Writing high-quality content that is valuable for the brand and attracts audiences is not a 10 minutes job.
Whether you are writing content for a blog, social media or advertising you need to keep in mind the basic goals to reach with content. It can be scaling up website traffic, revenue, generating leads or others.
A freelancer or expert content writer spends hours in creating content. But even the best writers can fall out because of a few common mistakes. These content writing mistakes can make your content dead out there without any profits to your business.
So, how to avoid these common content writing mistakes and start engaging users and building brand awareness? Don’t worry, with the right eye we have listed out the writing mistakes to avoid and turn your content potential to engage and be useful for readers.
What is Content Writing?
Content writing is the process of planning, researching, writing, editing and publishing content on the internet. This content writing includes various formats like blog pages, web content writing, ad copies, social media templates, product descriptions, ebooks, press releases and many more.
To put it in simple terms content tells and represents your brand. You can use case studies, insights, and scenarios to convey message and inspire the readers to take meaningful action.
In this digital age, content has become an essential part of any marketing strategy in growing the business. So, don’t take any chances with readers of not knowing the mistakes to avoid in content writing.
11 Content Writing Mistakes to Avoid
Knowing Your Audiences:
Content writing is not valued without understanding the need of audiences or readers. You need to choose the topic that is useful to your audiences and are interested in knowing about it. If you want your readers maximum attention and not bounce back then know what they are expecting.
People read articles for three reasons
- To seek information about the latest trends, technology or brand.
- Find the solution to a problem
- Because they find the content is too relevant to them
Create a buyer persona before writing the article and address the issues by providing complete information. You can start by knowing the main interests of the targeted audiences. Know the problems they are seeking and choose the topic around them.
This will help you to find the relevant topic between what your users want to read and what you want to tell them. It is the foundation for choosing the type of content and way to present information for them.
Poor Research:
Don’t forget to make research even if you are familiar with the topic. It clarifies the doubts, and learn new updates, and stats that can support your writing. Users trust numbers and evidence rather than opinions. Every sentence you write should have value for your readers.
Though this can be a boring task you need to find inspiration to make it interesting as it is an important part of content writing. Take time in investigating the topic and learn new things. Sometimes this process can lead you to new solutions for old problems, new information, challenges, and drawbacks that interest your readers.
For example, if your topic is about new technology. A little bit of research on previous technology, and updates in the new one will help you in outlining and optimizing the article. Effective research provides complete information that can help you in writing similar subjects in the future.
Not Owning Clear Purpose:
Know what you want to achieve with the piece of your content? It can be about entertaining your readers, giving information or persuading them to take action.
Understand your goal and have a clear view of the output. It can help you with the writing style, tone, organizing writing, stats to include, and focus on content to engage your type of audience. So, your readers don’t find content boring, confusing or lacking purpose.
For example, explaining the latest technology to normal readers and scientists is not the same thing. In the former piece of writing, you need to include general examples to explain whereas for the latter type of readers you can give an in-depth explanation.
No Planning of Content:
This is one of the most common mistakes writers make in writing and end up having a tough time completing articles. Many professional writers advise beginners to plan out what comes first, middle and last in their article.
The research process mentioned above will help you in planning your content writing. You can jot down the headings, points you want to include, supporting backlinks, keywords and more. It helps you cover all relevant parts in your content to give an overview of writing an article.
You can divide the structure of the article and be more focused on writing
- Start your article telling readers you have identified their issue or problem. How they can benefit from reading your article and grab their attention.
- Create sections for each point you want to explain and give evidence to support it. Try to be clear and specific.
- Use heading and subheadings in the article and add relevant content with examples.
- Conclude your article by summarizing the points or convenience the readers to use the above solution. Also, you can ask for feedback.
Don’t Forget Keywords Research:
Keywords work as the building blocks and help you to stay focused on your writing. When you know what keywords to include then you know what to write. These search words are important if you are targeting search engine rankings. Do good research and find different keywords like new long tails, seed keywords, and long phrases and add them to your writings.
Don’t forget to add search words in your content that readers use to find solutions. These words help you to land on the first pages of search results. But remember quality and relevance of content are more important than using more keywords. So, take care and do not end up adding keywords irrelevant in your lines. You can use keyword search tools like SEMrush, google keyword planner, Ahrefs and many more to assist you.
Double Check Everything:
Don’t make the mistake of not reading your article twice before publishing. They say reading the article the next day gives more detailed perspectives.
It’s quite common and easy to make mistakes when you are in a good flow of writing. There can be typos, repeated words in the same sentence, grammatical, structure forms and spelling mistakes. No matter how the topics in interesting and how effectively you represent them, these mistakes can take away the reader’s interest.
Sometimes reading your article for the 500th time can’t find any errors but other eyes can find them with the 1st read. So, getting somebody to read your article for insights is advisable.
Eye on Content Length:
Every writer needs to remember that always quality wins over content length.
Long articles are good when you can deliver valuable and informative content. Understand the context and don’t add unnecessary subheadings to make the article longer. No reader efforts in reading unnecessary content. This can also affect your reputation and increase the drop in your readers.
Tips to keep your content length ideal:
- Research and make clear sections of your article
- Focus and keep the content to the point to avoid meaningless sentences
- Combine the content with relevant examples which adds value
- Don’t extend the topic for keyword stuffing
- Stay concentrated on the topic when writing extensive research content
Oversight Content Format:
Every article needs to be organized with necessary headings and subheadings. Readers may get confused and leave the article which can increase your bounce rate.
It’s quite common when readers go through the blog’s contents before reading it. This is to know whether the article is worthwhile and provides us with the necessary information. So, it is important to have a perfect article structure with meaningful sections.
The basic structure of an article is
Heading 1
Heading 2
Subheading 1
Subheading 2
Heading 2
Subheading 1
Bullet points
Subheading 2
Distinguish your content for a better understanding while publishing in the digital medium.
- Use H1, H2, H3 to represent headings
- Bold, italic and underline words to highlight
- Use bullet and number points over paragraphs for clear representation
- Colour the links to show out in the content
Leaving Search Engine Optimization:
If your content is for search engine pages, you can’t leave SEO in the back.
There are many SEO ranking factors involved that show up your content on the first pages. But there are a few things that you can consider in writing to optimize the content for search engines.
- Use reader search intent keywords in the content.
- Add keywords in titles, subheadings, first paragraphs, alt images, etc.
- Provide high-quality internal and external links.
- Avoid keyword stuffing in the content.
Don’t Force CTA Buttons:
Call to Action buttons are used to inspire readers to take immediate action. It can be visiting the website, subscribing to a newsletter or finding more articles.
It is recommended not to include these CTA buttons unnecessarily in the content to gain the attention of the readers. This can annoy your readers and search for other resources. In the worst case, they may visit any other blogs from your website because of the experience.
Let’s Face Writer Block:
Every content writer reaches a point where thoughts are completely blocked.
But try to find inspiration from somewhere and get started. You can go through the research you have done previously to find a point or search for new resources. Take a break and do something fun to recharge your brain and for fresh writing thoughts. Also, try to stay consistent that helps you break writer’s block and polish your writing.
Final Words
We write content to help readers and provide valuable and genuine information. Keeping this in mind you can’t make any content writing mistakes that can take away your readers. This article will help you to identify those mistakes and keep an eye on them and not repeat them in your writing. Of course, you can always use the content writing tools that can assist you in compiling the best content.
It is helpful to join content writing groups or forums on social media platforms. It helps you to share different ideas and learn new things to improve your writing.
Always write your article from the readers point of view and explore new ways to represent your ideas.
