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10 Crucial Mistakes You Should Avoid in Your Content Creation
Even the most experienced writers can fill a few empty pages with juicy details regarding the most embarrassing content creation mistakes that they’ve made at some point. In this field, errors can be triggered by a plethora of factors, ranging from technical glitches to social media faux pas.
Colossal Mistakes to Prevent While Working on Your Next Content Piece
If you’re eager to step up your content creation game while learning from the mistakes of others, here are 10 of the most common (and perfectly preventable) slips that you should never repeat while creating content.
Neglecting Your Audience’s Needs, Passions and Interests
Not understanding and addressing the real necessities and demands of your audience is perhaps one of the most regrettable mistakes that you could make as a content creator. To prevent this error, spend as much time as possible researching your market, audience, products and competitors. By doing so, you could come up with new, fresh, inspiring content ideas that will manage to raise the interest of your readers, and provide accurate, concise and truly helpful answers to their daily questions and concerns.
Acting as a Self-Centered Brand
We can all agree that self-centered individuals are particularly annoying. Here’s the thing: brands focusing solely on their own image and interests also match this description. As Shane Show, the creator of Contently, affirms, in order to survive and stay relevant and popular on any market, brands should create and distribute quality content, and make it less about them and more about their segment of public.
Ignoring the Crucial Importance of a Well-Written “About Us” Page
When meeting new people, it is your responsibility to introduce yourself and do your best to create a positive long-lasting image. The same rule applies when you’re trying to lift your business off the ground by launching a cool, user-friendly website and/or blog. Without an informative, helpful and engaging “About Us” page, you might miss your target, considering that most readers look for this key page as soon as they land on a website that they have never visited before.
Excluding Personal Stories from Your Content Marketing Plans
While a self-centered approach to content creation can hurt your brand by affecting your bond with your audience, you shouldn’t ignore the importance of personal stories and self-references. Storytelling can help you humanize and personalize your brand, while making your content pieces sound less artificial and stiff. Used in moderation, personal, relevant self-references can turn a dull monologue into a compelling, authentic story that sounds more like a nice chat with a close friend.
Not Staying Active on Social Media Platforms
Social media allows you to establish a powerful connection between your brand and products. Considering that these platforms are the places where your readers hang out, interact with each other and other brands, and share ideas, you should maintain an active presence on some of the most popular social networking websites to boost brand awareness and create a solid community of fans and followers around your product or service.
Making Grammar/Spelling Errors
In this day and age, letting grammar and spelling mistakes creep into your web content is absolutely unacceptable, especially given that you have access to a wide range of free or extremely affordable tools designed to help you polish your writing. For starters, consider using online proofreading tools to prevent embarrassing mistakes. For better results, you may want to hire an editor to proofread your content pieces and make the necessary corrections.
Not Staying Up-to-Date with Industry News and Trends
Here’s the thing: if your number one goal is to establish yourself as a powerful industry expert, you should find a way to keep up with some of the most important news and trends that are impacting your niche one way or another. To begin with, you could subscribe to high-authority trade journals, stay active on industry-specific discussion forums, keep tabs on your competitors, take advantage of prominent networking opportunities, and most importantly, talk to your business partners, clients and prospects.
Not Creating and Improving Your Very Own Style
At the end of the day, your uniqueness is what may eventually draw the highest number of readers and customers. Therefore, don’t be afraid to create and reinforce your very own writing style. By doing what everybody else is doing, you may end up looking like a copycat, and being perceived as a fraud or an outsider with zero influence, real expertise and knowledge and industry connections.
Not Trying Hard Enough to Create First-Class Web Content
In-depth research is the key to creating informative, educative and engaging content. Once you know your audience well enough to identify and explore the topics that may actually interest your readers, keep in mind that how you wrap and sell your knowledge is just as important as what you choose to write about. When it comes to crafting high-quality content, don’t forget to:
Add a high-impact headline
Boost the readability of your copy by opting for a clean structure based on shorter paragraphs and at least 2 or 3 subheads
Add multimedia elements (photos, charts, infographics, videos) to make your content visually appealing and easier to process
Ignoring the Fact That You Should Evaluate Your Performance on a Regular Basis
Last but not least, remember that you should always assess the efficiency of your content marketing strategies to correct potential mistakes and reinforce the strategies that work best for you. By taking a closer look at important metrics-such as traffic sources, traffic numbers and bounce rates, you could understand the behavior of your audience a little better and make changes to get a better response from your readers.
At the end of the day, you should accept the fact that any inexperienced writer engaging his or her efforts in content creation will inevitably make a few mistakes during the first trial-and-error processes. If you’re determined to skip the risky experimental phases, consider opting for professional writing services provided by a highly affordable copywriting agency.
Annie has 18 years’ experience as an editor and content creator and manager. With work in television and written media, she has dedicated her past 10 years to learning the ropes of online content creation, from writing to editing, from SEO to content management.
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