3 Rules For Writing Stronger Online Content

The Internet is full of words, many of which convince the everyday user to buy something, visit a website, or follow a Facebook page. But what makes some of these words better than others?

Content marketing, or the combined art of online writing for businesses and social media management, is a good place to start. Experts who work in this field know that writing 10,000 awesome words is just as effective as publishing a million boring words. To give you an idea of how marketers do this, I’ve whittled it down to three rules or guidelines for writers to keep in mind.

1. Read Better Content

The best advice I can give you is to read awesome content. The study of online marketing is always changing, too, and it’s important to see how companies with strong marketing strategies and thought-leaders are responding to new trends.

Also, by reading other content you will generate ideas for your own blogs, web pages and social media newsfeeds. Or, at least, learn what you shouldn’t do while writing content.

2. Time & Routine

Writing is hard. Where do we start? What words come after the others? It’s like having a non-verbal conversation with people you’ve never met, especially when you start using high-end content to market your business.

It’s important to give content the time it deserves. This means investing at least an hour or two for blog posts and editing, laying out social media postings for the week or rewriting a press release. It’s hard to put an exact number on “how long it should take to write something,” especially since everyone has their own pace and is writing different things.

3. New Perspectives

The thing about writing content for businesses is that readers know that the content is some form of marketing. This immediately puts them on guard, but doesn’t have to. As an online content marketing specialist, I’ve learned to write conversationally with my audiences, even if I don’t know exactly who that audience is. The “online user” is a broad term, too, but what it really boils down to is a writer’s ability to write generally about specific information.

One way to do this is to take a step back and ask yourself, “OK. What do prospective customers/clients need to know about my industry, my products, and my services?” This is the question-answer approach, or when you focus on answering questions customers might not even know they have. In doing so, you are writing from the perspective of some sort of expert rather than a robotic, corporate-like marketing voice.

3 Rules For Writing Stronger Online Content