Introduction
Website content writing is a basic requirement for businesses to thrive online.
Owing to rapid technological advancements, the world has become a global village! Consequently, this keeps influencing the way the macro and micro economy operates.
However, this global phenomenon comes with its upsides and downsides. One key aspect of man’s life that technology keeps transforming is telecommunication.
The internet—man’s greatest invention in the late 20th century—has made the world a global village.
The benefit of this is that as an internet user, you have access to almost anything regardless of your geographical position.
The internet is essential for success in the global economy as virtually all market participants spend the better part of their time online.
Suffice to say, people come to the internet for various reasons.
This has been made possible due to the human desire of having an identity and social interaction. Therefore, internet users frequent social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snap chat, YouTube, etc., to keep in touch with the latest trends and people.
As a business person, understanding your prospects and market trends is an important arsenal.
This brings in the subject of content marketing. Best practices of business dictate that you should put out information about your products and services where your target audience can easily interact with them.
Since your prospects spend a significant amount of time on the internet, what better medium than the internet do you need for your marketing?
Also, increasing your online presence through the internet will see you register an increase in your return on investment.
The secret to effectively passing the word out is to remain as useful and helpful in your marketing. Your prospects should see that you mind their welfare—health, wealth, relationships—and not just after their money.
One sure way of using globalization for your advantage is to have a website. Having a professional website will put your business on the global radar, which means anybody with internet access can interact with you and what you offer.
Besides, adopting website content writing will see that you engage your prospects with top-notch, compelling, and useful content that adds value to their lives.
Simply put, content writing for the website will enable you to sell an experience to your prospects.
Before you can provide useful content that your readers will love, you need to understand what website content writing entails.
Also, you need to know how to create compelling content that meets your readers’ search intent at all times.
In this article, you will discover all you need to know about website content writing and how to best use this tool for creating powerful content for marketing your business.
So, let’s get started!
What is Website Content Writing and Why Does Your Business Need it?
Website content writing is the art of creating useful content for your website. Also, content is the engine that steers great businesses that have an online presence.
This is to say, without content, your business is as good as dead.
Any business that is unable to make sales has slim chances of making it in the long run. An in-depth study of such business reveals that they don’t give website content marketing significance.
Your desire to have increased readership, traffic, social shares, conversions, and sales is directly dependent on producing useful content from time to time.
Since content is the currency of the web, creating top-notch and engaging website content is a prerequisite for your business success.
There are many ways of marketing your business and website content happens to be one of them. Marketing helps you to put to the public the image of your business.
Therefore, this means the imageability of your business is dependent on the type of content you produce.
Great content will position your brand as an authority in your niche. Besides, your prospects will relate more with content that directly responds to their needs.
As they come to the internet to make their searches, they need content that can answer their questions within a spur of the moment.
On the flipside, mediocre or lack of content display your business as a joke. Poor quality content will naturally make your readers dislike your website.
The consequence is that you will lose on organic traffic that is driven to your website. In the end, your sales will drastically plummet.
In website content marketing, there are three types of traffic. These include; owned traffic, earned traffic and paid traffic.
Having an up-to-date blog or simply writing powerful articles on your website will enable you to have owned traffic.
Great content is unavoidable, and when you trade a freebie such as an e-book or e-guide with the exchange of your prospects’ email address, they’ll feel compelled to offer their contact details.
This is a creative way of building your list of prospects. However, the catch is in the quality of your content.
Surely, nobody wants to trade their personal information with crappy content. If you need owned traffic, creating quality content regularly—at least once a month—is a must-do.
When you’re active on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, you’ll have followers and/or friends that associate with your values and what you offer.
The kind of traffic that comes from such platforms is known as earned traffic. Besides, linking your business website and your social media platforms will lead your earned traffic to your website.
While on your website, you can convert them to make awesome sales.
Therefore, when you consistently build your earned traffic, you stand a chance of converting them into owned traffic. The other type of online traffic is paid traffic.
When you rely on ads either on search engines or Facebook to catch the attention of your prospects, you’re considered to be driving paid traffic to your website.
Whereas this strategy can be effective, it requires that you have a budget for these ads. Moreover, search engine users tend to avoid ads on the first page.
What they prefer is organic content. Since organic traffic is what your business needs for sustainability, you should concentrate more on owned traffic.
Related: Would you love to learn how to improve lead acquisition and sales? Then check out this cool blog post Why Your Marketing Approach Is Not Yielding Results
What Are the Types of Website Content?
Website content can be divided into two main types, i.e., informational and commercial posts. Informational posts—also known as educational—serve the primary purpose of keeping your prospects informed with useful and helpful content.
Writing articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and press releases are some of the examples of informational posts. They provide information in the form of expert tips or guidelines to your prospects.
Offering information on how to operate a machine or how to stay safe from danger helps you to build rapport with your audience.
On the other hand, commercial content serves the purpose of selling a product or any other item to your prospects. This type of content is more persuasive than the former, with several calls to action spread throughout the content.
