How to Write Articles That Are Beneficial to Your Business
When it comes to promoting your business, a solid content creation and content management strategy is an effective marketing tool. Whether you plan to do this yourself or hire article writing services, here are some things that will generate results you want to see.
Who Is Your Audience?
It's safe to assume that if you have a business, you know who your target market is. But in order to write articles that are beneficial to your business, you need to go deeper than target demographics.
For the time being, think of your audience as a single individual. You need to figure out what makes them tick. What are their likes, their dislikes, and what draws them to what you're selling? A great content marketing strategy will take into account all possible aspects of your audience. This includes everything that brings them joy to the things that cause them pain.
Start jotting everything down. You are essentially humanizing your target audience, identifying them beyond numbers. This is what will help set the tone for your articles. Remember, there's no such thing as too much information when it comes to dissecting your audience.
Find the Right Keywords
If you've noticed, determining your target audience may have led you to somewhat of a mixed bag of facts and assumptions. This step is where you sift between the two and figure out ground realities. This is a crucial step and is something that needs attention before you start writing your article.
The good news is that there are online tools you can use to enter the keywords and phrases you've dug up in the previous exercise.
Both these tools among many others are simple enough to use. All you have to do is punch in the keywords you need to verify, and these tools will display a list of specific keywords according to their volume and usage. Do this for all your keywords and make a note of the more popular ones to incorporate into your article.
Optimize Titles for SEO
Writing an article can sometimes make you lose focus regarding its headline or title. Repeat the keyword exercise to help you come up with one.
Fair warning: It can be tempting to sprinkle keywords throughout your article. Don't give in to this because keyword stuffing impacts the natural flow of your piece and render all your hard work useless.
Analyze Existing Articles
This is what good content writers and article writing services do. When we talk about evaluating existing content, it is tied to what we discussed under identifying your audience. By doing so, you have uncovered pertinent data and keywords.
Simply use those keywords and see what your search engine regurgitates. Read through the top 5 results, and you should have a fair idea as to the kind of content that is already out there. You may find the content helpful or think it to be absolute trash. Either way, you walk away with the ability to make informed guesses about what will work and what won't.
Now that you have a quality threshold in mind, all you have to do is focus on making sure your articles are better.
Make an Outline
You can check all the boxes when it comes to researching, but all that will amount to nothing if your article lacks structure.
Article writing services will have you know that content is king because two things make it so; research and structure. Note down what the introduction will be as well as the headings of the ensuing paragraphs. This will help keep you focused and on track.
Also, make sure to use proper formatting for titles, subtitles, headings, and subheadings. It helps break up the content into shorter snippets and is less overwhelming to read.
Don't Dabble in Self-Promotion
We can't discourage this enough. It's the content equivalent of that one guy at a party who can't stop talking about himself. You don't like him, do you? Neither do we...nor does anyone else, for that matter.
If, however, you are that guy at a party, you're probably confused as to why self-promotion is not a good idea. For one thing, it's counterproductive. It can even put people off. Just for a moment, think like a customer. If you read an article that goes on and on talking about why your business is the best, what are you really delivering to your (existing or potential) customer? What are they getting out of it? Where's the value?
When you cater to your audience's interests instead of simply promoting your business, you are giving your audience what they need. By doing so, you're basically telling them you value their time, interest and opinion.
Tell a Story
Nobody likes a clinical approach to writing. Articles written only to relay information are monotonous and capable of boring readers to tears. Be more imaginative in your writing and reel your audience in through a story.
Depending on the topic, you can even write articles in a conversational tone with fun and relatable colloquialisms thrown in. The idea is to address your audience as if you're having a conversation.
Don't forget though that it's all about balance. Prevent yourself from going overboard with the casual tone. No pressure, but this can take a fair bit of conditioning. A good way to go about this is by picturing yourself talking to or presenting to your audience. You will notice the steady stream of thoughts just flowing naturally.
Add Visuals
Visuals are to articles what cherries are to sundaes. Adding images, infographics, charts, video snippets, gifs, etc. can enrich the reading experience and also do well to boost SEO. Just remember to add associated keywords using alt tags.
Conclusion
There you have it; the daunting task of writing quality articles broken down in a few easy steps. You have no excuses anymore; go, write up a storm!
This guest post was written by Dave Brown, a marketer with a career spanning 25 years. His expertise in content management has led him to train and groom several article writers to date. He runs on words and coffee, and has no plans of stopping anytime soon.
