What your mom never told you about Content Creation & Content Writing
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Presentation given by The Agency's Senior Account Manager Meghan at Wordcamp YYC 2015 on content creation and content writing. A look at the W5 of content writing, it runs through how to come up with content ideas, different kinds of content, tips and tricks on how to create this content, and why you would even start creating content for your site.
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What your mom never told you about Content Creation & Content Writing
- 1. What your mom never told you about Content Creation & Content Writing &
- 3. Why April 2015 to yesterday
- 4. How did we do that? We knew our story – what is yours? Just say what first comes into your mind. It may not be “the perfect” key message. It probably won’t be your only one. It may also need a bit of work. But it’s a start. Don’t just create content for content’s sake Consider planning ahead
- 6. Types of Content Long Articles
- 7. Types of Content Listicles
- 8. Types of Content Advice & User Tips
- 9. Types of Content Interviews
- 10. Types of Content Infographics
- 11. Types of Content Company or Personal Updates
- 12. Types of Content Commentary on current events
- 13. Types of Content Can you think of any other types of content? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery What are some blogs and sites you have seen that you like? What did you like about them?
- 14. Sharing your content Social Media Newsletter Other channels you can think of?
- 15. Tips & Tricks Images – USE THEM Consistent Tone Google Analytics SEO & Keywords Call to actions
- 16. Questions? Meghan Somers – The Agency Email: meghan@theagencyinc.ca Twitter: @TheAgencyMeghan
Editor's Notes
- Hi my name’s Meghan and I am the Senior Account Manager at The Agency, a boutique Public Relations firm here in Calgary that specializes in the tech sector. I’m here to give you A look at the W5 (Who, What, Where, When, & Why) of content writing. We will run through how to come up with content ideas, different kinds of content, tips and tricks on how to create this content, and why you would even start creating content for your site.
- For a very long time, the company I work for – The Agency, did not have our own blog. We did extensive planning and work for our clients with regards to content creation, but it wasn’t until 2015 that we really buckled down and started pushing out our own content. Here is a screen shot of what our web traffic looked like in December 2014, the last month of our site being ‘blog-less’. Decent enough traffic considering we didn’t really do anything to push people to our site.
- Here is a screen shot of our web traffic from last month, April, until yesterday. That’s a 333% increase in traffic. The only thing that changed on our site in this 4 and a half month period is that we started creating content and blogo. So if you need an answer to the question you may begin to ask yourself once you get started on this process – Why am I doing this? Look at your google analytics, and they will help you reassure that you are doing this for a reason.
- One of the major reasons we have been so successful at creating content, for both ourselves and our clients’ sites, is that we know their story, and what they are trying to achieve as a result of blogging. Take out a piece of paper and a pen. Don’t worry I’m not going to make you take notes I just want to do a simple quick 1 min exercise to get you all thinking about your story. You can make it about your self or your company. Let’s get started Answer this question: What do you want people to remember or do as a result of hearing your story? Say your answer out loud right now. Don’t try to be clever, or quirky, or catchy – you’ll freeze up. Just say what first comes into your mind – now write that down. It may not be “the perfect” key message. It probably won’t be your only one. It may also need a bit of work. But it’s a start. Why is this question so important? Because it creates the foundation for your communications and messaging. Your story can be about your company, or your personal brand. It’s main purpose is to help you decide what to write about. Why am I talking about knowing your key messages and your story – because creating content for your site is about more than just word vomiting on a page. Having a plan, and a goal, not only will make your blog coherent but a couple months down the road when the shininess and excitement of content creation has worn off (and trust me it will) you will still be able to come up with content ideas. So you have your key messages – these key messages are what you will use to decide what you are going to write about. At The Agency, which is a boutique PR firm, we wanted to write about topics related to PR, both to show potential clients that we know what we are talking about, and to be a resource for other PR people. So we created a 12 month editorial calendar that had themes for each month, and created a plan for when and how often we would be posting.
