One of the great challenges that business owners face when writing for marketing efforts is coming up with content that engages their readers and encourages a conversion and a return visit. Tall order, right? Yes, but by working with three basic tenets, you can make your job easier.
Write for a specific audience
The old saying goes that by trying to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one. Write your content for a specific group that has a common interest. How do you determine your target group’s interest? There are several ways but by using a little creativity, you can create a persona or model of the target group’s most representative person. This is an imaginary person or persons that embody the interests of the target group. It helps to hash out what this person is like in a group if possible as it gives your efforts the benefit of a wider perspective. Once you flesh out this persona, write directly to them, try to be as helpful as possible and speaking in a voice that they would be sympathetic to.
Choose a specific subject
Armed with the knowledge gleaned by your persona development, now you can focus on creating content that is directly helpful to that group. The more specific the subject, the easier it will be to write high-quality, unique content. Remember that copy-pasting text from other articles is a no-no and can, at the very least, get you pushed down the search engine results. At worst, it can get pages and even entire sites deindexed by the search engines. So write well. You can compare your efforts to what other people are writing to determine whether or not you are heading in the right direction. If you feel unconfident about your efforts, ask someone to write for you that can. You won’t regret it.
Craft your page title and URL carefully
Many people forget that the page title and URL are two of the most important on-page factors for getting a page ranking well for local searches. Most online ecommerce or blogging platforms allow you to specify both. Take advantage of this feature. If possible, do some keyword research before you start to see what phrases most closely follow your audience’s intentions and interests. Pay close attention to search volume. That is the estimated number of times per month that people are searching for that phrase in the search engines. There are several places on the net you can get this information including Googles AdWords tool. Once you find a good phrase, see if you can naturally fit it into the URL and the page title. Have a look at this post for an example.
Your best teacher is experience and it pays big dividends to write as often as you can. Keep your readers in mind in the process and try to make that personal connection.working with three basic tenets, you can make your job easier.