Content Editing Tips To Make Your First Draft Shine

A thorough editing of the content of your first draft helps smooth the rough edges and make it presentable to the public readership. It is never advisable to upload your first draft directly to your live site. Follow the tips outlined below.

Analyze The Content Structure

Does the content flow smoothly? The end of a section should transition easily to the next section. If you have to eliminate a few words or even sentences to remove any awkwardness, it is well worth doing it.

Authors obsess over the length of content. There is a popular perception that lengthy articles tend to rank well on Google SERPs. I would opine that the quality of the content, its freshness, its uniqueness and MOST IMPORTANTLY how much value you present to the audience, these matter more than the size of the content. To achieve a certain word count, authors pad the content with extra words that just don’t sit well in the context of the entire article.

Remember that at the end of the day, it is humans who are reading your content and taking the desired action, be it buying a service or a product. Google bots should not be the focus of your content development.

The Title Says It All

You have gone through the process of creating content titles and outlines in previous steps. The title should be a standout, catching the reader’s attention as that is the first piece of content the visitor encounters.

An attention capturing title sets the tone for the rest of the visitor’s experience. When your visitor finds that the content in its entirety matches the intention of the title, it leads to an engrossing experience and results in visitors staying longer on the site and/or sharing the content with others.

It is also important that the title matches the rest of the content in the context of search engines. Having a catchy title and writing content that is totally unrelated to the title will cause the search engines not to trust your site. Trust authority is a key factor in the ranking algorithm. Do not deceive the search engines.

Avoid click bait titles at all costs. It is frowned upon by majority of the netizens. Using them in your business articles will result in total loss of your own as well as business credibility in the eyes of your audience.

Introducing Content To Your Audience

The first paragraph is the introduction of content to your target audience. This is the deciding factor in whether your readers want to proceed to the main content or not. Metaphorically speaking, the introduction serves to lasso your reader and move her into the meaty part of the article.

Does Content Relate To Your Audience’s Persona?

You cannot be everything to everyone. Differentiation comes in when you write for your audience persona. Look at your content objectively and be honest as to whether it meets the needs of your audience’s persona.

Be honest and put yourself in the shoes of your audience’s persona and answer these questions.

• Do you like the content you’re reading?
• Does it resonate with you?
• Does the content highlight your problems?
• How valuable is it from the perspective of offering solutions?
• If you are not able to answer the above satisfactorily, it’s time to revisit the content and tweak it to suit the persona of your target audience.

Add Finishing Touches To Your Content

It is time to proofread, edit the errors and format it to make it presentable and deliverable to the world.

There are several tools in the market, a few of which are listed below.

• Grammarly

The most popular tool is Grammarly The basic version is free and it allows individuals to proofread and edit content. The Premium plans have all the bells and whistles to take the editing to the next level.

• Grammarly For Chrome

You can download the Grammarly plugin for Chrome. You can get suggestions from Grammarly as you write in Gmail and Google Docs.

• Gmail

I use Gmail’s email compose tool which comes with built-in grammar checks, useful for editing and proofreading. The errors are underlined with dotted lines and you can hover such errors and use Gmail prompts to correct them.

All these tools help in ironing out the chinks in your content armor. But at the end, human brain is the best editor. Use it to judge wisely to ensure your content meets high professional standards earmarked for your target audience.

Remember To Add Your Call To Action (CTA)

Read and re-read the content to ensure it flows smoothly from start to finish. Don’t forget to add the all important Call to Action (CTA), where you ask your visitor to take action and guide them into your sales funnel.

Alternatively, your CTA can also be associated with the goal meant for that piece of content. This is a step you don’t want to miss, after having done all the hard work in bringing the visitor to your site.

Time To Spice Up Your Content

An all text piece of content can be boring on the human eye, especially in the context of the rich multimedia world we live in.

Add videos, images, podcasts or whatever form of content that enhances the content you have written. Adding them for gimmicks is not going to cut much ice with your readers.

NOTE: Give credit to the source from where you get your images and videos. It is a fundamental netiquette of the web. Anyways, copyright karma will catch up one day if it is not done.

Importantly, please turn off auto play audio when your videos play. In fact, Google’s Chrome blocked auto play couple of years ago. It is the most annoying feature that can drive anyone nuts when starting to read the article.

Importance Of Fresh Content

Keep churning out fresh quality content to get both repeat and new visitors to your site. It is the best way to keep google bots coming back for new spider food, to crawl and index the freshly added content. Keep an eye on your content pipeline and keep topping it when it gets depleted.

It is not always possible, as a small business owner, to create content, maintain a content pipeline and churning out fresh content when you have so many other things to do to run your business. At Traffic Alignment, we can take care of all your content marketing needs in line with your content marketing strategy. Contact us today!