Content marketing is not just about texts
It’s about selling through texts. Today, content is an important tool for business promotion, so the demand for it is very high. And a good content expert is a rarity nowadays. Therefore, if you are a good writer, you can earn good money. Therefore, we will now give you a few tips on how to boost the value of your services.
Study basic marketing analysis
In other words, this includes analysis of the target audience, competitors’ content, and analysis of the customer’s product or service. If you create complex content marketing (you oversee your client’s blog, write texts for the site, posts for social networks, and texts for mailings). It is a smart idea to create a complete content strategy and stick to it in the future.
Perfect content plan
Once my colleague and I spent a week analyzing 80 (!) competitors of our client. We studied if they had blogs, how they ran them, what articles were the most popular, what could be adopted, and what could be discarded without regret. The content strategy summarized the result of this analysis in a couple of paragraphs.
As a result, we got content that perfectly matched the goals and objectives of the client, hitting directly at the target audience.
Learn the basics of SEO
In other words, you should learn the basic principles of search engine optimization, internal and external SEO. As well as the ability to create meta tags (H1, Title, Description), links to other pages, and working with keywords. At a minimum, you should know how to select them in the keyword planner and competently embed them in the text to give it prominence. At a maximum, you should know how to create a semantic core and, based on this, create a content plan and themes for articles. Such articles are much more expensive and much more effective in any type of promotion.
Work with content creation tools
Work in Photoshop and Canva to create illustrations. Easel.ly will help create infographics, and Meme Generator will help create funny memes. Record a podcast with Audacity and Sound Forge. If you can enhance your texts with pictures, videos, and graphics, the price will be much higher.
Introduce new journalistic skills
Sooner or later, any author receives a serious assignment: to interview an executive, write a company story, a press release for the media, or a business case. You can refuse and say: I’m not a journalist, or you can learn new formats. Journalistic materials are traditionally better paid than general SEO texts.
Practice your PR skills
A simple example: your client not only wants to blog but also publish on external sites to build up the target audience and get a coveted link to the site from a cool resource. Make a list of sites for publication, communicate with the editor, build contacts, negotiate placement and get decent case studies on a wide variety of sites.
Master CMS
If you know the popular content management systems WordPress, Tilda, Bitrix, OpenCart, etc., you can publish an article on the site, format and edit the material and be sure that your project comes out exactly as you planned. Also, you can consider yourself not just a copywriter but the administrator of the site with extra pay.
Practice your content distribution skills
It’s not enough to write an article. You need to make sure it is seen by as many readers and potential clients as possible. That means the author and editor need the skills to distribute content and adapt it to different venues. This requires the understanding of the specifics of each site and the ability to skillfully play around with the text, transforming it into different formats. For example, an informational article can be turned into several resizes for a post on social networks in a question-and-answer format, an article for a wide audience in Medium, or an email dispatch with a catchy headline. This is serious marketing.
Learn to analyze
At least in Google Analytics. Without it, all your amazing texts and strategies are only words. Armed with analytics data, you can report back to your client. Explain your ideas and suggestions in the language of numbers and facts. Businesses appreciate it.
Besides, you will understand whether your texts are read to the end, which topics are most interesting to readers, and which gain a low number of hits. Based on this, you can and should adjust your content plan, focusing on topics that readers like and dropping those which attract little interest.
Learn how to keep documentation
Even if you’ve worked with clients all your life without any paperwork or invoices, it’s time to reconsider. Comprehensive documentation for every project is the key to your peace of mind. Keep templates of briefs, quotations, contracts, invoices for your services. And for those who want perfect articles without effort. There are agencies such as Translators Family. We can free up their time, allowing them to focus on more important tasks.
So, order a linguistic business package from Translators Family. Make your copywriting effective and top-of-the-line by entrusting it to professionals.