What is one simple content writing tip you'd offer for a beginning content writer?
To help new entrepreneurs with content writing we asked small business CEOs and business professionals this question for their best tips. From learning your audience to starting with a structured outline, there are several strategies that may help you write content if you’re a beginner.
Here are nine simple content writing tips for beginners:
Make Content Digestible
Learn Your Audience
Keep a Clear Objective in Mind
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Provide Your Unique Perspective
Start with a Structured Outline
Use Grammarly to Help Edit
Read Just as Much as You Write
Find Inspiration with Research
Make Content Digestible
Part of your content writing skills will hinge on how reader-friendly you make your writing. As a denture clinic, we have technical content that spans our blog posts and web pages, so we create content with our audience in mind. We take readability into consideration, which has to do with content difficulty and presentation, so that our website can reach a wide audience. We also implement an organized format that utilizes headings, subheadings, and short paragraphs to make our content easily scannable. If you're just starting out as a content writer, Hemingway App is a free online resource you can use to review your content's readability.
Henry Babichenko, Eurodenture
Learn Your Audience
Know your audience! If you’re writing to parents about their child’s education, you’ll want to use a different tone of voice than if you’re explaining advanced technology to business professionals. It can be challenging to switch between voices when you’re speaking to different audiences at first, but it will help you produce better quality content that is informative and answers your reader’s questions in the long run.
Beth Baranski, Markitors
Keep a Clear Objective In Mind
I've noticed that it's extremely easy to fall in love with words and to get lost in our writing. I guess it's only natural when you love language and storytelling. It may even be an inherent part of the writing process. My advice is put those words down on the page, the words you find beautiful and inspiring. Get swept away with them. And then, when you’re done and your mind is clear, sit back, and try to imagine your readers. Who are they? What do they do? What will they be doing when reading your content, commuting, sitting in an office, lying in bed? What state of mind will they be in, are they looking for a specific answer or just browsing? When you have a clear image in your mind, ask yourself what value or experience you want to give them. Now, step into their shoes and go back to the content you wrote. Does it do the job? You may need to fix a few things, but you'll have the clarity you need to do so.
Ella Levenbach, Opinion Stage
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Avoid keyword stuffing—it does more harm than good. The most common misconception that beginner SEO writers have is that the more keywords they put into their article, the higher it will rank on search engines. However, they fail to realize that search engines also value user experience, and keywords stuffing an article would lead to higher exit rates and a lower rank on the results page. With Google’s BERT update focusing on user experience, I recommend only incorporating keywords when necessary, and as long as it doesn’t disrupt the natural flow of the text.
Stephen Light, Nolah Mattress
Provide Your Unique Perspective
I’ve been working as a journalist and content writer for over 6 years now. My best tip is to write as if all of your readers are extremely smart people. Assume that they already know everything you can imagine. So, to surprise them and draw attention to the piece, you should do in-depth research and find something unique that they don’t even expect to see in the article. This way you will be able to boost the number of your readers fast because people love to share things that deeply astonish them. Remember, no one wants to waste time by reading all the same information they’ve come across hundreds of times. Don’t just rephrase what you read online, but add new value to it. At the very least, it can be your personal opinion on the topic described.
Tetiana Shataieva, HelpCrunch
Start with a Structured Outline
As a chief content writer producing close to 10,000 words of content on a weekly basis, the advice I would give to a beginner content writer is to have a skeleton template that you write towards. Never start writing on a blank piece of paper from intro to conclusion. Create the headings for your content first, structure your post in accordance with key and items you want to talk about and then start filling out the body of your content.
Mogale Modisane, ToolsGaloreHQ
Use Grammarly to Help Edit
Grammarly has a free extension to add to your Word docs and Google docs. Set it up for your writing. It helps keep the basics of writing managed, and it also offers suggestions to other similar words. It is easy to set up and saves you a lot of editing time. I highly recommend it.
Jason Wong, Doe Lashes
Read Just as Much as You Write
If you want to improve your writing, start with reading. If you want to be a writer, you have to read as much as possible. Make sure to read from a variety of writers with different styles and from different fields. Read a lot, read widely. Spend time thinking of the elements of their style that make their writing so appealing. Mix and adapt before you rinse and repeat.
Peter Thaleikis, Which Login
Find Inspiration with Research
Here's one tip for beginning content writers: find a way to keep yourself inspired about what you're writing. You need to love the topic you're writing about in order to keep from becoming bored or burned out. If that means finding other websites on the same topic you can read, watching youtube videos, or doing anything else that keeps your interest up, then do it. The easiest way to get inspired is to think about why it is that you love the topic you're writing about.
Ann Young, Fix The Photo
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