As search engines favor the creation of high-quality content, writers and publishers have become more important than ever.
But if you want to maximize the available resources to have at your reach, then hiring writers may not even be an option.
Outsourcing content writing from cheap job sites may not be the solution either if they are serious about providing content on their websites that their readers will find useful. Purchasing article spinners for this purpose is a no-no as well.
Therefore, for webmasters and marketers working within their budgets, they take up the task of writing content themselves to publish on their site or blog.
However, this becomes a problem if they are not natural writers. They find it difficult or are not confident enough to express their thoughts in the sentences they write.
If you feel like one of these non-writers, then the step-by-step guide below will help you approach writing much easier. By following the steps, you will be able to write tighter articles and improve your writing skills.
Mindmap your content ideas
Organizing your thoughts is the most important thing that you as an aspiring writer must do before writing the content. After choosing your target keyword, you need to come up with an irresistible title and plot out the content outline to make the writing process much easier.
Below are tools that you should use for this purpose:
- Title generators – If you are finding it difficult to come up with a compelling title, you can use the ones listed in this post at Social Media Explorer. In fact, the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator is one of the best in the market. After entering your keyword, you will receive hundreds of suggestions that you can use as your title. Verify its effectiveness by using the Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule.
- Mind-mapping tools – If you want to brainstorm for ideas online, these mind-mapping tools should do the trick. These will help you diagram your ideas much clearer to write your articles with a consistent flow.
- Project management tools – To manage your content writing much more efficiently, you may need to use a project management tool. These allow you to create projects and tasks, so you have all the information for your clients in the right places. The tools also allow collaboration with your co-workers so you can track your progress and stay on top of your priority tasks.
Run your content using a grammar checker tool
As a novice writer, you will have some oversights when writing your content. In fact, confusing yourself with the different prepositions, writing your sentences in the passive voice, and having inconsistent grammar are mistakes that even the best writers commit from time to time.
For this, you need to use grammar checking tools to tighten up your writing.
I suggest both Grammarly and Hemingway while writing the post. The former detects grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors not seen by the untrained eye. The latter points out the readability of your post, hard to read sentences that you should edit, and adverbs that you need to take out.
Include images
While writing is an integral part of publishing content that will rank on search results, you should supplement it with visual content.
The use of images, infographics, and videos in your post helps make your content much more dynamic for readers. Not only are your readers supplied with relevant information from the text you write, but also are compelled by the visual content embedded in the post.
Unless you have access to paid images, you should use free stock photos instead to make sure you are in the clear from copyright issues. Pixabay is an image search engine with the largest and most relevant database of free stock photos that you can use on your sites.
To customize the images with your branding and make much more compelling, you can use PicMonkey or Canva to edit them. You can add filters and drop and drop elements onto the photo to achieve the look you want.
Ensure uniqueness of content
There’s a chance that you share the same sentence or phrase with any of the eight billion pages indexed by search engines. Whether intentional or not, there is a large possibility that your content will be penalized by Google and dropped out from search results.
To avoid this, you need to use a plagiarism checker tool. Grammarly Premium has this feature when you are writing your content. It shows the string of words that matches the ones from other indexed pages online. You can also use Unplag, which has the most sophisticated plagiarism detection engine on the market.
Peer review
A creative way of doing this is to request bloggers within your niche to review a draft of your content. Once checked, you can include a link to their blog or site below the article, thanking them for editing your article. This way, there is a high chance that the writers will review the content for you.
Another site that can help you is MyBlogU. It has an Articles section where you can upload your content so other content can edit and review it to receive suggestions for improvement.
Final thoughts
Following the use of tools above should prep your article for publishing. Once you do, you can expect your article to rank atop search results for your target keyword. Not bad for a non-writer!
Images: “Content on typewriter/Shutterstock.com“
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An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
