October’s Best Tips And Tricks For Content Writers

The basic principles of writing rarely change. While language is constantly evolving and adapting, the process is relatively slow. But when it comes to digital marketing, writing website content and the role of SEO, every month people are publishing new tips and guides on how to get the most out of your content. Here at Embryo, we’re always looking to improve our process and find the latest SEO and content tools, so we make sure to keep our finger on the pulse each month. Here are some of the best articles, lists, guides and tips that we found about content writing published in October. 

Six Copywriting Tips For Engaging Content By tagDiv

Earlier this month we got a great list of tips from tagDiv, all about how to construct engaging content for your visitors. A content writer’s job is to produce work that is not only optimised for Google and for climbing the search engine rankings, but that also grabs attention, is readable and helps a user stick to your web page. If you have engaging content, then your bounce rate will fall and time on site will rise, giving you more time to persuade your visitors to convert. 

Among tagDiv’s great tips for creating engaging content are the importance of using visual media, clean typography and providing useful adjacent blog content for your audience. My favourite tip of the bunch, however, is the use of a buyer persona to more fully grasp how to speak to your audience. Here, tagDiv even points to hotmart and their blog about how a target audience and target persona differ. I think that the creation of a persona is a great way of humanising your audience. You want your copy to feel like a conversation, and that’s easier to do when you feel like you’re having a conversation with one person!

Here at Embryo, this is often an important part of discussions with clients, as well as thorough competitor and audience research. The content team here are always striving to get a more full picture of the customers we’re writing for. Whether you literally build a persona or not, the principle remains the same – humanise your audience, understand their needs, and start your conversation. 

Content Writing Tips From The Idea Of Creation To Publication By Entrepreneurship In A Box

On the 9th of October, Entrepreneurship In A Box published a structured overview of the content creation process, from planning to editing. Rather than focussing on a single part of content creation and giving tips for one thing in particular, this 6 step guide helps to plot your course from inception to conclusion. It can be easy to become stuck or confused at different stages when producing written content. Here, Entrepreneurship In A Box provides the building blocks you need and a map to help you find your way. 

It’s something seen particularly often among new content writers – the furrowed brow, fidgeting and blank-eyed stare that roughly translates as: ‘Where on earth do I start?’ Or some expletive-ridden version of that. I think this guide for taking content from creation to publication by Entrepreneurship In A Box is a great step by step roadmap, especially beneficial for new content writers.  

The writing team at Embryo all have our own process for producing content of high quality. Whether you start each piece of content with a particular research tool (such as the fantastic Frase), or you have a particular structure that you use across different pieces of writing (the AIDA method comes to mind) –  it’s important to plot your journey beforehand, otherwise it’s very easy to find yourself getting stuck. Having a clear process ready to follow will help any writer produce website content and written work at a faster rate and to a higher, more consistent level. 

4 SEO Tools For Data Driven Content Writing: Comparison By Netpeak Software

If you’re new to content writing and SEO, or you’re simply looking for a new tool to help you optimise fully, then I can’t recommend enough this SEO tool comparison from Netpeak Software. There are a LOT of SEO tools out there, and deciding which one to pick can be difficult. Each comes with its own pros and cons, and figuring out which fits your style and requirements the best is time-consuming. This comprehensive comparison article is a fantastic place to start. It looks at four of the biggest SEO tools on the market (SEMrush, CognitiveSEO, WebSite Auditor and Surfer), seeing how they match up in different regards and assessing where their strengths and weaknesses lie when it comes to content writing for SEO.

This in-depth look tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the tools in question. It looks at everything from the user interface and content editor, to pricing and usage restrictions. In my mind, the most insightful and useful section for content writers compares the tools’ content recommendations for SEO. This list of 4 SEO tools for data driven content writing, published on the 21st of October, is excellent, because when it comes to writing website content, a lot of digital content writers come from a traditional writing background rather a digital background. That means that SEO is new, and getting your head around it can be a little intimidating. These tools offer great recommendations to optimise your content for search engines, such as: keyword usage, readability, content length and more. 

Across the content and SEO teams here at Embryo, we use a range of various tools when it comes to optimising and polishing our content. We think that there are some fantastic SEO and content tools out there, and it’s just a matter of finding the one that’s right for you. Search engine optimisation is a crucial part of digital marketing, and content is a crucial part of SEO. As a content writer, you can have a huge influence on a digital marketing campaign with your words – both good and bad. Having the right tool can keep your quality consistent. 

5 Copywriting Strategies For Successful Content Marketing By Relevance

Writing good content and writing the right content is only half of the battle. Unfortunately, one informative and optimised blog isn’t going to change all your client’s fortunes. When it comes to having a meaningful impact on your client’s rankings, conversions and more, you need to be able to prove ROI and meet KPIs over an extended period of time. This means thinking a bit bigger and developing a creative content marketing strategy. Published on the 10th of October, this list of tips from Relevance helps to pin down the best methods for creating a content marketing strategy that is clear, efficient and effective. It gets into the nitty-gritty of copywriting with tips on how to concisely get information to your reader and generate sales. 

While a lot of content writers working in digital marketing may spend most of their writing service/product pages and blogs for clients, the fact is that writing is a crucial part of almost every aspect of a client’s campaign. This guide for creating effective and successful content marketing campaigns talks about the relationship between copywriting and content writing (more on that below), and how copywriting can define a campaign at every stage – whether it be writing sales emails, PPC ads and landing pages, sales letters and more. 

Writing is an incredibly transferrable skill and refining that into being able to move easily between different kinds of copywriting and content writing can make you hugely versatile and an important asset for your employer/client. This guide from Relevance focusses on some great copywriting tips than are universal across content and advertising, such as understanding your audience and their needs, always putting benefits first rather than features, and using clear headlines. My favourite is their fourth tip: ‘Simple language is key’. Speaking in plain English with common words and using short sentences will keep your written work impactful, readable and sharp. Save yourself from overwriting in dry, complicated prose and your readers will appreciate it. 

Copywriting vs Content Writing: Same Or Different? By Relevance

You’ve probably heard the terms ‘copywriting’ and ‘content writing’ used pretty interchangeably. If you’re new to writing, digital marketing or marketing in general, then you may be wondering what the difference is. Well, to find out we’re back with Relevance again and their concise overview of the main differences, published at the start of this month. Perhaps the quickest way of summing it up is to say that copywriters write short content aiming to make a big impact quickly, while content writers specialise in longer form writing with the aim of gaining brand loyalty and engagement by providing value and authority through well researched and informative articles. But there’s a little more to it than that, and Relevance helps us clear things up.

In essence, while content writing produces more specialised and bespoke content that dives deep into a certain subject matter, copywriting is marketing in its purest form. Brand awareness and grabbing people’s attention is the aim of the game for any copywriter, so writing imaginative, creative and unique short copy is the purpose. Content writing hopes to engage and persuade readers by providing value and information. Relevance’s guide about the differences between copywriting and content writing also talks about how copywriting and content writing can be used together as different parts of the same content marketing strategy. 

As a search-led digital marketing agency with an emphasis on providing targeted and impactful SEO campaigns, the writing team here at Embryo mainly specialise in content writing ourselves. Providing value for customers with informative and readable product/service pages, blog posts and articles is what we do. We direct our writing talents towards long-form content to populate our clients’ websites, but we’re a flexible team, able to dabble in range of different writing contexts. 

Get In Touch

Interested in finding out more about content writing and how Embryo uses it to boost our clients’ rankings, engage readers and build brand awareness and loyalty? Get in touch with us today and discover what can be achieved with a targeted, thoughtful, creative and impactful content marketing strategy.