Everyone tells you that you need to write great content don’t they? In fact, the two things that you need to be successful online are essentially these:
- You need to get traffic to your website (build links)
- You need content that engages your visitors (so that they stay)
Essentially, if you have those two things in place, people will find your website, book mark it, link to it and tell their friends and your traffic will just snowball from there right? Well, yeah to an extent (although that may be an over simplification).
As usual, it’s not that simple, because:
to make it work your content needs to be really special!
Some people can’t write very well, other people can write pretty well. That’s not enough because there is already loads of good content online. If you don’t know how to take the step from good to great, you are going to come unstuck.
What follows is my process – this is what I do when I want to write great content. It doesn’t work every time, but I find that with a process in place it’s much easier to write at the best of your ability.
Step 1: Pick your topic
This is the bit that can sometimes be the trickiest, because let’s face it, ideas don’t always appear when you want them to. Coming up with content ideas is a whole post in itself, but what’s important is having a system.
One good idea is to keep a list of content ideas:
I keep a spreadsheet that I have bookmarked on my desktop. In it I have three columns — column one is for titles, column three is for notes, and column two I use the to highlight certain posts:
- NW: “needs work” for titles I like, but they’re not right yet
- GI: “good idea” for titles I think have good potential
- GI!: “great idea” these are the titles I will write soon
I occasionally review my content ideas and try spinning the wording in my mind, occasionally combining ideas or flipping them around to see if I can improve them.
A few good ways to make an old idea fresh and new are:
- Combine two seemingly unrelated ideas
- Add a negative, so “How to” becomes “How not to”
- Next steps; write a follow up to a post idea you haven’t written yet!
I got this post idea because I had the title idea “how to brainstorm great content ideas” which felt like a bit of a tired subject. So I thought, “the next step is to write it” hence I decided on:
“How to write great content in X steps”
That didn’t sound great either, but I had a few ideas that I could put into the post and I changed the title until I got the title I settled with (see top of this post!).
An important point about idea generation…
…is that you need to have your mind open to ideas. I don’t sit down and decide to come up with an idea; I get most of my ideas whilst reading other people’s blogs or while writing my own.
In fact, I came up with a title idea after I started this post!
Remember this:
Your chances of coming up with a truly new, unique content idea are pretty low in most niches. Innovation happens slowly, and it really is OK to take someone else’s idea as long as you give it a new angle and add some new value.
This certainly isn’t the first post about writing content, but it’s unique because it’s written from my point of view and my unique experiences.
Step 2: Researching your post
Right, so you have your title, now it’s time to write it.
If you are sitting down to write because you know that you need to then there’s a good chance it will come out sounding rubbish, so unless you actually feel inspired to write your post, go for a walk and come back later.
Ok, so you’re ready to write?
The first thing to do is plan your post, and to do that you need to do some research into what is already out there and what has done well. I will use this post as an example:
So I might go and Google “how to write great content” because that’s basically what my post is going to be about.
Here are the search results:
These are all of the articles that Google thinks do a great job of answering my query, and since that is based on links, social stuff and user metrics, you can bet all of these posts were well received by their readers.
So what I want to know is: what did these authors do right and what can I use in my post? I’m going to open the most relevant results, which I think are:
- How to write great blog content @ problogger
- How to write great content @ search engine watch
- 9 ingredients that make content great @ kiss metrics
- 5 pillars of writing great blog content @ social media today
I might go further if I need to, but these are some great posts, so I think I should get plenty of ideas. The first task is to pick out the common themes that are covered. In particular, I noticed that all or some of them talk about (in no particular order):
- Format, length, readability, scan-ability, headings etc…
- Generating ideas, crafting titles
- Search intent – what your users want
- Social media
- What’s ranking – what’s missing
- Being original
- Make it actionable
- Using images and formatting
- Building links
Whoa, that’s a lot to take in. But this is all of the stuff that has done a great job of helping readers who have been interested in this topic, so I need to do something with that.
You don’t have to copy every headline and sub-heading, but all of the above is stuff that you should consider in your own content. You might want to reference points that have been made, for instance:
Darren mentions motivation, and also letting ideas marinade
These are good points and ones that I touched upon above when I spoke about only writing when you feel inspired. You might also decide that you disagree with parts of the posts that you research, that’s fine too, as long as you explain your reasoning.