Commercial posts are kind of complex as you have to persuade your readers to take specific action at the end of the read.
Taking the path of being useful and helpful is what will make you convert your readers. You need to build credibility by assuring your readers that you’re not just after selling them an item but after adding value to their lives.
That’s why providing expert tips to your sales copy comes in handy.
Some examples of commercial posts include;
- Homepage content,
- Service area content,
- Product description content,
- Product review content,
- Email sequences,
- Long-form sales letters,
- Landing pages,
- Ads copy etc.
This style of website content writing is popularly known as copywriting. For increased sales and return on investment, your website needs content that can convert your traffic into customers.
You are already aware that for success in your business, quality content is a necessity. However, creating compelling content can sometimes be a daunting task.
You need to acquire the necessary skills to create content that your readers will love.
The good news is that you can still hire a professional website content writer to help you with creating content for your website.
The benefit of outsourcing is that you’ll be able to concentrate on other aspects of your business that needs urgent and serious attention.
Below, you will find information on what successful website content writing entails. Moreover, you need this knowledge to be an authoritative writer for your business.
If you choose to hire a website content writer, then you want to make sure they possess the following skills.
Top 11 Essential Website Content Writing Skills That A Successful Website Content Writer Must Have
A successful and knowledgeable content writer should have the following key skills.
Keep reading to find them out!
1. Versatility and Adaptability
As mentioned previously, there exists an array of content types. Moreover, each type of content has a specific purpose and audience for which it is written.
The first thing you want to consider before taking on a writing project is to understand the purpose and your target audience.
The reason for this is that each content type demands a unique style and tone while writing. For example, when writing an informational post like an article, you should stick to making the content as helpful and useful as possible.
You need to avoid being sales pitchy when writing this type of content.
On the flip side, when writing a commercial post, the purpose is to have conversions that can lead to great sales.
For this reason, you should strive to make the content useful to the reader while spreading several calls to action which leads your reader to take a specific action.
As a successful website content writer, you need to be versatile, understand the type of content, and quickly adapt to the requirements of the content.
On top of it, you need to bear in mind the style and tone of writing.
2. SEO Knowledge
Writing awesome content that your readers cannot access can be discouraging. Ideally, you want to write top-notch content that your readers can easily access on the internet.
For this reason, you need to fully optimize your content for search engines.
When your prospects come online, they use search engines to look for answers to their queries. When your content is fully search engine optimized, you will be able to satisfy search intent.
The benefit of this is that your readers will easily find your content by the click of a button.
Moreover, they will stay on your website for a longer time. In the end, you can lead them to take specific actions like signing up for your newsletters.
So, how do you ensure your content is search engine compliant? Below are some valuable tips;
- Knowledge of on-page SEO,
- Knowledge of off-page SEO,
- Use long tail and less competitive Keywords,
- Know how to use the main SEO tools such as keyword tools,
- Carefully place keywords within the content, i.e. Headlines, sub-headlines, introductions, body text, and conclusion,
- Link to other sites with awesome content,
- Link content within your website.
As an experienced writer, having SEO knowledge should form part of your writing arsenal.
3. Meticulous Researcher
Being a successful writer, you need to come out as an authority in your space. The best way to achieve this is by providing useful and compelling content that your readers fall in love with.
Getting to this point requires hard work.
You want to avoid providing shallow information and the best way of achieving this goal is to carry in-depth research before you start writing.
Having a minimum of three reference points should form your baseline. Depending on the nature and complexity of the content, you can have up to 20 resources where you draw ideas from.
There are tons of benefits from following this approach.
- For one, you come out as an authority in your niche,
- Secondly, you create content that has lots of value,
- Lastly, you increase your trustworthiness and credibility.
Being a meticulous researcher will make you stand out as a successful website content writer. Also, you need to keep up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and Google algorithms.
4. Operating With a Work Plan
As the adage goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. Being a serious writer, you need to have a clear work plan that you are following. Detailing your tasks in a journal should come in handy.
A clear work plan will help you to remain organized with your work thereby increasing your productivity.
Upon getting the assignment, you need to have a clear brief that contains the project instructions. Knowing what is expected of you, you’ll need to follow your calendar, write good ass content while bearing in mind the deadlines.
You want to avoid delays and late submissions—if you’re reporting to another person—because they end up costing you and the business.
5. Maintaining Focus
You want to avoid stuff that takes your concentration away. An average day is full of things that may distract you from your scheduled daily goals.
If you’re on social media like Facebook or Twitter, you want to make sure you’re logged off as incoming messages may make your mind wander away.
Your ability to remain on focus will influence your ability to produce quality content. While researching online, you should be careful to ensure you only focus on the sites that provide you with relevant information that is related to what you’re writing.
To effectively stay on focus, you must have a clear work plan. Above all, you need to remain disciplined as you do your work.
6. Good Communication Skills
Good writing is a product of several factors at play. The most important of them is brief with instructions.
If you’re outsourcing work to a writer, you want to make sure your instructions and expectations are clear.
On the flipside, upon receiving your brief, the writer should maintain clear communication lines with you.
