How to create engaging content for your online business
Are you running an online business? Are you using content marketing as a way of building an audience? And are you interested in making that content as strong as possible, to keep people coming back to your site?
If so, this article is for you.
The chances are, you’re using content marketing in order to build an audience, and then using offers and email marketing to help convert those people into sales. It’s about creating a funnel.
But we know that online, there’s always something else your customer could be doing instead. So we’ve got to make our content incredibly engaging.
So how do we produce content that people actually want to read? Content that people will sit down and engage with — content that makes them feel that they’re engaging with someone they trust.
You probably don’t have a background in content production, so how can you be sure you’re getting it right?
For fifteen years I’ve been a professional writer. Most recently, I’ve spent the last five years as the editor of a specialist trade website. I’ve written thousands of online articles which together have been read millions of times. My articles have got me invited to lecture at universities and speak at national conferences. I’ve repeatedly been asked to appear on the BBC, I’ve got stories on the front page of The Times and I’ve even prompted debates in Parliament. All through the power of producing good content.
Now I want to share the tools and techniques I’ve learned.
The good news is that by following some basic principles, anyone can write strong content. It’s not magic. It’s not a mystic art. There are rules to good writing, and anyone can learn them. This piece is intended to be a guide to those rules.
There are a lot of elements to producing really successful content for marketing, other than writing the content itself: how you present it, where it appears on your site, how often you write, and which channels you use to distribute it. But this is an article about the most fundamental building block of all: producing a piece of writing that your customers will want to read.
The golden rule: content has to have a purpose
Producing good content starts well before you write your first word. You need to know the purpose of the piece you’re going to write. This involves considering three things: what you want to talk about, who you want to talk to, and what you want to say. Or to put it another way: subject, audience, message.
Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Pick a strong subject
It should go without saying that a good piece of content is one that is interesting to your potential customers. For this reason, a piece of writing is only as good as its subject matter. If your subject matter is interesting, your piece will probably be interesting.
It’s got to be relevant to your business, too, of course. But that should leave you with a lot of scope to choose a topic.
So here’s the first question. What subjects do you want to talk about? And the second: what do your potential customers want to know about?
That second question is particularly important. In order to get customers engaged, you have to talk about something they want.
So how do you decide what they want to know about?
Know your audience
If you know who you’re writing for, it’s much easier to communicate successfully. So you need to think about who the potential audience is for any piece of content. Who would want to hear about it? What would they gain from it? Why are they going to give up five minutes of their day to listen to what you have to say?
The more you know about the audience you want to reach, and the problems they face in their work and their lives, the easier it will be for you to produce something they want to read.
The chances are, if you’re experienced in your field, and you run your own business, you already know the people you want to talk to. So when you pick a potential subject, it’s worth having a conversation with them, in your head, and asking, “What is it you most want to know about?”
Have a compelling message
Once you’ve got a subject and an audience, you need to have something interesting to say. You need a message.
This is the most common fault I see in a piece of writing. Not knowing what you want to say. Ask yourself this question:
How do I want to change my reader’s mind?
By this I don’t mean the ultimate thing you want, which is for them to make purchase. You have to forget about that for now. I mean, what do you want them to get out of it?
You can create three types of changes:
• A change in emotion — you made them laugh or cry
• A change in opinion — you’ve made them think about an issue they care about
• A change in information — they learned a new piece of knowledge
That change, whatever it is, is your message.
Usually, if you’ve produced a good piece of writing, then by the time you’ve finished, you should be able to encapsulate your message in a single sentence. If you can’t, you may want to consider whether you really know what your piece is for.
How do you structure your piece?
Okay, so we’ve talked about what to do before you start writing. Now we need to talk about how to get from the original idea to the execution.
Headline, headline, headline
If you’re writing digital content, the headline of your piece is more important than anything you say after it. In some cases, it’s more important than everything you say after it. If you get the headline right, everything else follows.
This goes together with the concept of message. If your message is clear, your headline may well write itself.
In real life, when it comes to headlines, you will probably want to think quite a lot about SEO. How much you want to worry about search depends a lot on the channels you use. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m just going to talk about what works for humans.
When writing headlines for online content, the main thing is to just be very, very clear what your piece is about, so a reader understands very clearly why they want to read the piece. In general, I don’t like to make jokes or puns in online headlines. They often sound good, but they don’t explain what the piece is about.
It’s good to have some mystery in a headline — enough to intrigue — but many jokey headlines are too mysterious.
There are many ways to go about writing a good headline, but all of them must drag your reader into the piece. My favourite tactics are:
• Ask a question that the reader feels they need to know the answer to — “How do you make more money from your rental property”
• Promise to list all the things they might need to know to do something — “Ten ways to improve your rental property”
• Challenge or refute a well-worn concept — “Why XXXX is a terrible place to buy a holiday home”
• Reinforce or advocate an idea that the reader already holds — “Why people who XXXX job are worth their weight in gold”
It’s worth pausing on that last one a bit. I said above that you need to know the change you want to create in your reader’s mind, but one change you can create is to strengthen or affirm something they already believe. This kind of writing is hugely effective. People love reading a piece of writing which explains why they’re right.
