Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Mike Hanski.
Let’s cut to the chase:
This article is not about typos and grammar mistakes. If you write nothing but emotional and useful content, then readers will forgive you occasional most common mistakes or several writing cliches in texts.
Here we’ll speak of pitfalls able to ruin your expert content down to rock bottom.
Writing a text, you give information to a reader. But it’s not enough. A mere description of your product or service won’t be considered a content piece from an expert.
Expert content describes a problem, provides solutions to it, and puts wise to criteria:
Forget about writing the general truth. Build your expert content on practice, not theory so readers could find the best solution to their problems.
What do we love about canonical ads, both TV and outdoor? Their verve and visualization. A perfect wedding of words and pictures does wonders: delivers a sales message, catches the spirit of your product/service, and triggers emotions. The emotional response from the public is what matters: maybe they won’t run to buy your product at once, but they will remember it for sure. The rest is a matter of time.
Expert content is rational, as a rule, which is the very opposite of advertising. But it doesn’t mean you should forget about vivid images and emotions while writing.
Use them in a balanced and pre-dosed way. Emotions shouldn’t distract readers from useful information in your content or, what’s even worse, misrepresent it. If there’s a disbalance of emotional and rational components in your text, it looks ridiculous.
When writing about cars better safety compared to planes, assemble an evidence base. Arguing that deal furniture is better than birch one, find arguments rather than merely tell about its “beautiful structure.” Well, you get the idea, don’t you?
Where to find argumentation and how to support it?
Expert writing is hard. First, you do research and look for sources and opinion leaders to cite. Then, you think and analyze, check the gathered facts, work on outlining, text building, proofreading, and editing… It’s faster and easier to rewrite already published articles on your topic, right?
And this is where writers run into trouble…
They take texts of the same quality as their own, which are often far from expert. Don’t do that! Instead, rely on testing and fact-checking.
What’s the difference?
Unfortunately, far from all copywriters and content marketers do that. As a result, we have illegible texts with tons of mistakes.
Case in point:
Need more?
He who finds expertise and creativity here is welcome to cast the first stone at me.
Focus on a problem you need to solve with your content.
Think about how you will describe the problem and solutions to it. Keep the balance of rational and emotional aspects.
Describing your product or service as a way to solve the reader’s problem, make sure to provide arguments and proofs for it. Hit their insights, trigger emotions, and touch the “nerve” of the problem in your texts.
After your content piece is ready, show it to an expert in the niche and a couple of impartial friends who might be interested in the topic.
Your fingers itch to complement the article with something creative a la poetic description of gas-engine? Find an analogous example in this context, show it to impartial people (yes, again!), and listen to the feedback to decide if this trick is appropriate to use here.
And remember:
As a content creator, you might consider your text a writing masterpiece as it is. Your soul resists and your hand trembles to cut and revise content, but it’s a trap! Reading your work, you can’t hold the says even. That is why cold, objective feedback is the only way to turn your writing in expert content indeed.