Before you begin writing anything, it is important to understand the writing process.  Writing is more than just putting words on paper.  It takes thought and planning to produce quality content, and having quality content is more than important…it’s imperative!  Never has the phrase, “Anything worth doing is worth doing right,” more important than when preparing content for your site.

When you prepare to write an article, series of articles, blog posts, or even a script for a video for your site, ask yourself what you are going to write about and in what way are you going to talk about the topic.  Think about the final use of the article and tailor the article to suit its purpose. Think about it: is it promotion, informative article with an action involved from the reader, or is it purely for education purposes. There are many different ways to write and many approaches you can take.  Look at all the ways you can approach the article, and select the best approach for your purpose.

After you know your topic, brainstorm for ideas.  This is simply writing down ideas and thoughts about the subject. Jot down all of the ideas you can come up.  They might seem silly at the time, but write them anyway.  Jot down everything you can think of.  You may find it helpful to keep some means of writing ideas with you at all times.  It can be a note pad and pen, or an electronic device.  Whichever it is, you’ll be able to write down the ideas as they come to you.  You don’t have to use them all.  You can decide that later.   Just get your creative juices flowing and come up with anything relative to your topic.

Think about who your audience will be.  If you think about movies, they’re rated for a reason.  People don’t begin a movie for a “G” rated audience in an “R” rated format.  Having an understanding of your audience will allow you to set a suitable tone and create content the audience finds value in.   Will your readers be adult, children, or teenagers?  Will they be male or female?  Will they be educated or perhaps high school dropouts?  Will there be a particular ethnic group more likely to read than others?  All these things are important when you decide what you want to write and how you will go about writing it.  You want to write to the audience in a way they can relate to what you’ve written and understand it.

Research the topic you want to write about in detail to provide information that is not common knowledge.  You may know a lot about the topic, in fact, it’s better to have a good knowledge of what you’re writing about, because you’ll find it easier to write.  There are, however, many resources you can use to find relevant content about a subject that you might not know about.  You may find information about a topic you know well that you didn’t know.  You may want to pull information from several different sources for one article.  Just remember, when using these resources, it is important to rewrite the information in your own way.  Do not copy information from other sites or you’ll be guilty of copyright infringement.

You should prepare an outline of your article, blog post, or ebook.  Preparing an outline will help you to prepare quality content for your website.  It keeps you focused and on track.  You know that your content helps the websites web marketing, web ranking and content marketing efforts. The outline will help you create a logical order and flow to what you write, and improve your chances of higher web rankings.

Once the outline is complete, you’re ready to begin writing.  Follow the outline, and use the information you know or the information gathered from researching other resources to fill in the blanks.  If you remember the “fill in the blank” tests from school, you’ll know that this is an important part of the writing process.  If you don’t put the right words in the right blanks, you fail the test.  If you don’t fill in the blank in the right way, your writing will fail.  People will click on your site, begin reading, see it isn’t quality content, and then click off.  You’ve probably done that yourself many times.  The internet makes it so easy it has become automatic to some people.  Click on—read junk—click off.  It’s as simple as that.  Filling in the blanks properly, however, will cause people to click on to your site repeatedly.

There are three major portions to any written material:  Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.  You should always start with a good introduction.  Then you prepare the body, which is the meat of the material.  Last, but certainly not least, is the conclusion. In the introduction you should tell the audience what you are going to tell them and what they can expect to learn. The body of the article will include the details about the topic and mention different points that will connect to the reader.  These details should give the reader what you told them they were going to get.   The conclusion is where you summarize and state any conclusions that the reader should have come to once they’ve read your material.   The conclusion is the last impression you will make on the readers, so you always want to go out in style.  Let them leave feeling taking the time to read your material has been worth their while.

Write your first draft without being over-critical.  In your first draft, you’re basically getting all your information down on paper in a fairly logical format.  Then, you go back and revise the draft in a more critical manner.  It often helps to read the article aloud.  As you do, make mental notes to fully pronounce every word. This will help you find grammar errors and inconstancy in the article. It will also help you keep a good, steady flow to your writing that isn’t confusing.  If you stumble over the words when you read it, so will your reader.  Once you’ve completed reading the material and any errors have been corrected, you’ll probably repeat the process again and again until the article is satisfactory to you. You may discover you need to:

  • Rearrange paragraphs to make it flow better
  • Reword awkward sentences
  • Remove extra words, repetitive sentences, or even whole paragraphs

You need to realize that no one is perfect.  Learning to write articles, blogs, or ebooks takes time, creativity, patience, and practice.  You may feel you have something great and find out it wasn’t so good after all.  Don’t be discouraged if you have to change your draft several times before you get it right.  Just remember, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  Once you have that article, blog, ebook, or video that you feel is “just right,” it will be worth it.  Not only will you feel great about yourself, you’ll have quality content that is fit to reign.  You’ll be surprised.  Once you have been through the process of writing your rough draft and editing the drafts a few times, you’ll get used to all of these things.  It will become automatic, unconscious competence writing and you’ll wonder why you ever thought it would be so difficult to start with.

If you follow the all of the above steps, before you know it you will be able to be a competent writer.  Being a competent writer is the first step to creating that dynamic content you need for your website.

Now, you know the writing process.  It’s time to take the information you know, follow the process, and begin creating content fit for a king.  Below are 70 great tips to help you create that content you can be proud of.  It will be the type of quality content that will keep your audience returning to your site for more.

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