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How much time are you spending developing content? Many businesses throw content creation to the end of the line, or forget it completely. However, content has become increasingly more important in businesses. Content is king. While having content is important, it is more important to have good quality content. Here are some tips to help you develop quality content.
Research
Before writing any content, first you must understand who your audience is, what they care about, and how you can align it with your company. Here are some questions you will also want to look at: what are your competitors talking about, how are they doing on social and how often do they post. Knowledge is key. Having content your audience does not want to read or having content that doesn’t relate to your business is counter productive. You want people to read your content, see you as a subject-matter expert and want to find out more about your company.
Who Will Be Producing The Content?
Because quality content is important, do not just pass this job off to the newbie or intern. Ideally, you will want someone who can write well. If you do not have anyone in house that can produce content, there are always services out there that will write content for you.
The Content
Once you have conducted the research you can start deciding on what topics/subjects you will want to write about. Your content does not always have to directly promote your products or services, but it should promote an area tied to your business, products or services. For instance, a home insurance company blogging tips about good home ownership. If you did the research, you will have a better idea about what topics to write about, what tone to use and how often you should be writing content.
Formatting and length
While Google still prefers long content, about 1,000+ words, the average reader tends to prefer shorter content. However, the formatting of the content is far more important than the word count. Most readers tend to get intimidated when seeing large blocks of text. A good way to prevent this is by breaking up the paragraphs into smaller sections. Each section should have an accompanying header, and if applicable a subheader. Bullet points are also a great way to break up long bodies of text.
Good quality content not only brings potential customers to your website, but it also helps search engine ranking. Some businesses are able to make it to page one on Google search through good quality content alone. Content marketing and content creation are only going to become more important as Google adjusts their search algorithm to provide better results with higher quality information. Are you ready to produce higher quality content?
By Ashleigh Cue