- Creating an editorial calendar will give you a plan. Here is a screen shot of ours, which is similar to what we create for clients. We post, at a minimum, 4 times a month, which boils down to once a week. We don’t restrict ourselves from posting more often, but we find that 4 times is the most manageable based on our workload and how much time we have to devote to it. When we create these calendars for our clients, we consider the same things. Creating quality content takes time – so don’t over commit yourself. Once you have found your key messages and what you want to talk about, think realistically about how many times you can write a month. If you know you have some more time in the middle part of the month, plan to write some more in depth content then, and write less intensive content when you know that you don’t have much time usually. So we have the why and the when of our W5, but who are we writing for? Knowing who you are writing for is helpful in that it can help you figure out what the tone is for your blog. If it’s baking for beginners, then you would maybe use more simple recipes and tips for beginners. If it’s wordpress coding experts you want to reach, you would maybe have super technical content on your blog
- Here is a non-exhaustive list of different types of content you can publish on your site – the What, if you will Long articles – more in depth, require a lot of thought to write, and a lot of time. Medium.com publishes these in their online magazine frequently Listicles – very popular on the internet, is basically a list about a chosen topic (the 5 best ways to push out your content). Best example of Listicles is Buzzfeed, but sites like PRDaily or CIO do more in depth ones as well. Advice and User tips – short posts that give advice. if you are a tech startup, this could be user tips on how to use your product. If you are a food blogger, this could be the best way to beat egg whites. Basically a short how to on a topic you are an expert on. Anow, a CRM-type system for real estate appraisers, does this with a series of pro-tips they post on Tuesdays. Interview – Post a short interview. We’re in the PR space so we do quick interviews with Journalists that centers on advice for PR people. We had a client really interested in the Startups space so we launched a Resources for Startups column where we chatted with different organizations about how they helped startups. The key thing with interview pieces is to do your reach outs early because it can take a while for people to get back to you. Infographics – visual way of organizing info, take a lot of time to put together. These can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make them, just remember that the info should be short snippets. Company or Personal updates – did your company just hire a new sales manager? Write a post welcoming them to the team – people are checking your blog because they are interested in what you have to say and your company, so it’s good to keep them informed of what is going on there. You see this a lot in media blogs, where people announce when they are leaving journalism. A recent example of this is when a CO-EDITOR of TechCrunch left to go to business school. Commentary on current events – Oil and Gas services companies are doing this a lot right now, and chatting about how innovation can help save companies money
- Do you follow news outlets and blogs that think are doing a good job? Use them as an example and imitate. Don’t ‘steal’ their content, but create your own version of it. For example a site I follow pretty regularly is PRDaily and they use a lot of .gifs (or jifs if you will) as images – this is a tactic I would really like to use on our blog. Shout out some sites that you like. What do you like about them?
- So you’ve drafted this great content – now what? This is where the ‘Where’ of the W5 comes into play You have to share it. I once saw an article that said you should share your blog 8 times on twitter the day you post it. I think this is a little excessive, but they aren’t wrong in the fact that you should post it more than once. Come up with a few different ways to tweet/facebook post/LinkedIn group share/etc. your content other than just the title of your post. This way you won’t get frowned upon by your followers for sharing. Make sure use key hashtags in your posts so people looking for info on your topic see your content Do you have a newsletter? Include your content in there. What are some other channels you can think of? For example, Did you write your post in response to an article you saw on the CalgaryHerald’s site or to something you saw on Buzzfeed? Post a comment with a link to your content on the original article saying that you had some thoughts on the subject. Shout out the original article’s author on Social Media and say that they inspired you to write yours.
- Images and your blog - a picture is worth a thousand words, and content that uses images is almost always better received by any audience. You also don’t need to spend a fortune on stock photos – there are a lot of sites out there with archives of free images. Be careful of copyright and attribution rules though – do your research and make sure that you are using the proper attribution for that image. One major tip – use free image design sites like canva.com to add text and other design elements to images if you don’t have graphic design programs or skills. With your content be aware of what tone you are using. I don’t mean you have to be polite and PC, but if you are writing for business you may want to take a more formal tone. You also don’t want your content to have a split personality, jumping from super PC to super friendly, to being really snarky, as people will most likely not connect with your blog. One way you can get around this is if you have different authors, for example my account executive tends to write pieces in a more conversational casual tone versus my more formal pieces, but it’s tone consistency is something to be aware of. Has someone chatted about having Google Analytics on your site today? The easiest way to track how your content is being received is by how many people are actually visiting your page. If you notice that certain types of content, say your listicles, are driving more traffic to your site, take that into consideration and write more of them. Content creation is one great way to help with your organic SEO. Make sure you have a list of key words you use that you repeat in your article and your article tags. Also consider installing an SEO plugin tool on your wordpress backend and plug your keywords in there as well. If you can, try to include a call to action in your blog. It could be as simple as asking them to share their insights on the topic you wrote about in the comments section of your site or on social media, but including a Call to Action helps drive engagement with your content