There are four pillars of content writing. Here they are (in my terms)

Written content is the very cornerstone of all digital marketing. In fact, writing is the foundation of ALL marketing and sales.

The odds are that you are mostly interested in the basics of content writing. You need enough to get you off the ground, but you aren’t interested in becoming a guru.

If this is your wheelhouse, then you’ve come to the right place. There are four basic pillars to remember in content writing. Let’s go.

Understanding your target audience 

This goes for all parts of the sales process. If you don’t understand your target audience, you’re probably NGMI.

This is a fundamental question: who are you targeting to buy your product? It has to be someone and someone totally specific. This is not the time for vague generalizations. You need to understand the perfect avatar for your audience clearly.

In my case, small business owners need a web presence but don’t want to outsource it, so they need to know how to start. Good content writing is a skill that takes time to curate, but years can be shaved off with proper coaching.

Creating value in your content (keyword stuffing can go to hell)

Your content is your site’s lifeblood. But here’s the thing: just making a bunch of content doesn’t cut it anymore. All of us older Googlers remember the early years of search when results were a hefty size of spam sites that had content that could hardly be considered writing. Stuffed with spam, ads, and just altogether crap, they were horrible. 

But they were stuffed to the gills with keywords, so they ranked very high…for a while.

But those days are thankfully behind us now. Gaming the system by cramming a bunch of keywords in the content isn’t going to impress anyone, the least of which would be the search engine.

Search engines are smart and adaptive to human behavior. People want to find value in what they consume. If your content is all fluff and has no value, they aren’t going to get through the rest of your material, no matter how many internal links you insert.

You are looking for one specific solution to the problem of the day. Your solution had better answer the questions of your customer base- or future customers, as the case may be.

Adjust your style as necessary 

The great thing about writing your content is that nothing is set in stone. You aren’t subject to some editor who doesn’t like your style or content.

If your blog is falling flat, you can restart it. Look, sometimes your writing style just doesn’t resonate with your desired audience. That’s okay, though; you either need to change your audience base (harder) or change your style (easier).

Another thing is this: you need to write tens of thousands of words to find your style. Maybe hundreds of thousands. I don’t have an exact count, but the point is that you need to write a shitload to find your voice. You can’t really change your style if you don’t even have one yet to start with.

Repeat the process over and over until you hit paydirt 

The final pillar is to repeat the process over and over practically forever until you strike gold. This is the most misunderstood part of creating your own luck.

You will keep doing the same thing for years, and people will call you lucky. What to make it on YouTube? I don’t know personally, but my thought is it’ll take months to years of consistent content to make real gains. The same is true of X/Twitter; I’ve worked at it for three years and am finally getting closer to one thousand followers.

There are no shortcuts. If you think that buying followers gets you anywhere, it won’t. Anything that has an end result worth chasing is worth putting in the work for. Nobody thinks that success means writing blog posts on the toilet at midnight on Super Bowl Sunday, yet here I am (Chiefs Kingdom, bb 💍💍💍).

Closing arguments 

I have no arguments here. I just thought it sounded good.

These are kinda the four most important concepts of content to beware of, but writing content is a skill that takes years of work to develop and master.

But there is one other angle: writing is writing. If you have been practicing some other medium for writing, you can easily transition to content writing. It’s all the same when you get down to it.

SEO learning for the week

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve kicked videos into high gear on my YouTube channel. More to follow, but this one is all about creating compelling calls to action.

Take a listen, throw me a follow, you know the drill.