Over 6 million blog posts are published every day. And a vast majority of them drown in the sea of data, never to be read again.
Why so?
Because they are averagely written by an average writer.
Let’s look at a few content writing mistakes that make you an average content writer who nobody wants to read. By the end of this quick post, you’ll learn to create better content people love consuming.
No more beating around the bush. Let’s get to the point.
1. Superficial Research Is a Big NO
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.
Charles Buckowski was surely a nihilist but he was right about that.
The greatness of your content depends on your research. The deeper your research is, the more amazing your content.
But research is boring. You don’t enjoy scanning through text-loaded research, whitepapers, blog posts and other sorts of content. Until it is on Netflix, right. So you often start writing without going into the depth of the subject matter.
And this is one of the common content writing mistakes every writer has to avoid. To be a great content writer, you have to dive deep into the sea of information to extract the precious pearls of insights, even if it is filled with sharks of boredom.
So if you’re eyeing on amazing results with your content, say no to superficial research.
Backlinko’s blog is the prime example of why you should conduct in-depth research before writing a content piece.
Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, always focuses on creating what he calls Power Pages. A ridiculously comprehensive and insightful content piece covering a topic from every possible angle.
These power pages are a result of in-depth research. Providing almost all the answers for your queries, these pages eventually leave you doubt-free and satisfied. As a result, these well-researched pages rank on top of SERPs for some of the most competitive keywords.
So if you don’t want to be an average writer, make sure you’re not committing basic content writing mistakes like surface-level research. After reading your content piece, your readers should leave your site with a sigh of relief. Simply put, always research well and satisfy search intent.
2. Great Writers Don’t Just Write
You’re not paid to write, but to think, says Jasmin Alic, a Fortune 500 copywriter.
What does that mean? Let me explain.
Besides content creation, there are plenty of other activities you must perform regularly as a writer. Not performing these activities can also be counted as a content writing mistake. Here’s a brief list of some of these must-do activities:
Content Performance Analysis
Among all content writing mistakes, this is also a frequent one. Content writers, especially new ones, refrain from tracking content’s performance. Analyzing your content helps you identify its strong points and loopholes. This enables you to improve your content and get even better results.
Hence, you need to always keep an eye on your content performance to find out if there’s anything fishy. You can use free but insightful tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, etc. to at least begin with.
Link Building
Google is biased. It always ranks up the content with a shitload of backlinks. So, you should also focus on building backlinks to your content once you publish it.
You can email relevant websites in your niche asking to link to your content. But don’t spam them. If your content is truly valuable, people will naturally link to it without much persuasion. Eventually, you’ll get the link juice, pushing your content upwards in the search results.
Social Media Promotions
As soon as you create a content piece, you must expose it to the audience immediately. And there’s no better way than social media for this. So, even if your social handle has minimal followers, you must step promote your content yourself. Who knows which of your posts go viral? Just make sure you’re not just dumping links on the platforms. That’ll take you nowhere.
Basic & Technical SEO
Content and SEO goes hand in hand.
And if you don’t want to stand in the queue of average writers, you must learn SEO. at least the basics of it.
There are several factors that eventually impact the performance of your content. Keyword frequency, internal and external linking, meta tags, to name a few. Having an idea of these SEO basics, while avoiding the mentioned content writing mistakes would help you maximize the performance of your content piece.
3/ Don’t Be a Lone Ranger
A lone ranger seems good in the movies. But you’re not Johnny Depp.
In real life, working alone makes things harder for you as a writer.
You need to collaborate inside your team and outside as well to get the best output from your content.
For instance, by connecting with your sales and support team, you can find out what features customers like in your product and what pisses them off. This will help you identify their pain points so you can create content that will help them deal with their issues.
Besides your in-house team, you can also collaborate with people outside your company to help you create better content.
For example, you can use tools like Connectively, Help A B2B Writer to ask experts about their opinions on a topic you’re writing. Including their thoughts in your content piece will make your content look more credible. It’ll also give collaborators a reason to promote your content since they featured in it. Win Win for both.
So if you don’t want to be an average writer, just get out of your bubble and start collaborating.
4. Stop Cursing AI Tools
AI is here to stay. In fact, it has already settled in.
You can either swear at them or let them be your copilot.
After using these AI writing tools almost everyday, I find that they can’t come anywhere near to a creative writer. However, they can still be your assistant and help you at places like:
Overcoming Writer’s Block
When you’re not getting any ideas on how to begin with a topic, you can ask these AI tools to generate an outline, an introduction or something.
A trivia: I used ChatGPT to generate an outline for this post. Though I didn’t follow it, it gave me an idea on how to begin.
But I’ll suggest you not to rely heavily on these outlines or content as most of the time it is an average written material. Defeating the whole purpose of reading this blog.
Trim, Stretch, Proofread or Improve Snippets
The best use case for a content writer for these AI tools is editing content snippets. I often ask ChatGPT or Bing AI to improve a sentence, shorten a phrase or proofread a paragraph. Most of the time, they give me a better result. Here’s an example:
Get the Redundant Tasks Done
There are plenty of pieces that do not require enough pondering. Like a formal email reminding customers about their due payment. In such cases, you can use AI tools to generate straightforward content in a blink.
Give You a Bunch of Keywords to Target
You can ask the AI tools to list down some keywords related to the topic you’re writing about.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to show me some keywords related to donor management. And it produced some good results:
Again I’ll say don’t bank on it totally but you can take an idea.
A great writer always leverages every possibility out there in his/her favor to create something better and better. AI brings you such opportunities to your table. But again, fully relying on them would be one of the most dreadful content writing mistakes of your career.
At The End…
Writing great content only doesn’t make you a great content writer.
You need to excel in other domains like SEO, social media marketing, link building, researching, collaboration, using AI tools as well.
By implementing the tips and avoiding the content writing mistakes outlined above, you can stand out in the crowd of average writers and take your content writing to the next level.
Good.
Thank you 🙂