5 Ways To Write High Quality Content
Content creation is like building a portfolio. It’s a long-term investment in building your brand, creating a community, improving awareness, and boosting longer sales cycles.
Many entrepreneurs don’t focus much time on good content development because they’re after quick wins. However, creating quality content is the most effective way to promote a brand.
Having said that, creating quality content is a choice. You can choose to put in the work and time needed to create high quality content and build a successful brand. Or you can choose to take the easy way out and create poor content that generates no results, which is a waste of time and resources.
If you want to boost search engine rankings, get more traffic and gain leads, you need to write high quality content. Here are 5 key components of content writing.
FREE Download: 5 Step Content Strategy
How To Write High Quality Content
1. Know Your Audience
Who is your target customer? What do they need? What do they want to read?
This is crucial in creating great content. You need to know what your customers want to read – not what you think they want to read. To know your audience, conduct market research. Define customer personas, establish what they’re interested in, and determine their problems so that you can create content that solves their issues.
This is the primary way to get your customers’ attention and connect with them.
For example, many corporate blogs talk about what they’ve been up to and what’s happening internally. But customers don’t care about what you’ve donated to charity or that your sales manager is leaving. Consumers care about their problems and what you can do to make their lives better or easier.
Therefore, if you want to write high quality content, you must know who your target customer is. Also, your content must focus on how you can help your audience achieve their goals and how you can make their lives better.
2. Conduct Extensive Research
To produce high-quality content, you need to research to a journalist’s standard. This means you must back up all your statements with evidence and you should avoid unfounded claims.
Offering reliable information is the fastest way to gain credibility. Many blogs are now hiring journalists to add their expertise to what’s being published online. High quality content must have citations and links to other respected and credible material to support its credibility. Mercola is such an example. Dr. Mercola owns Mercola and his articles are of high quality and backed up with medical references.
3. Find a Fresh Approach
If you want to create high quality content, you need to avoid herd content. This is content that you see replicated across websites in the same niche, all saying the same thing.
When searching through a niche, it’s common to see lazy research where an article lifts the references and structure from another article. However, to create great content you must be ahead of the pack by creating something original or by taking a different approach to an existing subject.
Everything has been done before, of course. However, it’s possible to find a unique approach to a topic. To stand out, you need to take a different approach by:
- Using a unique tone of voice
- Finding an original slant on the topic
- Including a lot of data to back up your theory
- Using visuals and screenshots to make your content easy to consume
- Using stories and analogies
4. Be Informative and Answer Your Readers’ Questions
Many people who search across the internet want help with something. Web searchers want to find answers to their problems.
If your content writing format has a focus on answering the questions that your target audience is asking and offering solutions to their problems. you’ll gain more website traffic and become seen as an authority in your chosen niche.
Content exists to offer information. And content that doesn’t offer value or is of little use to the reader, it will not inspire, engage or connect with the audience. High quality content must answer specific questions, and great content will lead to brand recall. In other words, the more a reader reads your posts or sees your brand name, the more they trust you and the more likely they are to buy from you.
5. Easy to Navigate and Read
Have you ever come across a wall of text? Some articles are so bad that you can’t read them and the only option is to click away.
To create high quality content, it’s crucial to keep the reader visually stimulated so they continue to read your content and take the target action. To achieve this, create content that’s easy to navigate and read. Be mindful that people read differently on a screen than on a printed page. Thus, you need to use many subheadings, bullets, and short paragraphs.
To keep your readers engaged, use a combination of images, videos, graphics, maps, and short blocks of writing. The basics of producing great content start with having a strong topic and doing extensive research, but great presentation makes your content easy to navigate and read.
Free Checklist: The 5 Step Strategy To Write High Quality Content
The goal of most marketing strategies is to generate maximum exposure for brands. You can gain this exposure by creating high quality and valuable content that boosts the chance of brand mentions, link shares and sales.
When you develop your content strategy plan, it’s important that you understand who your audience is, while also knowing what your brand is and what you want that brand to represent and to whom. When you put your customer value and satisfaction first and focus on problem-solving, the more that customers will be attracted to you.
If you continually write high quality content, it won’t take long before you see the results. For more information on how to create great content for your website or blog download my free Content Strategy Checklist that outlines the 5 key steps and best practices used by the most successful bloggers and online entrepreneurs.