Written content that gets meaningful results and relevant content that enhances your marketing is rarely an accident. While you've often heard the catchphrase "content is king" in conversations about online marketing, it's not entirely true. At best, it's only a half-truth, merely pointing you in the right direction, but making it easy for you to get lost along the way.
Content is king only if it meets certain conditions and, in this article, we will explore the conditions that writers have to meet in order to fashion content that delivers the goods. The king is not yet dead and doesn't need to be resurrected, but you may have to revive him before he can rise to the throne.
Publish in the Right Places
The right places are the ones that deliver the most traffic. For instance, when you first launch your blog, it won't be as relevant to your business success as heavily trafficked platforms like Medium, a publishing/blogging platform capitalized by The Chernin Group (TCG).
You should not only write quickly and well for your blog but also publish articles for Medium publications and write guest posts for authority sites-because these external links will drive traffic back to your website.
Write Quickly and Well
It's not only important for your business growth to write content, but to write content quickly and to write it well. Content has to be written quickly because you need plenty of interesting articles to engage your readers and plenty of search engine optimized keywords to tempt search engine crawlers.
Speed also expedites the volume of content you can generate for diverse publications, such as content for your website, for your blog, for your Ezine, for your guest posts. But content has to be more than a sequence of simple sentences articulating some bland theme. You have to be interesting, perhaps even fascinating, weaving stories and facts and humor, entertaining as you educate.
Content also has to be well written because you want to excite your readers, whet their appetite for more, stir their curiosity, make them look forward to what you have to say next when you pen your next blog post, email, or e-book.
Additionally, quality content drives up your search engine ranking. As traffic to your website increases, authoritative and relevant content, like cream, rises to the top. Only the best content designed to deliver a juicy keyword makes it to the top rankings of the search engine results page.
Charm Your Audience
The best way to hook readers is to write about things they are interested in reading. The more you can give your target audience helpful, relevant, thought-provoking content, the more likely they are to want to know more about you, follow you, and buy your stuff.
Unless you understand your audience, they won't understand you. Naturally, you will have to do plenty of research to build a customer avatar, and the accuracy of your vision about your ideal reader will improve over time as you get to know your audience better.
Offer Remarkable Value
Add value by informing people about how to do things, add value by educating them on the latest science-based evidence, and add value by answering burning questions.
Sometimes you can add value by sharing a personal experience, pouring your heart out about your failures and mishaps--in short, taking the risk of being vulnerable if it's in service of illustrating a personal life lesson that will improve their own dire situation.
Sometimes you can add value by trying to reveal little known trade secrets, tips on how to win in business you picked up at board meetings with elite marketers and crackerjack copywriters, and tricks on how to win in life you picked up from mysterious strangers during your travels.
And sometimes you can add value by just being yourself, nerdy, smart, snarky, silly, and playful, and, occasionally, witty and disarmingly genuine.
In summary, content is king if it is well-written, easily available, and focused on the needs, wants, desires, and interests of your target audience.
