Tag Archives: business content writing

What comes first, content writing or social media?

3 Replies

Social media marketing these days in an integral part of business development: it is just a matter of who realize it and who don’t. Some online marketers even compare the indecision about investing in social media marketing to that initial phase when people were not sure whether they should get a telephone connection for their business or not.

But what exactly is social media marketing? It is constant interaction with your present and prospective customers and clients (on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) and not only your customers and clients but with all those people who are interested in your brand and your philosophy while not being interested in doing business with you. Why bother with people who don’t want to do business with you? Word-of-mouth marketing: they may not want to do business with you but they may know somebody who would and they would like to recommend you due to the level of familiarity you have sustained through your social media marketing effort.

Aside from regular interaction you need to post lots of content on social media and networking websites. It doesn’t do much good to your brand identity and reputation if you simply get content from other websites and blogs and keep posting it under your profile. Then you become just another user who simply wants to spend some time on Facebook and Twitter sharing “interesting stuff”. People begin to respect your opinion only when you have your own content on your website/blog. This is because expressing your thoughts and sharing your knowledge shows that you are confident and knowledgeable enough to articulate your opinions and experience openly and be open to scrutiny. This is how true interaction begins: you post links to your own content and then your friends and followers either forward that content to their own friends and followers or they expressive opinion.

So should you write content first or launch your social media campaign first? You can do one of them or you can do them together, simultaneously, it depends what approach you want to follow. My personal preference would be to maintain a balance. Both the activities take time and effort, and also expense, if you’re going to hire people to write your content and manage your social media profiles. Companies and individuals that build their presence based upon their opinions and knowledge need to have lots of content in order to have a solid social media presence. You also need content if you intend to spread awareness regarding your product or service. You don’t need content much if your audience is not the reading types.

GET WEEKLY UPDATES ON CONTENT MARKETING

How come targeted content improves your search engine rankings?

Leave a reply

If you ask me SEO content is actually targeted content, and if you are wondering what is targeted content it is content specifically generated for a particular audience using particular keywords (and that’s what makes it SEO content). Purely SEO content doesn’t do you much good because even if it generates lots of traffic it doesn’t generate much business because it doesn’t move your visitors. Targeted content on the other hand not only draws qualified traffic from various search engines it also improves your conversion rate.

A couple of weeks ago I removed a package that I had started offering from my website. I had collaborated with a writer (a content provider, actually, who hires writers to generate bulk content) to provide low-cost, average-quality content that could help clients improve their search engine rankings. I started offering this package because I was getting lots of queries from India and I also got contacted by a few writers who were ready to generate lots of content at very low rates. This worked for a while but then I felt it was counterproductive for my clients and also for my own business.

I am not a very well-known copywriter on the Internet but over the past five years I have managed to eke out a presence through providing quality content persistently. Since there are very few people who understand the difference between cost and value a majority of clients confused that package with the overall content writing services that I provide.

They somehow got themselves into believing that they could pay dirt cheap and still they should be able to use that content as primary business content.

Content purely written for SEO rarely performs well as primary business content and if you want primary business content then you must pay accordingly. Anyway, it is very difficult to explain to clients once they have seen the rates. Instead of wasting my time again and again trying to explain the difference between quality content and low-cost SEO your content I stopped offering that package altogether.

Instead, I insist — even if they have to pay a bit more — that they should aim at producing highly targeted content. They may end up with less content than what they could have gotten by paying a lower rate, performance wise this content is much better.

But how does targeted content improve your search engine rankings?

In order to produce targeted content you need to be clear about two things, in fact three things:

  • What exactly you want to convey
  • To whom you want to convey
  • What words you want to use

Once you have sorted out these questions you are more than halfway through producing high-quality SEO content that can also be used as your primary business content. When you write content keeping your audience in mind you are careful about what you’re writing and how you are writing. When you know what you want to convey you stick to the topic and stay away from ambivalence. The words that you want to use while creating your content are your keywords and the search terms you want to target.

Although you should arrange your content so that it is more convenient for the search engine crawlers to go through it and assess it, your primary focus must always be your visitors, your readers. Search engines are not going to do business with you but people will.

GET WEEKLY UPDATES ON CONTENT MARKETING