There are many different ways to increase the effectiveness of your content writing and encourage more interaction. Blogs, social media, and websites all require different approaches, since their used for different goals. Your first step toward creating interesting content and increasing the likelihood of interaction from your audience starts by figuring out what you want.
Are you interested in leads or brand recognition? Receiving reviews or making sales? Climbing search engine rankings or creating a loyal customer base? All of the above? Then make sure you select the correct approach. Technically, if you’re creative, any of the following could be used for any of the aforementioned goals. However, here’s how they’re most frequently used.
Website content is the static content available on your website, both on your homepage and your internal pages. It is often used to create brief marketing copy to give users a bite-sized synopsis of what your business does, aids in local SEO services, and give calls to action.
Blog content can be purely informative or highly creative. If you want to build a loyal audience, you’ll want to approach with innovation and write about topics that draw responses. If your goal is to further your website’s relevance to search engines, then creating interesting content isn’t going to be as important as creating informative, relevant content. If you can combine the two, you’re golden.
Social media content has become incredibly multi-faceted. It can be used to increase your company’s weight on search engines, but it can also be used to build brand recognition, practice customer support, or weigh audience sentiment. It’s shorter, punchier, and designed for fast and easy consumption. Brevity is key.
Approaching your content takes slightly more skill than throwing some keywords into a paragraph and throwing it up on your website. It’s always best to work with a professional copywriter, particularly one who’s up to date on the most recent SEO requirements for the major search engines. You have to be willing to really sit down and decide what, exactly, you want your content to get people to do, and then put a plan in place to make it happen. Magic works in storybooks, but not in marketing.
A few more tips to live by:
If you want readers, you have to be readable. This sounds like complete non-advice, we know, but extrapolate a little. Research other blogs and social media in your industry to see what they’re doing that’s working… or not. If you’re not getting bites, change course. When people respond, take note of how and why.
Succinct delivery defeats verbose posturing… within reason. This tip comes with a caveat: sometimes it’s okay to be a little long-winded. Google’s getting smarter, which means it can figure out when you’re just repeating the same content with different keywords. Organic content – content that reads naturally rather than structured – is gaining prominence. For marketing purposes, make your point quickly and cleverly. For relevance and gaining authority, learn to write good, organic content. If you want to be read, either write short or write quality.
Ask for what you want. Don’t be afraid to directly ask people to share your content. Make sharing easy by adding share buttons. Tell people what you want them to do. Don’t be pushy, but do be direct.
Stephanie Wargin is the Social Media Strategist at Zenergy Works, a web design and SEO company located in Santa Rosa, California. Her friends like to brush her hair into her eyes whenever she talks about Facebook.