Content writing is a vast area where many creative writers are now building their careers. For any business to shine, they need to have a strong online presence and content marketing is a way to do that. You will find some content writers focusing on editorial writing, while some are writing content for social media. You will also find writers crafting press materials for their clients while others are working with entrepreneurial writing for their own businesses, podcasts, or shows. So what does it mean? Do they all call content writers? What is exactly content writing? What are the tips you need to follow to level up your writing game in this industry? Let's get all these answers. 

What is content writing?

Content writing is a well-known process that includes planning, researching, writing, editing, and presenting content in a digital format. This content can include a wide variety of types and styles such as blog posts, press releases, social media posts, video or podcast scripts, landing pages, product descriptions, etc. To put it simply, content writers are the storytellers of the brands. The goal of content writing is to inform, educate, entertain, and persuade readers to be involved with the business or brand. Content writing can also be used for a variety of purposes which include - 

• Establishing credibility
• Creating brand awareness
• Increasing website traffic
• Improving brand SEO
• Generating leads

What are the different content writing formats? 

As mentioned above, content writing has a million styles and formats. Some of the most popular are - 

• White papers
• Video scrips, titles, and descriptions
• Podcast scripts, titles, and descriptions
• Social media posts
• Online product descriptions
• Keynote speeches
• Email newsletters
• Blog posts
• Press releases
• Ebooks
• Landing pages
• Web page content

To understand simply, content writing is the basic foundation of anything that you put out on the internet. 

How to make your writing better? 

Regardless of its formats and styles, content writing is important for creating and putting out high-quality content that represents a brand's voice in the right way while strengthening it online. It is also critical to attract, engage, and delight the target audience. So here are some tips that can take your content writing to the next level. 

1. The structure: 

The first step of crafting any kind of content is thinking about its structure and giving it a look that people will engage with. Often when people think of writing, they take it to be creative yet chaotic, and yes, on the very first draft it surely can look like it. But it is the final draft you want it to be organized and ready to be published. So while writing content, make sure you have this structure in mind. 

• The hook - This is designed to get your readers' attention from the first glance, and should be your first sentence. With this sentence, you have the power to make the readers want more.
• Introduction - The introduction should explain the situation using the 5Ws of journalism. This is the best way to get your audience hooked without making them bored. Use the 5WS (Who, What, When, Where, Why?) to explain what you are writing about and why they should invest their time reading it.
• High-end discussion - Now this is your space where you can get in the details and make your writing look more granular. Here you can add more data for backup and explore the subject to create a greater impact.
• CTA - This Call To Action is necessary to persuade the readers to be more invested in the business you are writing for. 

2. SEO optimization for search engines 

The motive to publish any content online is to get the reader's attention and the best way to get that is to become more visible on search engines. SEO refers to Search Engine Optimziation that decides how higher the brand or its content will rank when someone puts in a query. When someone searches anything remotely related to your business, its services, or its products on the internet, the higher the business will rank on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) the more chances it will get to be visited. So make sure your writing has relevant and trending keywords that are essential to improve SEO performances. Use short, simple, and easy-to-understand words in the content, and make sure the first 100 words are well-optimized. 

3. Easy to consume and share

Another great tip that can elevate your content writing game is to make sure to keep your content not only easy to consume but also share. You can have the world's biggest copywriter write a post, but if it is not easy to understand or consume, people will not pay attention. So the goal is to make the content rich and entertaining, that can easily grab people's attention. No matter which type of content you are writing, pay attention to its formatting and layout. Keep the paragraph short so it is easily understandable. 

4. Work with multimedia

Studies have proven that just video or audio content has the ability to capture people's attention better and keep it that way than text-based content. If you are working with just text-based content, then make sure to take full advantage of multimedia. Whenever it is possible, make sure to incorporate images, graphs, videos, or other multimedia to break up the text and make it more consumable. This is also a great opportunity to increase web traffic to the business' other marketing materials. 

5. Edit, edit, edit 

At the end of the day, we are all humans, and we make errors. So editing the content is that once necessary step that you can never ignore. The best way to do it is to edit something and remove all the grammatical errors, leave it for a few hours, and then come back to it. This will allow you to take some time off and when you return to the content, you will have a new and fresh perspective. This will help you examine the content with great detail and you will be able to fix even smaller grammatical errors or fix any other structural issues. As legends say good content writing is not possible without some good content editing. Remember, we are all humans and we all make mistakes; it is fine as long as you go back and edit those mistakes out. 

You can also incorporate quotes from real people to make your writing more attractive or ground your advice with some great examples.