The Ultimate Guide to Writing Marketable Content that Converts

From SEO to emotional appeal

Photo by Webaroo.com.au on Unsplash

How do you go about growing a raving audience of fans that share your work with everyone they know? The answer is epic writing that ranks on Google, and here I’ll show you how to do just that.

Remarkable Content

Before all else, focus on making the core content of your site as high-quality as possible. Make people think, change their lives and blow them away with how useful your words are.

Only then should you worry about promoting your writing.

“Great content can promote itself but even the best promotion can’t create great content.” — Unknown

There is no quick fix I can give you to make you a great writer. You need to sit down every day and commit to getting better at the craft. Promotion is easy, what’s hard is sitting down and drudging through the emotional labor required to write.

Oftentimes a quick preparation before you start writing can go a long way. Once you find a topic, brainstorm the 3 main points that you’ve learned a few supporting ideas for each of these points that you can elaborate on.

When starting out you need the right mindset to succeed in the long run. Commit yourself to do what others won’t and to stick it out longer than others do because then you’ll get different results than everyone else is getting. Put 10 hours of work into a single article if that’s what it takes.

Writing isn’t easy, to create remarkable content you must wage a war with yourself. With your inner critic, with doubt, with comfort, with your ego, with anything that will get in the way of your creative potential.

Topic

A few questions you may want to ask yourself when considering a topic are:

• What will my audience be searching for?
• What will they resonate with and empathize with?
• What are my industry’s frequently asked questions?

Although revenue is the bottom line, effective content that drives revenue is always focused on the customer over the product. Your goal when figuring out a topic should be to consider their problems, what they’re searching for, and their most intimate desires.

You can research this by using keyword research or by reading the books, magazines, and articles that they’re reading to put yourself in their shoes. None of these efforts go to waste even if they don’t have tangible results. By doing this you’re going to have a much easier time solving your buyer’s problems and providing them with viable solutions.

Post Structure

The rationale behind adding structure to your posts:

1. It gives your post direction so that you don’t go off on tangents and sway too far from the topic that you’re aiming to write about
2. By planning what you want to write about beforehand your writing will be faster and more efficient
3. Your readers will more easily comprehend the point you’re trying to get across
4. It will make your posts more memorable
5. Your readers will become more avid promoters of your brand

A couple of formats that both humans and search engines like are list formats and how-to formats:

A how-to post aims to solve a problem. They’re like a guidebook helping you step-by-step through a process until you reach a higher level of understanding than what you had at the beginning.

These types of posts are one of the most common posts on the internet, it especially makes sense for businesses. If your primary source of income is a service then building trust through how-to posts can lead to quite a bit more sales down the line. Oftentimes how-to posts can be strengthened by adding other mediums of content within the post like a video explaining something that is hard to explain in words alone.

A list post is a numbered collection of things. They’re a considerably easy type of post to write and can still be helpful in redirecting traffic back to some of your older posts. You can do this by mixing internal and external links into your list posts. You might include a few links back to older articles on your site all relating to the same topic as well as a few other websites that you’ve found helpful over time and would genuinely recommend to anyone in your field, rather than copying and pasting the first link google shows you when you search your keyword into the search bar.

Whatever the structure may be, make sure you stick to it so that the reader knows what they’re getting before they open the article.

The Art of Storytelling

Learning the art of storytelling is what it takes to get past logic and touching an emotional level in your readers. Your job as a storyteller is to create that connection, that reason to relate, and something to believe in.

There’s no single formula for you to follow. Stories may fit into your larger content strategy, but the writing itself involves much more than a fill in the blank template if you are to appeal to deeper emotions. Your story needs a deep authenticity and ringing truth that shows the audience you mean what you write. Logic doesn’t sell, it’s all about emotion. If you want people to remember your story then find creative ways to empathize and relate with people.

Still, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind that can help you write a more powerful story. First off, always focus on the why. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Instead of stating what you’re offering, start with your vision and why you’re doing what you’re doing and work back to what it is and how it works. The why penetrates through logic and gets at emotion much faster.

Great stories always have a main character, conflict, and resolution. In business, the main character is your connection to the audience. It reflects your understanding of the audience’s wants and needs in order to speak directly to your audience.

Character

In order to create a memorable character start backward from the buyer persona. What is the optimal buyer and what are their needs and wants? Once you determine this you can figure out the POV to write the story in.

Professional copywriters, like Jerrod Harlan, talk about the importance of reading all the things your customer would be reading to put yourself in the customers’ shoes.

First Person POV

In first-person, you’ll be using the pronoun ‘I’ quite a bit. The character is yourself and the story is written from a much more confessional tone. Writing in the first person works best if the author is known and is someone the reader can relate to on a personal level.

Second Person POV

In the second-person, you’ll be using the pronoun ‘you’ quite a bit. The character in this story is the person reading your story, in the second person you’re speaking directly to your reader. You’re trying to solve their problem by speaking directly to them and telling them what they need to do differently in order to get better results.

The second person is valuable because when you speak directly to the consumer and solve their problems they’ll associate positive feelings with your company and keep coming back for more. Look no further than what you’re reading right now to get an example of second-person writing.

