest way. It must be clear to a layman as well as an expert. As easy as it may sound, it is actually the toughest part to follow.
- Be direct with your readers: Maintain a direct conversation with your readers ensuring that you are talking directly to your readers and that everything happening is in a direct tone of speech. This is the trick to keep up with the readers’ continuality and consistency to read your content.
- Use of active voice: To make your topic clear and specifically targeted to your audience, do make sure to use an active voice.
- Keep your content optimized and simple: Simpler is better. But do ensure not to stroll on in your content. Readers might enjoy long write-ups, but if they notice that you are unnecessarily dragging the topic, it won’t take them to quickly navigate from your content to any other content.
- Single idea at a time: To remain consistent with the topic you are talking about is an art and a necessity for a good content.
- Originality and authenticity count: No prize for guessing that it is your original content and authentic ones that make the differences, especially when you are writing for digital purpose.
- Proofreading is must: Don’t forget to cross check and proofread your content before you head on to publish it.
3. Engaging readers with the answers they look for
Among the major soul-searching for your content is the trick to keep questions popping up throughout the content, and providing your readers with the immediate and proper answers. Not only it is a great way to keep your reader engaged with your content, but it is also a proof that you have done adequate research that eventually makes you a good content writer.
The ultimate purpose of a content is to be informative and educative for the person who reads it. All that a reader wants is information for the thing they are looking for digitally. After all, online content marketing is the effort to spread the word about your business, product, service or anything relevant with the use of internet to make it available to the readers.
4. Connect the dots
One of the greatest tactics to deal with a good content is to know how to connect the dots. In other words, inter-related topics and paragraphs within the content must make sense. If a particular point is followed by another without making much sense, readers would eventually shift pages or websites. And that is not what a good content writer would want.
The ability to sum up an idea is the art of content writing. A good content writer must remain precise with his or her wording throughout the flow of the content thereby clearly concluding the content with the right words in every section and paragraph.
Going from one point to another making a smooth transition and still making proper sense, is the main art of creating a good content. Not only that, to sum up the entire idea to cut things short at the end, is also necessary to complete the content with meaningful angles and points.
5.Research and analytical skills are important
Research is the decision-making point of any good content. With the right dose of patience and excellent research and analytical skills, a successful content is sure to be created. The research element is crucial in the process of content creation. Irrespective of whether the concerned angles are keyword research, topic research, niche research or any other type of research, remaining patient without getting overactive is necessary. Adequate research on the web is not an easy task and can sometimes become depressing and frustrating.
While you are on your way to do the research part, do make sure to cite the sources. One must link their content with its original sources and to mention them wherever required.
6.Play with several writing skills
While maintaining a distinct writing style is a welcome thing, writing on the same topic and in the same niche is not always a great thing to do. It can eventually kill your writing and creativity skills. A successful writer must switch the writing genres and niches to diverse topics with the sole aim to enhance their ability to think outside the box. At the same time, the varied writing style does help to increase the knowledge. The trick is to practice writing on entirely opposite topics to gain these skills.
To be an all rounder as a content writer, one must be able to adaptable to multiple trend varying from the news or social media, and must be eager to write on anything and everything. Readers have the tendency to search over the web all the relevant and interconnected content to what they have been reading at a certain point. Keeping the readers engaged with the right use of skills in the content is the ultimate thing to do by a writer.
7.Learn about WordPress and SEO
A content writer must know the crucial SEO basics to be a star. The algorithms that determine how search engines work are constantly being updated and the best content writers need to understand them in order to successfully take advantage of them. The high quality of a content is the only thing that remains constant and to write successfully good content, the relationship between WordPress and SEO must be known.
Additionally, knowing the right use of social media is the key. Social media functions more like a tool than just a hub for meeting different people from a variety of places. Several business owners view all social media as a whole market and invest lump sums on promoting products and brands using social media marketing. Social media is also a great way to create a word-of-mouth where one can build personal relationships with people. After all, social media is a valuable tool for conducting viral content marketing.
8.Good command over language
Among the very important things to create good content is the need to have good language skills and extremely good command over the language, format, and flow. Skills like spelling, grammar, word usage, sequence follow, sentence formation, and comprehensive flow are among the most important things to keep in mind.
With a weak language skills are weak, don’t just sit back. Work on your writing skills to improve your language and other basics. Also, being persistent with your writing skills do count. It is completely normal to sometimes get fed up and frustrated with everything related to writing provoking you to quit and give up. But for a good content writer who wants to make it bigger, the only solution is to overcome it. To face new challenges and deal with the unexpected is what shapes the future of a good content writer.
- Regular content updates to pep up search engines
Search Engines have a soft corner for those sites that update their content on a regular basis. If you write for a website or blog, the trick is to consistently update your content to make the readers aware that the content is alive, and so is your site and business. Continuous updating helps you to maintain higher search engine rankings.
The best of the content websites are regular updated to maintain their traffic, ranking and positions on search engines. Also, regular updating also means that the writers desire to provide their readers with the most up-to-date information. While it remains completely at your discretion, depending upon the nature and niche of your website, it is suggested to make content changes once a month to make it a sufficient and efficient move.
10.Calls to Action is important
CTAs or Call To Action are among the most generic ways to turn heads of your audience and readers towards your business. In other words, to increase viewership, nothing can beat the utility of Call To Action. A good content writer must be aware how to generate engaging CTAs that can provoke users to respond willingly.
Do remember that CTAs require tremendously skilled communication skills. As a content writer, you must know how to communicate with your readers the best way. You may use relevant images, infographics, videos, and statistics to make your content stand and to make your CTAs meaningful. In either ways, the point is to communicate the most effective way possible.
It depends on the readers’ preference of reading, listening, or viewing. As a content writer, you must ensure to keep the communication skill high and alive among multiple reader-types.
To conclude with:
To sum up with, make sure you, as a content writer, is comfortably adjusting to the mentioned points. In case you are lacking somewhere, work on it to sharpen the edges. If something is going missing in your content, start incorporating the same with immediate effects.
Once ready, do hit the the market strong with your amazing content writing skills. As long as you are confident about your knacks and skills to write the content in the abovementioned ways, nothing can stop you from being successful in writing industry.
If you feel you need some professional help to brush up your skill set, or if you need some proper guidance from the scratches, it is wise to get in touch with trainers who are experienced and expertise in content writing.
Carney Consultancy Service is a reliable body that can be trusted for the right guidance in writing content. They can be reached on http://carneyacademy.in/ for the courses modules, training tenure, and other relevant details. You may call them up at +91-033-400-46569 or +91-983-052-0826 to talk directly to their representative. You may also drop them an email on info@carneytechnologies.com or fill up the online form to get in touch with them or to send in your queries. Their representatives would get back at the earliest.
Good luck on your way to be a successful content writer. Because the world needs it. After all, a website without content is not the thing we might be looking for over the web.