I’m also going to assume that you’re interested in repeat business, and that you want customer loyalty and trust. In this case, your headline must be truthful. Don’t mislead or exaggerate or lie in order to get clickthroughs. That works for clickbait sites, because they don’t expect customers to trust them, but if you are looking for loyalty, that means you have to be trustworthy.
Introduce your ideas clearly
Once you’ve got a headline, you need an introduction.
Intro sections aren’t as important as headlines, but they’re still very important.
Introducing a piece of content is a tricky art. I talked about the fact that a good piece of writing produces a change in the reader’s mind. This change is easier if we establish a common base that both reader and writer starts from, and that’s what your intro is for.
A good intro needs to do three things.
• Establish your subject in the first paragraph. Explain what you’re going to be writing about, and why it’s worth reading.
• Give context. Set the scene. Give a sense of the wider environment, and any background information you’re going to rely on.
• Explain the message of your piece. Make it clear what change you want to produce.
Give yourself the space you need to do all these things. One of the most common errors I see in content produced by people who aren’t professional writers is that they dive straight in and smack the reader with complicated information, right in the first sentence.
Take the reader on the journey
If your intro sets out clearly where you’re starting from, then the rest of the piece carries them through the journey to your conclusion.
Once you’ve established your message, the rest of the piece is about presenting the information you need to justify that message, in the most sensible order. Exactly what order that is will depend on the message you’re conveying. Some possible approaches include:
1. Chronological. First do this, then that. For when you’re telling a story or explaining a process. “Ten steps to a perfect birthday cake”
2. Pros and cons. For when you’re weighing up whether something should happen. “Should you buy a hybrid or an electric car?”
3. Problem and solution. Outlining why something is an issue and then explaining what needs to be done. “Why delapidations bills are a big problem for commercial tenants, and how to avoid them.”
4. Logical progression. For when you want to prove something, and each piece of evidence relies on the step before. “Why a universal basic income would grow the UK economy”
Any structure is fine, so long as it presents information in a sensible order. It’s all about understanding what the reader needs to know in paragraph three, in order for them to understand paragraph four.
Don’t write more than you need to
Woodrow Wilson, the president of the USA during the First World War, once said: “If you want me to talk for five minutes I need a month to prepare. If you want me to talk for an hour I’ll need a week. If you want me to talk all day I’m ready right now.”
Shorter is harder, but also better. Ideally, you should trim off all the irrelevant stuff, and leave only the words you absolutely need to get across the point you are trying to make.
There’s nothing wrong with writing a short piece, and there’s nothing wrong with writing a long piece. But there is something wrong with writing a long piece when a short one would have done.
Use the right words
If your structure and your subject are good, you’re most of the way there. But still, there’s a lot to be said for getting your choice of language right.
Simple is best
Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This is good advice. If readers have to work hard to get through your writing, for any reason, the chances are they won’t.
I usually try to use short sentences and simple words. Long and complicated words make your article hard to read. If you’re explaining a complex idea, introduce one new piece of information in each sentence.
The full stop is the best type of punctuation for content marketing. Use it as often as you need to.
The art of really good writing is to get an idea across so that everyone understands it. It’s not to show everyone how clever you are. If you’re actually clever, they’ll figure that out eventually.
There are a few tools to measure how easy your work is to read. One is called the Gunning Fog index. If you go online, you can find a Gunning Fog tester. Paste in your whole piece of writing and it measures how easy your work is to understand, and gives you a score. Generally, lower is better.
Don’t forget about the second half of the Einstein quote, though. Don’t oversimplify. Don’t miss things out. Provide all the information people need.
Tools of the trade
A while ago, I tried to sit down and articulate the tricks and tools of sentence construction which you could use to be more persuasive. It turned out I was wasting my time, because the Ancient Greeks did it thousands of years ago, and they called it rhetoric. They identified literally hundreds of different tools to help persuade people. So far as I can see, though, there are four underlying themes in most rhetoric, and you can use all of them to make your writing more compelling.
Rhythm
The rhythm of your language is extremely important. The easiest thing is probably to think of music, or your heartbeat. If there isn’t a rhythm, that puts us off. If the rhythm is too monotonous or slow, we don’t like it.
If the rhythm’s fast — lots of short sentences — then we look around for something exciting to be happening. So slow down when you want people to pause and think and reflect. Then, when you reach a point where you want to say something, and you want people to agree with it, write something short.
Repetition
People pay more attention to something if it’s repeated.
Let me say that again. People pay more attention to something if it’s repeated.