Third Person POV

In the third-person, you’ll be using the pronouns he or she. The most common form of articles written in the third person is case studies where you’re explaining exactly how one of your customers got value from your product and what he/she did to improve their life with the product you’re trying to sell.

Conflict

Your goal in storytelling is typically to relieve stress, create happiness and solve problems. If your story lacks conflict then it’s hard to accomplish any of those important points. A story that lacks conflict isn’t a story, it’s just a selling point and a tagline.

Conflict is a valuable way to normalize difficulties that you went through and to show to someone else that these difficulties are a normal part of the improvement process. Conflict is often just the problem you’re aiming to solve with a how-to post.

Resolution

A conflict is followed by a resolution. How you construct the resolution can make or break a story. The closing to any story provides context and closure. When thinking in terms of content marketing we want to consider how to include a call to action. If the conflict is the problem that you brought up, the resolution is the solution you provide to solve that problem.

The ultimate goal in your resolution is the take the customer to the next stage of your funnel. Whether this means moving into your email list or just reading more content, you’re getting them to take some action other than leaving your website.

How to Optimize your Content

We want the aesthetic of our post to be clean, interesting and easily skimmable so that we don’t dissuade the reader with huge blocks of text. Whitespace is your friend, break up your article with subheadings, bullet lists, and images to keep your readers engaged.

Here’s an example of good vs. bad post aesthetic.

How to Meditate (Gaiam) vs. Rumi Quotes

Another helpful practice is to bold the important ideas, which also makes it easier to skim. You might aim to bold one sentence every few paragraphs or so. Remember, less is more and bolding too much is the equivalent of not bolding anything at all.

In order to optimize for the search engine, there are a few things you can focus on that will make a huge difference. First, mention the keyword throughout the post in spots where it makes sense. Be careful not to go overboard cause the penalty from Google for keyword stuffing is harsh and will result in your post not showing up in results at all. To avoid this you can use synonyms of the keyword to make sure that Google and your audience know what the topic of the post is.

When changing the URL you’ll want to shorten the title without losing context. Then when inserting images in your article you’ll want to include alt-text. Search engines can’t search through images, they just read the alt-text to figure out what your image is about and subsequently displaying it in the images section.

When it comes to links there are a few things you should consider. Link only to external content when it’s important because this takes the user off of your site leading to less time on your site and a higher bounce rate. If you think an external link is needed then consider making the link open in a new tab so they can come back to your article easily.

Considering lowering bounce rates you’ll want to include multiple Call to Actions (CTA). CTA’s can be in the form of an image or text hyperlink at relevant sections in your blog post. If your article is long enough you may be able to add one in the beginning, middle and end of the post. In shorter posts, you may consider leaving a text CTA at the beginning and an image CTA at the end of the post.

Determining when to include the CTA is ultimately up to you, just aim to include it where it makes the most sense and not in some obscure location where it feels forced and unnatural. The best time to generate a conversion is often right after educating and building rapport. You’re in a sense building transactional trust, you teach them and then they give you their email in return.

What to Check for when Editing

There are quite a few things to check for when editing, here are a few tips that will make your writing better.

• Use contractions. They make the tone more conversational, which is a good thing. For example, don’t always sounds better than do not when you’re giving advice.
• Write in simple terms. A survey found that using big words makes you appear less credible and confident. Simple language doesn’t have to be boring, it can be stronger if you use it right.
• Use the active voice. Instead of using passive voice like “The apple was thrown by me,” use the active voice synonym like “I threw the apple.” This makes your writing more direct and effective.
• Be clear and concise. The ultimate goal of editing is to be as clear and focused as you possibly can. Remove all obvious details, rants and irrelevant ideas that don’t directly add to the main point. If there is something that could be explained in more detail consider linking to another post that does just that.
• Use short sentences and paragraphs. The shorter the paragraph is, the easier it is to read right down the page. As stated earlier, bullet points, images, and shorter paragraphs are going to make your writing much easier to read.
• Don’t use adverbs. Any word that ends in -ly can be cut out without losing any meaning. Yeah, you don’t need those — cut them out! Instead of saying “He angrily shut the door.” say “He slammed the door.”
• Avoid Jargon. Depending on what you’re writing about there may be acronyms or technically-heavy words, it always helps to avoid these or explain them in more detail when possible.
• Ask yourself “Why should my audience care about what I have to say?”

Write a Title that will Hook

Interesting catchy titles that catch a viewer's eye are important to get people to read your article in the first place. The best titles are often written after you finish writing a post as you’ll have a better picture of what the post is about.

To come up with an effective title, aim to spend 5 minutes brainstorming 5–10 different title ideas in the post-editing process to find one that sounds best. And if you’re particularly marketing-minded you can split test which title gets the most engagement by switching out titles week by week and seeing what gets the best results.

A few title ideas include:

• Little known ways to [fill in the blank]
• The secret of [blank]
• What I learned from [time period] days of [blank].

Writing amazing content doesn’t have to be as hard you perceive it to be. By demystifying the writing process and breaking it down step-by-step you can approach your content with an ease and focus that will help you overcome even the tallest of content marketing hurdles.