Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

While doing some research, I came across a guy who ended up firing his outsourced content writing staff because they weren't giving him what he wanted. I can't help but think that better communication could have fixed most, if not all, of his issues with his outsourced writers. He complained specifically about the articles being produced being "dry" with "no soul in them."

I'm left wondering whether he discussed these problems with his writers. Speaking personally, as someone who writes a lot of blogs, I love opportunities to let my hair down a bit and write content that's a bit fun as well as factual. After all, I doubt very many people enjoy writing articles that are "dull as dishwater."

What this illustrates to me is the importance of communicating with your blog writer when content writing goes bad.

Communication Makes Outsourced Content Writing Better

The author of that article is right about one thing. If you put up a content job with minimal instructions outside of the article title and a list of keywords, you probably are going to get back a fairly plain article. Content writers are going to be conservative in the face of minimal instructions. They aren't going to put too much personality into an article if they fear that personality will just garner rejections.

However, there's no need for it to be that way. Content writers thrive on feedback and the more you tell them about your wants and needs, the better they'll be able to meet them. Now, of course, some may still be unable to meet your needs, but you'll never know if you don't ask.

Care and Feeding of Your Outsourced Content Writer

There are some fairly easy things you can do to ensure good communication between yourself and your content writer. However - and this is the important bit - most of them require you to know in detail what you want from your blog writing. The better you understand your goals and strategies, the easier it will be to explain them to your writer.

• Create a Style Sheet: Do like the newspapers and magazines do. Make a style guide that covers how you want the blog written, including aspects like how much personality you want it to show. Just remember that your writer will likely treat these as rules, rather than guidelines, if they're in doubt.

• Give specific feedback: If you aren't happy with your blog writer's output, step one should be to simply tell them about it. Talk about your strategies and goals and why you don't think the blog is currently reaching them.

• Start a conversation: If your blog writer specializes in your industry, just talk to them. Chances are they've come across items of interest in their own research that might be able to help you out. There's no harm in asking for suggestions, and if your writer gives you good ideas, you've probably got a keeper. Just like with your customers, the more engaged your writer is, the better they'll do.

• Consider your keywords: Remember that your keyword choices will limit your writer's options. Using the infinitive form of a term, like "to buy a car" will force the writer to write using passive language like "those who want to buy a car," creating a weaker article. Try to pick keywords that can be easily integrated into more active and interesting content.

In short, many writer relationships are totally salvageable with a little communication. Share your ideas and strategies with them and discuss what sort of tone you want. The more informed your writer is, the better their content writing will be.

What tips do you have for working with content writers?   

If you're just starting out in the world of content marketing, you're probably going to write your own content for quite awhile. While full-service inbound marketing firms offer a lot of bang for your buck, it's a big investment for someone looking to get their feet wet in the blogging world. You, or someone in your office, are going to write content for your site before anyone else does.

The good news is, anyone can write content for their website. As long as you follow a few simple rules, you'll be able to come up with blogs and whitepapers for your website that look like work done by professionals, while only “costing” you the time it takes to put words into a document.

Some Easy Rules For How To Write Content Like a Pro

• Maintain a consistent voice: In general, you should pick one “voice” for your blog and stick with it. Don't constantly jump between perspectives (like first- or third-person) and tones, or it will stick out. The only exception to this is if the blog is being maintained by multiple people – which is nice if you have the resources for it – in which case each writer should try to have their own distinctive voice.

• Only have one topic per blog: Resist the urge to make your written content too broad in scope. Each piece of content should have one specific goal or purpose. If you're covering a large topic with a lot of aspects, break it into several smaller blogs, each explicitly focusing on one part of the whole. This is a good place to apply your organizational skills.

• Stay concise and to the point: Don't overwrite. While opinions vary on the “perfect” length of a blog, generally speaking, if it's more than a thousand words, it's probably too long. Posts in the area of 400-800 words seem to work best. If you really want to pen a longer piece than that, consider making it an eBook or whitepaper and using a Call To Action to drive leads to it.

• Write to your audience: While it's fine to use your blog as a personal soapbox every now and then, remember that for the most part you need to write content that your visitors want to read. Talk to your sales and marketing group and work up a profile of what your average visitors look like, and try to focus on content that will appeal to them specifically.

