How to Add Value to Your Content and Increase Readability
Gone are the days when content writing could be done with your eyes closed. It has become a very serious business, with significant consequences for a brand’s online presence and success.
Even the biggest brands now rely on content writing and content marketing to get their message across. Today, 90% of brands are using content marketing – and that may well be because content marketing costs about 62% less and generates about three times as many leads compared to conventional marketing.
Content marketing success, however, does not come easy at all. Among the multitudes of content being published online every minute, you need to make sure your content writing has that certain “X factor” that will draw readers in and bring the results you need. Let’s start with these writing tips to add value to your content and make it more readable and successful:
- Be Innovative
- Get the Headings Right
- Do Not Underestimate the Power of Visuals
- Strive to Become a Better Writer Every Day
1/ Be Innovative
The importance of being inventive and bringing novelty to your content writing cannot be stressed enough. It is one of the most important attributes of any great content piece.
According to Buffers, the best way to achieve this is to work with new types and styles of writing and be fearless in your experimentation. Try adding your own personal stories or interesting anecdotes from someone else’s life. Make references to fictional works where possible. Add puns or listicles to make things exciting and entertaining for the readers. Always try to create something new and unique. The challenge to stay original and novel is not easy – but well worth the effort.
2/ Get the Headings Right
Your title is the first thing people see when they click on your content. Always ensure the best titles for your work, no matter what. Make your titles short yet descriptive. A Copyblogger article states that an estimated 8 out of 10 people will read your title, but just 2 out of those 10 will go on to read the article itself. With odds like these, it is essential to make your heading as powerful as possible. Here are some useful online tools to assist you in the task of headline generation:
- Blogabout by Impact – Enter your keywords in pre-structured blog headlines and get some great headline ideas.
- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – Get your headline rated for common and uncommon words, power and emotion.
- Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer – Enter your headline and find out how it scores for emotional impact.
3/ Do Not Underestimate the Power of Visuals
Finding the right image for your post can be challenging, but it is a must. The use of graphs, charts, and other images can distinguish a good piece from a truly engaging and enticing one.
Apart from adding visual interest, images help break up the content into sections, which actually makes it easier for the reader to scan and digest. It is effortless for a professional designer to add images to their works. However, for writers who don’t necessarily have design experience, here are some useful tools to make the task easier:
- Piktochart – Online software for easy creation of infographics and other design elements.
- Canva – Popular site where you can design all kinds of graphic elements via drag-and-drop interface.
- Evernote Web Clipper – Create a virtual inspiration notebook by saving design elements you see around on the web. Use these ideas to build your own designs.
Check out some great tools for video creation too.
4/ Strive to Become a Better Writer Every Day
In the world of content writing, a good writer is not necessarily the one with a degree in English. A good content writer doesn’t have to know the thesaurus by heart. A good writer is the one who can keep readers engaged and interested.
When you write from the readers’ perspective, you automatically generate worthwhile content. Therefore, the first rule of content writing must be to know and understand your audience
Reread every line of your content thoroughly. Give consideration to each word. Spend time on your writing. Not even the most prolific writer can whip up a great piece in ten minutes. Remember that customers love to read quality content. In fact, 95% of all B2B customers consider content as a major factor when evaluating the offerings of a company. Read other writers’ works, particularly those in your industry, to get inspiration and ideas for styles and content.
Apart from reading, here are some tools to enhance your piece and learn to be a better writer in the future:
- Highlight weak spots in your writing with tools like Hemingway. This editing app categorizes your mistakes while also correcting them. It’s a great way to learn from your mistakes during the writing process.
- Grammarly is another useful online grammar detection tool for every content writer. All you need to do is to create a free account and paste your text in the Grammarly editor. The tool not only shows you the mistakes but also provides possible corrections.
A blog will only generate more traffic if it contains content that is smart. That means high quality, research-based, reader oriented, and emotive. What’s more, stay away from superlatives and other writing gimmicks, and stick to good, old-fashioned relevance and readability. That’s the very best way to becoming a better writer.
