Now, writing outstanding content is a choice. You have to put in the time, money, and work to build a great brand that attracts prospects, or you can choose the easy path and write poor content. That will waste time, resources, and money writing.
Original content will help with your SEO rankings and get more exposure for your business. Google penalizes sites with duplicate content. Producing original content on a fixed schedule imposed improves your website’s domain authority, which has a positive effect on growing your business.
1. Create Original Content
So the first thing is that you want to create original content. Copying other people’s content will get you punished by Google. At one point you could find some e-zine articles and top Google rankings. You won’t see them anymore. And that’s by design.
As engineers, we try and engineer our way out of the problem.
- Can we outsource cheap content writers to write filler content?
- Can we repost existing content from other sites on our blog?
- How can we piece together our content as cheaply and easily as possible?
- Or can we make a bot or AI do content writing for us?
These are dangerous ways of thinking when it comes to writing quality content. Remember, you get what you pay for. Invest in high-quality content with us for your marketing and sales needs.
2. Create Strong Headlines
Remember, from Copyblogger and Moz, 80% will read your headlines, but only 20% will read the rest of your content. Here are some good examples of headlines:
“The Wonderful and Thankless Job of Being in IT,” by Andy Jonak. I like the paradox and the headline.
There’s also another headline called, “Machine Learning-Driven Sales and Marketing for Everyone with Einstein Behavioral Scoring Part 2” by Srivatsan Ramanujam. This is the ultimate SEO title to how Google picks up particular a particular product that he is writing about.
3. Make Your Content Actionable
The first thing is to make your content actionable. Find at least one way your reader can take action from reading your blog, whether that’s picking up the phone and calling you, or you can download a free ebook, or a specific engineering task. The best content gives you a sense of how to apply the information. Respect the reader by not telling them exactly how to do something, but give them the realizations on how best to apply the material they’re reading.
Help your prospects and readers learn and become better at what they do.
4. Provide Answers to the Prospect
What is the purpose of the search engine? It delivers answers. Google presents links, videos, images, and knowledge cards. When your ideal clients are ready, reading a blog post, or watching a video, they want to be answered that they can gain knowledge quickly. Make sure your content is easy to scan, with headers, sub-headers, and bullet points so readers can find the most relevant information quickly. The title and subtitle should leave the ideal client with a sense of curiosity. It is the content writer’s job by answering that curiosity and by having the supporting information.
5. Source Your Information Accurately
If you wrote an article for a company’s blog and some of it was inaccurate, how damaging would be for your firm’s reputation and your reputation? Your blog is a representation of your firm, and it impacts how prospects view your services. Here are some tips:
- Make sure any statistic is linked back to its original report and source.
- Linking to quality websites will help earn more trust from readers.
- Linking to other and more sources of content will help search engines categorize your content.
6. Create Engaging Content
The best way to get an engaged audience is they create engaging content. Here’s how to do it:
- Have questions: Include questions that make prospects reflect on how they can implement the knowledge you imparted to have an excellent introduction to the 20% that read more of your content after the headline.
- Good introduction: It’s important to have a good introduction outlining what your blog post is about. Make sure the first few sentences are also worth reading.
- Include a story: This personally is hard for me, but I would include a story. Use an antidote in the introduction or have a story woven in the blog posts. When possible, include a story to help your blog posts.
7. Add Images and Video for Different Learners
Prospects learn differently. Some prospects learn better by seeing others by hearing. You can use pictures, videos, and diagrams to help illustrate your point. Look at Wikipedia. They have pictures to help add value and understanding to the reader. So remember only to add images that help or add value.
You can add stock photography as well, as long as it talks about the point that you’re trying to make.
8. Write Pointed Content
You can eliminate sentences and fluff for a better blog post or case study. There’s nothing better than a brief blog post filled with information for prospects. Word counts help, but it shouldn’t be the primary concern. You could aim for a three- to five-minute read. Most American adults can read 250 words per minute. That would put most blog posts at 750 to 1,250 words. Focus on having good content that will enrich your prospects and audience.
Think about having high-quality blog posts that will resonate with your readers instead of the longest post possible.
9. Updated Your Blog
Starting a blog is a commitment. You can write a few posts and then abandon the work. Don’t do that. Abide by a regular content calendar when you write new posts on a cadence. For example, you can write a new blog post each week. Many of the best sites are updated regularly. I would invest to at least publish one published blog created once a week to keep search engines happy.
Search engines don’t favor sites that aren’t regularly updated, so here’s the picture in the blog posts of how blogging has helped grow our site visits. Here's our visits growing from blogging 2-4 times a month:
Questions to Ask Yourself
Here are some last questions to ask yourself as you have finished writing your blog:
- When you read the post, do you have the proper title, grammar, and organization? Grammarly has helped me a lot. Get my post free of simple grammatical and spelling mistakes.
- Have I given the prospect the best information I can?
- Is the blog post as complete as I can make it?
Now let’s look at some websites that provide great content. The first is the Engineering News-Record. The magazine is great for those employed in the construction architecture and civil engineering industries.
What I like about this website:
- In-depth technical articles
- Great rankings
- A variety of different articles to keep you appraised of the industry
Now, the next website is fairly new, but I like it. David Ramsden-Wood authors the content, and he’s an alternative voice in the oil and gas industry.
Hot Take of the Day has great articles and podcasts and what I like best is:
- Highly entertaining podcasts
- Insightful content
- Simple layout to his site
