Summary By Margaret Petrarca

Not that long ago if you wanted to write for a living you “simply” needed to write good content. Today the situation has changed, and in order to be a good content writer you cannot just know how to write but you also need to have collateral skills – from knowing how to use SEO to using certain visual tastes.

Ravi Kumar together with two summer interns at Modlingua, Urja Shah, and Shruti Singh, give us an insight on how to become a good content writer. Two mentors have added their expertise and advice on the subject: Kanika Dhawan – a communication and digital content specialist – and Shaifali Sangal – copyeditor and content writer.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a form of the marketing orientated to create content for a targeted audience on the Internet. It is part of digital marketing but besides its name, it includes things that go beyond simply writing.

Content writing is especially used by businesses in order to elevate their brand and catch the audience’s attention through unique ideas. That is why your content must be catchy and well-written: mistakes are forbidden, and your text has to be original and interesting. You have to write an attention-grabbing headline in order to be read and shared on social media. This is exactly the goal of content marketing: being shared and bringing to action. Of course, a clickbait headline per se leads nowhere. The content below the headline should be as great as the clickbait title. Kanika Dhawan especially underlines the importance of both headline and copy to grab and retain the audience’s attention and bring it to action. No matter what we write – we need to do it in great depth, from longer to shorter texts. Kanika Dhawan also explains that the best way to write something is to do it with an open heart.

There is no exhaustive list of the types of content writing. Among them there are:

• Blogs
• Brand journalism: press releases or customers testimonials used to show a brand in a positive light
• Copywriting: infographics, product descriptions, ad descriptions and webpages for businesses
• Technical writing: FAQs, know-hows
• Social media writing: Instagram posts, tweets and anything posted on social media
• Email writing: promotional emails
• Scriptwriting and Ad & Promo writing: anything that can be converted into a podcast, video or radio show
• Long-form writing: e-books, case studies, data studies
• Creative writing

In order to be good, these types of content – from an article for a blog to a tweet – need to be SEO friendly.

What is SEO friendly content?

It is a content created to help the search engines rank it high. You must define the objectives of your SEO marketing and have a detailed marketing strategy even before starting writing your content. To plan the content you can create an outline and a template to help you structure out thoughts into a proper flow. After having created an outline you can start writing. Your content should have some keywords that will appear on the headline as well as along the article at least once or twice. The content should be written following the AIDA model. To reach a greater success Kanika Dhawan suggests reading quality content on a daily basis in order to get used to this type of content and to get the right inspiration.

If you want to be a good content writer you need to take several things into account.

• Know your target audience, i.e. who is going to read you. Only if you know the buyer persona you are writing for you will be aware of what kind of style you should inside of your content; similarly, you also need to adapt your writing style to the company you are working for. For instance, if the buyer persona is a teenage girl you will write your content differently than if it was written for a retired man.
• Do not improvise a topic. You always need to know what you are talking about. If you feel you have a gap in something, try to fill it by reading and doing research about it.
• Keep evolving: stay up to date and practice different writing styles, attend writing classes, ask for feedback, and keep improving.
• Optimize your digital content in a user-friendly way – don’t simply try to be high on search engines ranking but do write for your audience. As your content should be easy to consume and share you should avoid keyword stuffing and cloaking as well as rewriting and plagiarism.

If you found this helpful and want to learn more then do visit the Modlingua Community Learning channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modlingua Make sure you subscribe to the channel and press the bell button so that you get notified each time Modlingua puts a video on its channel.