This happens with all speech, at every scale. Repetition of any word, or phrase, or sound will draw the reader’s focus. If you repeat the same word or phrase or sound when you’re making a new point, people will associate it with the last time they heard it. So the trick is to repeat yourself if you want people to pay particular attention. Look at Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech if you want to see it at work in the hands of a master.
It’s equally important not to use the same word again if you don’t want to draw particular attention to something. People will start looking for the connection and if it’s not there, they won’t be listening to what you do want to say.
Comparison
Human beings love a good comparison. All of us learn through stories, and simile and metaphor are just tiny stories about how two things are alike. If you can link something you want people to feel good about, with something they already feel good about, that’s a powerful tool. Similarly, if you can find an original or engaging comparison, it can draw people’s attention. (My all-time favourite metaphor is from PG Wodehouse, who described one character as “So crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase”.)
Contrast
This section is going to be totally different to the last three.
Just kidding. It’ll be mostly the same. But at least I got your attention.
Basically, people pay more attention if there is a contrast between two things. If you shift from black to white, or from billionaires to beggars, or from the sublime to the ridiculous, then it draws attention to how different those things are. It emphasises the unique characteristics of both things.
Let’s go back to the “fight them on the beaches” speech. Churchill uses basically the same phrase seven times: we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight. Then, at the end, he changes. “We shall never surrender.”
Listeners were expecting the same formulation again, for the eighth time, and he changed it, and it came up and hit them right between the eyes because the contrast created a big surprise. Brilliant writing.
Tone of voice
Every word has a set of connotations attached to it — a collection of other words it makes us think of. Two words with similar meanings can have very different connotations. Think of slim and thin and slender and skinny. Or stubborn, determined and tenacious. In each case, they all mean the same thing, but the feeling we get from them is different.
Let’s take one example of why this is: the origin of the word. Our language is unusual in that it’s an amalgam of three parent tongues: Saxon, French and Latin. The languages of commoners, the nobility, and the church.
To this day, English speakers see Anglo-Saxon words as tougher and stronger, French words as more elegant, Latin words as more intelligent. It’s very different if we cease, or desist, than if we cut it out, or stop.
To see this in action, we can go back yet again to the “fight them on the beaches” speech, because it contains a great example of this, too. Every single word in the most famous section of the speech is Anglo-Saxon in origin, except for the last one — “surrender”. The tough Saxon words contrast beautifully with the effete French to make “surrender” sound that much more unpalatable.
All of this feeds into the tone and mood of your writing — the tone of voice, also called register. The register you should use for each audience is different. Should it be jokey and informal? Simple and to the point? Intricate and technical? The important thing is to think about the effect you’re looking for, and make sure your choice of words reflects it.
Are words the answer at all?
I’m a big fan of words, but they aren’t the only things which matter. Far from it. There are many other tools which can communicate information more effectively — pictures, graphs, tables, infographics. It’s really important to consider whether these are an effective alternative to writing.
The design around the piece is important, too. The quality and style of the presentation is all important — white space, fonts and headings all contribute to the ease of reading.
This really matters. The quality of your content is necessary but not sufficient. I’ve found that often a simple change in design can hugely impact the effectiveness of a piece of text.
Getting the most out of your content
So there we are. That’s the basics of how to produce good content which will appeal to audiences. Know what you want to say. Structure it sensibly. Write clearly.
A couple of final tips. First, rewrite.
The first thing I do once I’ve written something is to stand up and walk away and do something different. Make a cup of coffee. Check out the news. Do the crossword. Then, once I’ve cleared my mind, I read the piece again, and start making changes. As Ernest Hemingway said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting”.
How much rewriting you need to do will probably relate to how much planning you did. Some people love to chuck all their ideas down on paper and make a bit of a mess, and then hack it into shape. Others need to get it right at every stage before moving on. But all of us will benefit from some degree of revision.
Unfortunately, good writing can often involve cutting out the good bits, too. Often the good bits aren’t necessary and slow the piece down.
And once it’s ready, and you’ve published it, don’t stop there. There’s a lot of feedback available to writers online. Analytics, comments, social media. See how it lands, and try to incorporate that learning into future pieces. Everything you’ll ever write could have been written better. Try and work out how.
Finally, don’t do it alone. Always have someone else read your work. Ideally, if you can, make that someone a professional editor. Editors can give you feedback on your ideas, on your structure, and on your language. They’ll spot any typos and find the places where you’re not being clear. I’ve written several thousand pieces of online content in my career, and I think there can scarcely be one which has not been improved by the work of an editor.
And don’t worry about getting it right in the first piece of content, either. This is the start of the process. Writing improves with practice, so make sure you keep learning.
Good luck. And if you want any help with writing and editing your content then get in touch with me on daveainsworth@yahoo.com. I’ll happily review one of your pieces of content for you — no charge.