You should also look for any ideas that are not mentioned in the posts you look at; these are things that you can improve upon in your post. So here’s an example:
None of the posts I read mentioned looking in the comments as a way to come up with more ideas that the post missed.
Look in the comments to see what else the blogger’s audience came up with
Step 3: Writing the post
Funnily enough, I did all of the above before writing about it. That’s the odd thing about writing a post about writing a post! But I digress…
Once you have your research, it’s time to plan and write your post. I could have broken these into two headings, but I actually tend to plan and write at once, other people prefer to separate the tasks.
My advice is to do it whichever way works best for you!
Based on my research I decided to split my post into 4 parts:
- Generating ideas and titles
- Researching the post
- Planning and writing the post
- Marketing the post
In the first two sections I have already touched upon some of the points that my research threw up, such as looking at what’s ranking, generating ideas and crafting titles, being original (in terms of reinventing ideas).
In this section I will tackle things such as:
- Format, length, readability, scan-ability, headings etc…
- Search intent – what your users want
- Make it actionable
- Using images and formatting
Then in the next section we’ll look at the rest.
So you can see how my research has given me a basic template. My job now is to cover each of these points in a way that the other posts I looked at didn’t. Hopefully I have been doing a good job of that so far (you’re still reading aren’t you?)
In terms of formatting and length etc, there is a lot written about this already, so I will be succinct:
SEO is one particular niche where it’s not always easy to include relevant images, I used a screen shot above, but otherwise I don’t necessarily like to include images that add no value.
What I do love to do is use bold, italics, bullets and centering liberally to emphasize important points and to add lots of white space.
Post length is often debated and I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer, although longer content tends to rank better, but don’t use that as an excuse to ramble; because you also need to keep your audience interested.
Be thorough, be concise and let your content be as long or short as it needs to be
The most important point that I found in my research (and wholeheartedly agree with) is that you need to understand searcher intent:
If someone searches the topic you are writing about, what do they want?
Your content needs to answer the question that they are asking (perhaps implicitly), otherwise it is not of any value to the user and therefore does not deserve to rank for that phrase.
It may be helpful to consider a few search phrases that your post could potentially rank for (or that you would want it to rank for) and ask yourself whether it serves that search query well.
Once you have considered the person doing the search, you can target your tone and writing style to speak to that person. Always write as if you were writing for that particular user and not for a crowd of faces.
A Thing To Note:
It may be that you marketing strategy doesn’t include SEO (say if you’re relying on Twitter or email to get traffic) but in reality the above exercise is about making sure that your post serves the reader’s needs, not Google’s – if your content “deserves to rank” it probably “deserves to be shared” too.
Step 4: Marketing your post
You’ve heard the term content marketing no doubt. All of the above was content, but the final step is marketing it. If you follow steps 1 to 3 then your content will (hopefully) deserve to rank for some meaningful queries, but if your post is hidden somewhere obscure then it might never happen.
How your market your post will depend on your assets and the context:
If you have the opportunity to post your post on a popular blog then you may not need to worry too much about marketing it.
Whereas if you have a small blog with no following,
marketing your post may take more effort than actually writing it.
Fortunately, marketing great content should be relatively easy. I would recommend starting with guest posting on relevant blogs. Bloggers should be happy to let you link to your post because it is worth linking to.
Ask any bloggers that you guest post for whether they would mind Tweeting about your blog post. You might be surprised by how willing they are to promote a worthwhile post.
Using your own social media is a good idea too, although it depends on how much of a following you have. If you have any friends in your niche you might want to ask them to help you out…
If you don’t have any friends in your niche then do some networking!
So There You Have It!
Hopefully this post has given you a few ideas about how to create better content for yourself. Remember that the process is actually fairly simple, but it takes a little bit of thought:
- Be generating content ideas all the time, keep your mind open
- Start with an idea and see what’s already out there
- Figure out how to improve upon what’s already been written
- Plan your content and write it in a style for your audience
- Think about how you will get traffic to your post
Of course the one thing I haven’t mentioned is adding a call to action.
So here’s mine:
- What do you think I have missed?
- What are the essential steps that you take to write great content?
