How to choose the best words to write better articles

So many people get hung up on all of the different marketing tasks they need to do, that they forget to focus on what they need to say. But content is still king!

If you are making an effort to manage an editorial calendar, strategically plot your blog posts to target a variety of personas, and then methodically follow your sharing recipe…how much time are you spending on actually creating content that people are searching for?

There’s a science to writing marketing copy that takes your words to the next level. Not only does it need to satisfy your readers with real, substantial information thoroughly, but it also needs to meet specific strategical objectives to help give you ROI.

Here are 6 helpful tips that we follow when we sit down to write:

1. Be strategic and plan.

This is a simple checklist that we start every blog draft with so that we are focused:

• PERSONA
• TOPIC
• WORKING TITLE
• KEYWORDS
• CATEGORIES
• TAGS

Next, we start mapping out the key points that we want to hit. You can try the old-school way with pen and paper or try a neat online resource like  Wordstorm. If you’re stuck on how to get creative, here is a great read from CoSchedule about 4 Simple Brainstorming Techniques That Will Help You Write Killer Content.

2. Determine which persona(s) you’re writing for and what they need to read.

You have a variety of  buyer personas—so who are you writing for? What are they interested in? What can you share with them that will help them? Can you give them tips or tricks that they may not be able to get anywhere else?

To know the answers to this, you need to consider two things:

• Are you listening?
• Are you asking?

HOOTSUITE’S LISTENING PLATFORM

Social monitoring is critical to being relevant to your audiences. There are a wide variety of tools available to monitor—and listen to. You can create social streams in Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Or you can try a dedicated listening service like Mention.

3. Identify your keywords.

Yes, creating custom content that solves problems is critical. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to go back and make sure you are thoughtful including your keywords.

After we make our keyword list and have written our drafts, we go back and highlight our article keywords within to make sure we’ve gotten them all. Remember, the key is to make sure you’re adding keywords into your post in a smart way—you can’t just plop them in!

4. Plan your formatting and visuals.

Your article needs visual support. Think about it, how excited do you get to read a long blog that seems like an endless paragraph, ph after paragraph. How you present, your article is almost as important as what you have to say.

Try organizing your blog to include a mix of bulleted and numbered lists, callouts, embedded videos, and images. Make sure you give credit where credit is due and include a proper citation for someone else’s image.

Remember to pick compelling images because as you share them socially, those images will be auto-pulled in and will help get your article noticed.TIP: Optimize images by naming them properly so they’re searchable. Don’t forget to alt text too.

5. Review, proof, repeat.

We’re all guilty of rushing. But stop. Read. Proof. Reread. 

Don’t just rely on yourself. You’ve written your blog and can easily miss a typo because your mind knows what you are trying to say…even if you’ve missed a word or two.

6. Create a working title.

We know this seems odd to be the last item, but that’s how we do it. Sometimes, we find that our articles may shift as we’re writing them. We may add in a few additional keywords. And the full power of what we are saying comes together when we’re done proofing. So start with a working title, but never end there.

Your title is key to getting read. Don’t be too clever so that the actual topic isn’t recognizable because of the title. And don’t be boring and throw away your chance to pique your reader’s curiosity. 

We’re going to share our favorite resource with you. It’s CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. And it’s genius. Bookmark this page and never post an article again without using it.

Our working title for this article was: “Choose your words wisely for your blog”

Here’s the evolution of our title through the Headline Analyzer. Notice that we keep going and trying to get into at least a green/A range. And then we see what other options we may want to use for messaging to use when  reposting to maximize your blog post.