Professionally Written Content

The seven pillars of successful content

1. Communication:  An effective article or page allows for dialogue between customers and regular readers. For a business blog, long-serving clients may bookmark your blog and/or website. He or she will check often for fresh content. From past experience, the author of this piece has met several people through his own personal blog, either 2 or 270 miles away from home.

2. Trust: Whether you are talking about the business itself or some other topical matters, regular readers will turn to your blog for first-rate information on certain subjects. As well as information, authenticity and forthright views can be favourable to its readers.

3. Reference to current affairs:  Any reference to the day’s news events is helpful to any blog post. Plus it may do your website traffic a lot of good. At this time of writing, Brexit or Coronavirus are the buzzwords of the moment. To see what’s capturing the zeitgeist this week, month, minute or hour, consider looking at Google Trends or the trending topics of social networking sites. Reference to physical media sources can be helpful too.

4. Informative posts: Believe it or not, you are looking at one example of an informative piece of content. Any content  published with similar posts to this one are a great help. Whereas posts pertaining to current affairs could be as ephemeral as chip paper, tutorials and tips are ‘sticky’ content. The reader may refer to that page if they wish to learn more

5. Regular maintenance: Over time, links can go astray. Webmasters change web pages, hosting accounts and domain names may expire. Computer programs and other details are subject to regular updates. Dead links and redundant content are an irritation for search engines and people browsing your site. With the former, this has a negative effect on your search engine rankings. Every so often, it is always worth checking your site for broken links, images, or scope for any updates to existing content.

6. Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar:  There is nothing more off-putting than a grammatical error or a full stop felony. On any form of written communication, virtual or dead tree, it is at best unprofessional for your business. We recommend adding a grammar checking tool to your blogging client such as Grammarly.

7. Research your subject areas: Second only to keeping your spelling, punctuation, and grammar in tip-top condition, we always recommend researching your subject areas. Besides using more than one primary and/or secondary source, your own experience is helpful too. Why stop at online sources? Take a trip to your local public library for suitable books. Or your borough’s local studies library for historical sources.