There is content to seas. And anyone who creates content for a blog, a social profile, a website, a forum, etc. You will understand the level of competitiveness out there. Being unique and engaging your readers or viewers requires several things: choosing the right topics, writing well, being creative in your presentation, and knowing the needs and tastes of your target audience.
But how can an entrepreneur or content creator do all this? There are tools and services that can help you write content and make your content a success.
Let’s take a look at seven of them.
- Topic Generators
- Headlines
- Investigation
- Professional or writing services
- Readability
- Entertainment or inspiration as a factor in content generation
- Visuals and video tools
Topic Generators
If you have done an investigation of the audience and are aware of their problems and concerns, you are ready to generate topics of their interest. Good content creators generate playlists long before writing about them. They develop a publication calendar and are consistent and frequent in their writing. That is the only way to keep your audience and also get new followers.
Thinking about topics doesn’t have to be an arduous task. There are tools that will provide you with the most current, popular and hot topics in your content niche. Use them – they’ve already done that job for you!
One of the best topic generators is HubSpot. By entering just one keyword, you can get ideas for an entire year. Another tool of this type is Buzzsumo, especially if you want to find out what topics your competitors use the most.
Generating themes is only the first step. There are a lot of people writing about the same thing, so you have to find a unique perspective or improve and rewrite the content that others have already created. If you don’t do something new and different, your readers won’t value your content.
Headlines
Did you know that Upworthy spends as much time writing headlines as doing the entire article? In fact, they generate at least 25 headlines for each piece of content in a brainstorm. That’s how important the headlines are.
Ask any journalist and they will tell you that the headline is the most critical thing in an article. It is what will get the audience hooked immediately and encouraged to continue reading. The subtitle and the first lines are the second most relevant thing.
Headlines need to intrigue and offer key information. In addition, they must provide psychological motivation.
For this, there are two tools that you will love.
- Portent: introduce a topic and get ideas for making good headlines
- Co-Schedule Headline Analysis: When you already have a headline, analyze it with this tool. It will indicate the most powerful words and the most emotionally charged fragments, among other things. In the end, you will have a score for each item, as well as an overall rating.
Tip: Even if you want to hook your audience with a headline, don’t be dishonest. You have to be able to count what the title sells. If not, readers will bounce and many will not return.
Investigation
You should seem like an authority or an expert in your niche. Your readers must believe that you have the information they want or need. One of the best ways to do this is to research the topics you write about and add references to your content.
You do not need to introduce yourself as an academic, but it is good that you refer to the sources that support what you are saying.
One of the best tools to investigate is Atlas. It is part of the Quartz data centre and offers many charts, tables, and other visual information. His studies and data range from science to other lighter subjects. Imagine how much time it can save you and the respect you will earn implementing this type of visuals in your content.
Of course, there is always the option to investigate through Google searches (and other sources) and you can use that information if it is updated.
The key is that you want to sound like you know everything about the topic you’re writing about. This is how readers will trust you to be the person they get information or training from.
Professional or writing services
Many small businesses or entrepreneurs choose this alternative. These are some of the reasons:
- They don’t have time to maintain their blogs, social profiles, email marketing, etc. Good content requires consistency and frequency.
- Entrepreneurs often don’t have the writing skills or talent. They are not marketing specialists. In that case, they must trust other people who create the content of their website, blog, etc.
There are many ways to find those people known as copywriters. Finding someone who meets your needs can take some research and experimentation. Here are some places where you can search:
- Upwork is a website with a large number of freelancers and copywriting is a very important category within its structure. There, you can “interview” potential writers, take a look at their portfolios, and make an informed decision.
- There are several professional writing services. Many of them, like Trust My Paper, have qualified staff with extensive creative writing experience in copywriting departments.
- Freelancer is another company that connects people looking for a service with professionals who can offer it. It works in a very similar way to Upwork.
If an entrepreneur has such a need, there are many ways to get quality content. Most of these alternatives are also quite inexpensive.
Readability
There are a couple of aspects to consider here. First, whatever your content is, it has to be well written, grammatically correct and organized in a way that is easy to read. Also, tone, style, and above all, structure and vocabulary, have to be tailored to your target audience.
If the content is aimed at the scientific community, then the language and tone you use has to be formal and the vocabulary sophisticated enough.
However, most of the content is unscientific. It is intended for users looking for simple information. A potential customer looking for garden products or garden information does not want to read scientific data about substrate analysis, etc. He simply wants interesting information for his problems. A good content creator will provide you with this easily.
How to ensure that your content is as simple as possible?
First, you can break it into small sections with subtitles and add point-by-point lists. But in addition to that, you will need to make sure that the content itself is easy to assimilate. Here are a few tools for this:
- Grammarly: get a complete analysis of your content. The editor will tell you if your sentences are too complex, if the vocabulary is too elaborate, or if you have too many descriptive words. You will find out what problems your text has and, also, how to solve them.
- Readable.com: This is a quick tool that scores the readability level of your content. Ideally, you shouldn’t pass grades 6 or 7, so remember these numbers.
Entertainment or inspiration as a factor in content generation
One of the most common mistakes of content creators is to tend to be too serious. It is true that readers want information and training on topics that interest them. And that is a very serious thing.
However, writers need to understand that they are also creating bonds with their audience. And this relationship is not built with tedious content. There must be room for humor, inspiration, and individualization. Consumers want to know who they are dealing with and they like to appreciate that there is a human on the other side – someone with stories to tell who appreciates good humor, who is inspired and who can inspire others.
Using tools that generate jokes or phrases of the day (especially on social networks and landing pages) and creating good memes and gifs are strategies to demonstrate that you are not only interested in selling your product or service. These are some of them:
- https://mashable.com/2013/09/25/making-memes/ – A list of the best tools for creating memes.
- https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker – A simple tool to select or upload a photo or video, add text, create a gallery and much more.
Visuals and video tools
This is nothing new. Most content creators know that readers or viewers prefer visual information over reading paragraphs and paragraphs. Because most consumers access content via mobile, it is especially important to control the amount of text. Creating charts, tables, infographics, and videos can attract, engage, and keep visitors consuming your content.
There are tons of tools to create visuals and videos. They have become very easy to do and here are some examples that will help you achieve this:
- https://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/13-easy-to-use-tools-for-creating-killer-visual-content/. Here you will find specific tools like Canva for images, Pow Toon for animated presentations (great for explanatory product videos) and Thing Link, which allows you to upload images and insert icons that will take viewers to your landing page or blog.
- AVS Video Editor: Nowadays, anyone with a good phone can make quality videos. Then using AVS Editor you can cut, separate, mix, and add background to your video, as well as music and other effects. It is very useful and easy to use the tool.