Introduction
Have you ever stared at blank pages: I can tell it is frustrating
Most especially when you understand how good content affects your bottom line.
This piece will show you the top 23 hacks for creating content faster, increase click-through rate and conversion.
Enjoy!
Top 23 Hacks!
1. Sort writer’s block: Admit that you are stuck and do something that takes you out of the project. I read a book by Ted Nicholas and he advised that switching up activities could be a great source of inspiration. If what you do first thing every morning is work, try meditation
2. Keep your ideas: We are all goldmines of ideas, some thoughts come to mind that you don’t believe are great content ideas until you find the time to flesh them out.
3. Talk to your audience: Create social media polls asking your audience what content they will like to read from you.
4. Ask questions: I tell you there is so much you know about your industry but you don’t realize they are content ideas, is there something you are unclear about? Ask
5. Optimize for search engine: Getting discoverable online not only helps you reach more people but convert them. Read more
6. Have a strategy: This is the engine behind your content marketing effort, without a strategy you can’t have results with your content. A part of your strategy could be your content calendar, content distribution, and social engagement.
7. Write Drunk, edit sober: You interrupt the creative flow when you edit and write your content simultaneously, so it is advisable that you pen your thoughts as they come, and leave it for a few days/hours before making brutal edits.
8. Be simple: Don’t overcomplicate concepts, people don’t have as much time as you think over 4.9m content is produced daily and yours is one of those. Gain and retain attention with simplicity.
9. Ditch industry jargon: This hack cannot be overstated business is first people to people, use words that people can relate to or explain industry terms in their simplest form. Your goal is to convince and not confuse people.
10. Use proper spacing: Shorter sentences do better these days, ‘Theyoung manpickedthepen’ or ‘The young man picked the pen’ which of these sentences were you able to read did any of them stress you out? Use proper spacing to make your writing better.
11. Focus on your headline: People read your headlines first, ensure you tap into their emotions so they can read your content. Remember, you are writing to achieve your business goal.
12. Avoid procrastination: If you have been postponing your writing project. It’s time to deal with fear by combating it heads on write, just write better still, outsource.
13. Build your network with guest posting: Guest posting not only helps you to build backlinks, but it also helps you tap into an audience interested in your offer, while this is unpaid the benefit are enormous,
14. Use you and yours: Words like you and yours make your content personal and relatable. People read such content and get a feeling that you are talking to them and that is the essence of communication. When you write content with words that address a lot of people you risk talking to no one.
15. Create useful content: Want raving fans? Create useful content. The success of your content is hinged on the usefulness of your content. So, before creating ask yourself what is in it for the people you are creating for, if you can’t answer that you might want to delay sharing that piece of content till you have an answer.
16. Focus on quality: Provide your readers with quality content that has depth. Credibility is a conscious effort, back facts and statistics with research. You will be better off creating one quality piece of content weekly than ten. Hence the importance of repurposing.
17. Hyperlink: Link juices are important, it helps Google trust you, so be sure to link to your content and that of others.
18. Outline first: When writing content like blog posts, Ebook, whitepapers and case studies, it is essential that you have an outline. Not only does it guide you it saves you time and ensures you create impactful content.
19. Research: Get lost in curiosity, find information because your content depends on it.
20. Observe your competitors: If something is working for companies in your industry, observe and see how you can do better. I believe that every company should have a list of 5-7 competitors that they observe from time to time to get insights. Tools like Semrush makes this process easier.
21. Plan, plan and plan: True to the cliché, he that fails to plan, plans to fail. Over a period of one week, I observed a 169% growth in my blog traffic as a result of planning. Why are you starting content creation? Who do you need to hire? How often do you want to post? What are your KPIs? What is your template? Answering these questions will help you develop a solid content marketing plan.
22. Subscribe to plagiarism checkers: After hours of arduous research, it is almost impossible to prevent certain phrases from slipping into your content. Tools like Turnitin and Copyscape help you prevent this.
23. Use writing tools to your advantage: There are several tools at different stages of the writing process- research, editing and ideation. One of those I find inspiring is Otter not only those it store ideas in form of voice, but it also transcribes the audio. To learn more about content writing tools