Content Writing
How to Write Effective Content - Top 10 Tips for Bloggers
Content writing, or content is one of the key elements of a website. An engaging content helps your business to build a long-term relationship and trust with your prospective audience. The content may be text content, visual content, audio, or video content.
Among the text content, blogging is an important medium that has the potential to drive visitors to your website.
Here we are discussing 10 tips for content writers to create engaging and effective content.
1. Keep the target audience in mind
The content writers are not supposed to write contents they are interested in and drive people to what they wrote. Instead, write content that their prospective customers are interested in, readers will come in automatically. This is how “Generating Organic Traffic” to your website.
2. Be Short and Sweet
Content writing for the web should be short, clear, and to the point. Nobody has the time to read out all the linguistic jargon, so remove the words, explanations that add no value to the actual intent of the content.
3. Format your content scannable and skimmable
People’s engagement with the content highly depends on the way it is presented. If they don’t recognize it as useful, relevant content, they often move on. So it should be easy for the readers to skim or scan the content before actually reading it. Formatting like headers, links, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, quotes, etc will improve the readability of your content.
4. Limit paragraph lengths
It is always better to write your idea in some small paragraphs instead of writing the whole in a single paragraph. It seems there are different recommendations for the word count in a paragraph. But on a personal note, I would say a word length between 65 to 75 will do the job effectively.
5. Write meaningful headings
Along with splitting the idea into short paragraphs, try to use meaningful titles for every paragraph. This will help the reader to scan through the entire content in seconds and to decide whether the content is relevant for him/her.
6. Use bulleted lists whenever possible
Bulleted lists can draw easy attention and can help in scanning things fast. If you are listing more than two items in your content, you should use bullet points. If you are talking about some procedure or instructions use numbered lists for easy reference.
7. Use active voice
Sentences in the active voice are more clear, conversational, and engaging than the ones in the passive voice. Active voice sentences will be shorter and powerful in conveying the idea.
8. Use common language
A web page or a blog page is not the place to showcase your vocabulary. Use commonly used words to express ideas. Keep in mind that the search engines as well as the readers use common words to find the content you put online. Try to use keywords consistently to improve the SEO(Search Engine Optimization)
9. Be professional and human
Be human and talk in a conversational tone. Users engage more with content that talks with them than instead of that talk at them. Avoid using word jargon. Simply talk like you do to a human being instead of a machine.
10. Include valuable links
If you think some other pages are relevant to the subject, try adding links to such pages. The links may be external or internal. Instead of adding the same content again, you can hyperlink to the original content from the new one.
Last but not least, use other content elements like Pictures, Motion Graphics, Audio, Video content, etc. in a visually appealing manner to convey the subject.