In the case of an area that needs clarification, they should contact you as soon as possible. Doing this is important as it will prevent many unnecessary revisions.
Also, the writer should update you regularly based on the agreement you have with them. The update can be a daily, or weekly basis depending on the duration of the project.
Most importantly, the writer should understand your time zone so that they only communicate with you when it’s convenient for you.
This tip is also applicable to you as the project owner. You should endeavor to contact the writer at the right time when he/she is in a position to reply.
Note that, understanding your time zones, if you’re in different time zones, is important for effective communication.
7. Proofreading, Editing, and Re-writing
Great writing involves researching, writing your content outline, and writing the first draft. The first draft is not always top-notch.
Therefore, you should proofread the content to ensure it is the best quality. Some of the benefits of proofreading and editing include;
- Assessment of sentence structure,
- Scanning of fluff and filler words in content,
- Evaluation of paragraph length,
- Analysis of readability,
- Grammar check and other errors like typos.
Upon discovering where your content needs adjustment, you respond appropriately. For example, you can remove filler words, rewrite super long sentences or you restructure your paragraphs to make them more readable.
As you can see, great content requires hard work.
Because of that, you need a writer or should be the writer who understands this process and what it takes to produce quality website content.
8. Deliver Pure Gold Content
Your readers will only be attracted to high-quality content. As a successful website content writer, you need to ensure that your content is irresistible by satisfying your readers’ intent while searching for information online.
Conducting in-depth research, properly formatting your content, avoiding grammatical errors and writing engaging content will see to it that your readers fall in love with the content.
Also, you want to only focus on niches or topics that you can handle. While outsourcing work, make sure that the writer is an authority in your niche.
It can be disappointing to hire a writer who is a Jack of all trades but a master of none. Moreover, operating on a clear plan and content strategy will help you produce high-quality content.
In the strategy, you should break down your content needs into strategic areas.
Next, you want to focus on these specific areas at a time as this will help you to write in-depth and well-researched articles. When hiring a website content writer, you need to ascertain that they possess this skill. You should never compromise on quality.
9. Awesome Presentation Skills
Compelling website content that is also reader-friendly has the right formatting of paragraphs, sentences, headlines, sub-headlines, and general body text.
To enhance readability, you should have more white spaces in your write-up.
Therefore, you want to have short paragraphs of 2-3 sentences, and short sentences of a maximum of 20 words. Also, you should use bullets when listing items in your write-up.
However, the bullets should never cover more than three-quarters of the write-up.
To improve your presentation skills, you can add some images, graphs, and videos to the write-up. Your readers will fall in love more with visual content through images than words.
Research shows that content with images and other graphics tend to convert 6X more than the ones without.
As you outsource your writing tasks, check to ensure the writer possesses great presentation skills.
10. Ability to Come Up With Content Ideas
An essential skill of a successful website content writer is the ability to come up with great content ideas. Having awesome content ideas will prompt you to write high-quality content.
This is true as the omelet can only be as good as the eggs making it!
Great content ideas have the potential to capture the reader’s attention, increase readership, increase viewership, increase conversion and sales.
Moreover, this is the kind of content that your readers find helpful and useful as it answers their questions.
The good news is that when your readers find the content relevant and impressive, they will share it. Coming up with content ideas is one single most important skill that a website content writer needs to have.
Make sure you possess this skill for the success of your business online.
However, if you have to outsource for a writer, check that they are knowledgeable in coming up with awesome content ideas. Also, you need continued research to understand your target audience and what they love.
11. Frequently Updates Content
Trends keep changing and your readers’ interests and needs also change as occasionally. Therefore, how do you remain relevant in terms of the content you create for your audience? This is a critical area that you need to pay close attention to.
The moment your content becomes irrelevant to your readers, you’ll have decreased readership and traffic. Since less traffic implies little to no conversion and sales, it is in your interest to prevent this.
For this reason, you want to keep on updating the content on your website to match up your target audiences’ interests.
Continuously updating the content will also help your website to rank top on search engines. This is because search engines—especially google—recognizes fresh content and rewards it with a high rank.
Fresh content also sends the signal to Google algorithms that you’re an authority in your niche.
When seeking for a website content writer, you should check their content rewriting skills as this will be vital when the need to update website content arises.
Final Thoughts
The success of your business requires effort from your end. One method of getting leads is through content marketing.
Taking your business to the market place—the internet—is what you need to do in this new decade. Thumbs up if your business is already online.
However, if you’re yet to, you need to hasten your steps and create a professional website. Next, you need to create high-quality content that is compelling and your readers love.
Most importantly, you want to create content that is relevant and matches your potential customers’ search intent.
Nevertheless, getting top-notch website content can be challenging for you as a business person with tons of responsibilities.
On the contrary, you’ll still need to keep your readers and prospective readers captivated with quality content.
It’s for this reason that you can hire an expert website content writer to handle your website content writing needs. If you desire to have increased return on investment, then you need to embrace content marketing.
Start creating quality content today because your business’ success depends on this!
