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If you’re new to creating content, let’s start by understanding the what, where, why, and how of content writing. This will give you a solid starting point for creating amazing content your dream clients will love.
Let’s get started!
What is content writing?
Content writing is everywhere we look, and if you’re online, you consume it all the time without even realizing it. Those captions on Instagram posts, the text on those pins, the blog posts you read? They’re all forms of content writing.
Simply put, content writing is any written content you see online. This includes text like:
Blogs
Emails
Social media captions
Articles
Press Releases
Podcast scripts
YouTube scripts
Why should you create written content?
When it comes to your business, strong writing helps your visitors get to know your brand. It’s a way of showing that you’re not just selling a product or a service, you’re solving a problem, bringing joy, and delivering value to your customers — even if they don’t buy from you at the moment.
Is content writing worth the time and investment?
The short answer is yes! If you want a thriving online presence, strong content writing is the place to start — it helps your market your brand, connect with your audience, and show up on search engines like Google.
Content writing can help you organically (i.e. no paid campaigns) capture the attention of your ideal customers. This will help you generate sales, and optimize your website for more traffic in the long term.
A little investment in this area can help your website rank when it’s optimized for long-term organic search engine results and growth. This investment can be in the form of your own time, in an in-house writer, or outsourcing to a freelance writer.
Content writing tips & best practices:
When writing content for your business, there are a few best practices to keep in mind. These will help you reach your target audience and create impactful content.
Best practices you should keep in mind:
Know your audience
Having an idea of who your audience is, their age, their likes, and dislikes, their problems and challenges, and their hopes and dreams help you speak to them. You want to take the time to get to know the person you’re talking to because if you’re trying to talk to everyone you’ll end up talking to no one.
Beyond their likes and dislikes, ask yourself these questions about your audience:
Why is your product or service relevant to them?
What questions would they have about it?
What problem are you helping them with or feeling are you helping them achieve?
Answering these will help you determine what you’re writing about and help you speak with your audience in a way that’s valuable to them.
Have a purpose
Don’t just write so you have content, have a broader goal in mind. This helps you offer value to your audience and fosters a relationship between you and your ideal client.
Decide which type of content is relevant for your brand
With so many different content platforms out there it can be hard to figure out where you belong. Where should you be creating content, and where should you be talking to your audience?
Take a look at your audience's demographics and at the demographics of different platforms. See where there is overlap, and that’s likely where you want your written content to be.
Have a baby boomer or gen y audience? You might want to hop onto Facebook. Have a gen x audience? TikTok might be the right place for you.
Odds are you’ll be on a few different platforms, but as a basic rule of thumb you’ll want to have:
A website
An email marketing platform (like MailChimp or FloDesk)
A long-form content platform (like YouTube, a Podcast, or a blog)
At least one short-form content platform (like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or TikTok)
Follow a style guide
Style guides help you be consistent in your writing. This helps you establish trust and authority in your niche. You can create a unique style guide for your brand, or use an existing one (like the CP Style Guide).
Know your brand voice
Brand voice is essentially your brand's personality. Think about how you want your audience to feel when reading your content and be consistent in showing up in this way.
Be clear and concise: less is more
If you can say something simply, do it. When your message is easy to read, it’s more likely to be received and have the impact you want.
Use plenty of white space
Content writing isn’t just about filling the page, in fact, it's actually better if it doesn’t. Using lots of white space around text and information makes your content easier to read and skim.
You can increase white space in your writing with elements like lists, bullet points, pull quotes, and regular text breaks.
Edit your writing
Make sure your writing makes sense and is grammatically correct by making sure you take the time to edit it. Consider using tools to help you edit your work. Grammarly is one of my favourites editing tools, and it’s free to use.
Another great way to edit your work is to read it out loud or use a screen reader. Doing this helps you catch things you might miss while reading by offering a different perspective.
Tools to help you get started with content writing
As someone who has been creating content for more than three years now, these are some of the tools I’ve come to rely on to make content writing easier and faster:
Answer The Public – this helps you identify topics to create content about
Co-Schedule – this helps you write an attention-grabbing title for your content
Grammarly – this helps you edit your writing to be grammatically correct and clear
Hemmingway App – this helps you simplify your writing
Start creating your content
With these best practices in mind, go ahead and start writing content for your brand — future-you will be so grateful you did!
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