We’ve been told we MUST provide great content marketing for our businesses, but there seems to be conflicting tips and trends out there.

Great content marketing is actually pretty straightforward! If it feels complicated or overwhelming, then you’ll be happy I’m sharing this with you. Let me impart the “not so great stuff” I’ve seen.

Information Floodgate

You’ve seen them – articles and emails chock full of great information. But they’re too much! It’s like drinking water from a fire hose. If you print out the article, it winds up being several pages long. That’s ok for an e-book or white paper, but as far as blogs and email campaigns are concerned, you’re losing your reader’s attention and you’re lucky if they make it halfway through.

When you have LOTS to talk about, break up the content in a 2- or even 3-part series. Your readers will thank you, as they’ll have a chance to digest the information.

Inappropriate Language

Nope, not talking potty mouth. I’m referring to language that’s either too formal or too casual/immature for your intended audience. Often WHAT someone has to say gets side-swiped by cute terms or corporate-speak. You’re not entertaining a middle-school class and you’re not writing a dissertation. Who is your perfect prospect? Do they speak this way? Would they easily understand it? Read it out loud and that will give you a better idea of the proper tone. If it doesn’t sound good it won’t read good. Um.. well.

Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation

You knew that was coming! Yes, we’ve all hit typos or get confused about grammar rules and feel semi-colons are not a “thing”. But the fact is that while your tone should be natural, the rules of writing do need to be followed. You don’t want to sound rushed or careless. Get someone to check over your work. And please make friends with commas and semi-colons!

Enough of that – let’s share what does work –

Tell the story of how you helped a client. Leave out personal identifying factors and give us only the relevant details of how you solved their challenge.

Keep it simple. After writing your content, read it over with the intent of cutting it down at least 10%. And then cut 5% more. Whatever you wrote in your first draft, I promise you: it’s too long. We have short attention spans, so be ruthless in your editing.

We’re humans – give us emotion. For every problem, there’s a deeper impact of the problem. People are trained to be polite so you don’t hear their deeper pain. However, do address that pain in your content so we know that you’re really listening. Cold facts only go so far. Make us feel it!

That’s it – I wanted to keep this under 600 words because I know that I start to lose my audience after that.

If you find writing great content 2 or 3 times a month to be too challenging or stressful or even boring, please reach out so we can chat about how I might help.