Top 7 content writing skills- to be successful

If you are a writer either freelancer or in-house these 7 content writing skills will help you improve your content writing.

Writing holds an important place in your blog or website.

It deserves the same attention as the design of the blog or site. It is the first level of engagement between you and your potential audience.

Your writing sets the tone and defines the future steps in the customer engagement process.

Search engines rank your site based on the content it provides. Your writing skills drive the entire traffic and audience engagement on your site/blog. It plays a role in establishing you as a brand. Hence, the quality and quantity of your content, drive your business.

The role of content writers, therefore, becomes the key factor for audience engagement and website traffic.

Content writers must know the niche and the audience.

The correct writing skills allow the audience to engage further. There is no magic wand to achieve this.

You will write better content that strikes a chord with the customers and search engines to drive traffic and engagement by following the content writing skills listed below

 7 top Content Writing skills you should know as a content writer:

A headline that matters:

When do we click on an article/post?

Which article in a magazine or newspaper catches our eye?

The catchy and intriguing interest us, and we continue reading further.

Headlines that are gripping make the audience read further about the post. Headlines are as necessary as the rest of the article/post.

If headlines are impact less, the best of writing will not find engagement or traffic.

Create relevant headlines that are catchy and interest the audience.

There are tools such as online headline analyzers by https://headlines.coschedule.com that rate your headlines.

Check and tweak them if required to land the perfect or almost perfect headline that grabs the attention.

Create attention-grabbing first two lines

After the headline grabbed the attention, the following two lines should compel the audience to continue further.

So the following two lines after the headline are the deciding lines that determine whether the audience continues to engage or move away.

It takes two seconds to read those lines, so write such impactful lines that convert 2 seconds to 2 or 3 minutes read, based on the length of your post.

Create an impact, sync the attention-grabbing lines with the rest of the post.

Write articles/posts that are research-backed:

If you write a personal blog or general topic, it is ok to rely on your expertise.

However, writing for a brand is a different requirement.

You have a role in building the brand’s credibility and market reach, hence back the writing with necessary data and graphs, etc., to support it.

A central theme or idea–

Have a focused message or narrative and develop the surrounding writing.

E.g., to highlight how a particular product offered by an ed-tech company makes learning fun, keep that as your primary message and build your article/post around it.

Try to loop the writing back to the focus message as far as possible.

That way, you do not risk losing the primary message conveyed to the audience.

Write in a style that defines you or the brand:

If you write for your blog or site, adopt a tone or language that conveys what your site stands for.

E.g., if you have a platform that caters to kids, the writing style needs to match that.

Similarly, when writing for brands, adopting the tone and language that represents the brand, the target audience, and the goals of the brand or organization is necessary.

Optimize Content for search engines.

It is necessary to write content for the audience and connect with them.

At the same time, writing articles and posts that can reach out to audiences in the digital world is the need.

It is possible if you have optimization in place for search engines.

It is possible to drive traffic to the site and make it accessible to a larger audience digitally by using the best search engine optimization techniques and strategies,

Proofread your work.

After writing, the next important step is proofreading.

Check for grammatical errors and spellings. Content that has the best message but has grammatical and spelling errors is not well perceived.

Therefore, use online tools such as Hemmingway, and Grammarly, to help you correct your writing issues and improve your writing in terms of language.

Proofreading also helps to eliminate and refine your sentences, so do not omit this step.

It gives a polished look to the final writing piece.

Anyone can write, but to write posts and articles that rank higher on search engines, engages the audience, and drives traffic is an achievement.

Keeping these writing skills in mind helps you write high-quality content that positively impacts your brand or the brand/organization you represent.

Key takeaways 

• Write in your style to reflect your brand or adopt one that represents the brand/organization you write for
• Proofread your articles to refine and correct your grammatical and spelling issues
• Write attention-grabbing headlines
• Couple of lines that follow the headline determine whether it would be a 30 second or 2 minutes read, so make them count.
• Search engine optimization drives traffic
• A central message around which the content loops conveys the point home
• When writing for a brand, substantiate your writing with research