• Be restrained in your keyword use: Layman readers may not know what a “keyword ratio” is, but they'll notice it if you're repeating the same phrase over and over. Writing that's overly focused on keywords will generally look amateurish and be harder to read. Besides, with the new Google Penguin updates, hammering on the same keyword repeatedly may not even gain you any extra traction anyway. Try using keyword variations to make your content writing more dynamic instead.

• Back up your assertions: Source as many of your claims as you can, especially if you're using specific numbers or borrowing another writer's argument. Well-sourced blogs look more professional, and they're more likely to impress people into sharing them. When in doubt, just think back to your college days and the rules of citation you learned in Freshman Comp. That same level of rigor in sourcing will aid you when you write content for your blog and increase your credibility.
  

• Use good headlines and subheadings: Since you only have a matter of seconds to grab visitors' attention, eye-catching headings are a must. Plus, readers' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text. Subheadings make your content scan more easily and increases the chances of someone reading – or at least skimming – through all of it.

What other rules have you developed for writing content? Share what you've discovered in the comments section!   

Some employers believe that once they hire a website content writing service to provide articles for their website, that's all they need to do. The content creation company writes the material, it gets posted to the website, and that's that. Right?

Well... not really. While it's true that a website content writing service will greatly reduce the amount of time you or your PR team have to spend working on the website, it's not a "fire and forget" sort of situation. You still need to maintain good oversight and ensure that the content continues to match the quality and messaging your Internet marketing strategies require.

In short, you can't let your content writers off the hook once you've signed on the bottom line. You need to make sure they stay on-course.

Tips For Managing Your Website Content Writing Service

Proper Feedback

Perhaps the single most important factor in dealing with a writing service is communication. Fundamentally, a content writer will only be as good as the feedback and instructions you provide.

It's all too easy for a content writer, even a good one, to get into a rut where they're writing the same sorts of articles over and over if there's no one above them watching out for it. Since effective content marketing requires a large bulk of unique content, you should have someone overseeing the output, watching for repetition, and suggesting new topics for your writer to talk about.

Also, if they're doing something wrong or producing content that doesn't fit your idea for the site, the best thing you can do is tell them about it ASAP. The more detailed your feedback is in terms of what you'd like to see done differently, the better they will be able to meet your expectations.

Keep Them In The Loop

The more your content writers know about your overall vision and strategy, the better they will do. If you have a high-level meeting where you decide to change the focus of your website, your writers should be among the first to know so they can start developing a new "voice" for your website writing.

This can even extend to small things. If a content writing service knows that your company is forward-thinking and progressive, they can slip in references to the future and new developments to support this idea. If your company is more of a traditionalist, your writers can reflect this as well through an emphasis on the "good old days" and tried-and-true methods.

Your website's content is part of your company's voice, so your content writers need to know what that voice should sound like.

Watch For Questionable Tactics

Unfortunately, there are website writers out there who try to cut corners. Perhaps they're overworked, or perhaps they don't care about quality, or perhaps they just think you won't notice. Either way, they're out there, and you need to keep an eye out to ensure they don't try to "cheat" when producing your content.

One method to especially watch for is called spinning. In content writing, "spinning" means taking an existing article and running it through an automated thesaurus that replaces words with synonyms, creating multiple "new" articles with the exact same content. Many writers who accept extremely low per-word rates use software to do this, allowing them to rapidly churn out junk articles that still pass plagiarism checkers.

Other writers sometimes plagiarize ideas without adding anything new. It's inevitable that there will be some idea recycling - after all, one article about SEO basics is going to look much like any other - but you need to keep on them and remind them to introduce new ideas and concepts into your content.

In short, hiring a website content writing service is a great way to simplify your content marketing, but you still need to keep a hand on the reins.

How do you manage YOUR content writing?  

Believe it or not, one of the single best advertising and PR investments your company can make is simply hiring a good content writer.

After all, we're living in an age of information. Whether it's “right” or not, the online public expects a steady stream of information about the companies they're interested in. You have to write blog posts about your thoughts on the industry and your upcoming products. You have to make Facebook posts with pictures of your latest event, Twitter announcements of new promotions, and more. It's enough to drive one to distraction.

Fundamentally, you have to work harder to attract online customers than in just about any other area of marketing. You have to be putting out new content constantly.

And that's why a good content writer really can be your business's best friend.

Why You Need a Quality Content Writer

• Good content brings good leads.

  It's easy to forget in all the numbers and statistics of SEO, but at the end of the day, you have to be putting out content writing that people want to read. Blog writing that is going unread and uncommented-upon isn't doing you much good at all. Maybe it's attracting eyeballs, but they're bouncing away almost immediately. (Now there's an odd mental image...)

• Content writers understand different markets.

  Good content writing is very much an art, and a difficult skill to learn. It's not just a matter of stringing words together in a grammatically correct fashion; it's about picking the right words to appeal to specific audiences or markets. A piece of rhetoric aimed at Boomers, for example, would fall utterly flat if sent to Millennials, because of differences in how the different generations view the world. It takes years of practice to begin to master this process, but this is where great content writers excel.

• They probably understand SEO nearly as well as you do.

  Professional content writers have to be well-versed in the theories of SEO, or they're not going to get much work. Concepts like keywords, viral marketing, search page rankings, and social sharing are part of the business. Further, they also understand how to integrate these into content without distracting from the ideas and messages being pushed. Fundamentally, good SEO should be invisible to your visitors, like sleight-of-hand, and a content writer knows how to do this.

• They know how to write for different mediums.

  A blog post is not a Facebook update is not a Tweet. Copy on your landing pages is going to look totally different from copy on a newsletter. Every medium you could use for your message has its own attributes and focus, and a good content writer knows these differences and can make sure that you stay on-message while still adjusting your content to fit the format.

• Content writers come cheap.

  There's no reason to beat around the bush here. It's not even necessary to hire a writer full-time to work in your office, although that's certainly one option, especially if you want to be hands-on. However, freelancers abound, and there are dozens of brokering services such as Zerys and Textbroker which have stables full of hungry writers looking for their next big opportunity. With rates generally well under 5c a word (at least for all but the most technical subjects), they can be easily afforded by virtually any business.

Content Writers: Smart, Productive, and Inexpensive

A good content writer is your ticket to more visitors, more leads, and higher-quality content all around. They get your message out to the people you want to see it, writing to specific markets as needed, and save you from having to do it yourself. Considering how cheap good writers come these days, there just aren't many good reasons why you wouldn't want to hire one.

How have you used a content writer to increase your leads or communicate more effectively?  

The Internet is all about content these days: video, visual, and especially written content. All of this hype comes from the really hot trend of using content marketing to help boost a business's reach online and to land new customers. Why? Simply because it is entertaining for the viewer. Instead of being bombarded with in your face advertisements like on television, content marketing lets customers connect with brands in a unique and engaging way that hasn't been seen before. However, what about unique content creation? Hiring on a content writing service doesn't have to break the bank!

Businesses have the ability to outsource all of their written content, but sometimes that can really add up with certain freelance writers. Instead, business owners and marketing professionals should look into outsourcing with websites such as: Zerys, Media Piston, eLance, or Freelancer. Why choose these websites?

• Websites like the ones mentioned above help businesses get quality content without having to pay thousands of dollars. Freelance writers of all walks of life can help you create content that will be SEO friendly and boost your viewership.

• You can choose what the rate for each piece of content will be, while with job sites like eLance and Freelancer writers can "bid" on your work in order to win that project. There are thousands of writers a part of the content writing service.

• Fast turn around means you can have your content immediately with little editing and proofreading involved. Writers and editors on the site will do all of the content work including editing.

• It doesn't matter what industry you are, writers will be there to help you!

Where else can you find writers to create great content writing? Other than the websites provided you can also find inexpensive content writers at Craigslist, freelance writing forums, or even on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Another great way to find a writer within your customer base is putting out an ad right on your website. However, if your budget is closer to the zero mark than you'd like to admit, you have the potential to find new up-and-coming writers who will do the work for free, in exchange to have valid work to put in their portfolio.

Small businesses need to stay ahead and one of the most inexpensive ways to do that is utilizing content marketing and employing a content writing service to do all of that heavy lifting. Content writing means using great content on your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else you want to publish content and be seen by new viewers. However, it is more than just having content written and going on your merry way.

Content also needs to be shareable and entertaining. Business writing shouldn't be stuffy and boring anymore, it needs to be relatable to the customer and even offer some helpful information that can be great take-aways from the content. Of course, when it comes to creating content, this all depends on how well you describe the content you need to the writers on the content writing services.

Have you ever used a content writer to create content for you? And have you tried the methods mentioned?