It is not only important to do right things, but also do not make mistakes that can eliminate all your efforts. Here are a couple of things the one should not do when working on a new content piece.
Don’t word count
A good writer treats the article as a whole and tries to tell a story. Having to keep in mind a required volume can kill creativity. If a company uses outsourced writers, linking their pay with the number of words is the worst thing to do. It prompts the writer to include empty information in the article to get more money.
Offline media has to consider the physical size of a newspaper. In terms of online media, blog posts and articles can be of any size, as there is nothing to limit it. Don’t worry that an article is too short, that doesn’t matter.
Quite often, short articles consisting of a few paragraphs are read by thousands of people, while long reads that took weeks to prepare go completely under the radar.
“This-Has-Already-Been-Covered” policy leads to failure
It’s always tempting to be the first one to cover something. But most topics a company could elaborate on have been already covered by somebody else. This isn’t an excuse to sit and wait for huge breaking news that will explode on all blog platforms and attract the attention of the best media outlets.
Regular postings are an important component of successful content promotion. You can’t write something unique every time unless your company is a giant like Google or Facebook. This means that you’ll have to learn how to find something newsworthy in unexpected places, look at existing topics from a new angle and compile different opinions and postings in order to channel a debate in the right direction.
Nobody wants your boring corporate news
With a few rare exceptions, corporate news doesn’t interest anyone except for founders, team members and relatives. So don’t publish press statements about a couple of new functions or changing the color of your menu buttons.
However, an article about how your company collected and analyzed data on audience preferences in order to introduce these features, or how changing the color of a button improved conversion and sales, could be appealing.
Earn the right to advertise
This is the single most important point. Former Apple staff and marketing guru Guy Kawasaki says companies should earn the right to advertise their products. If you start a conversation with your audience using press releases about your success, ignoring the interests of the readers, their numbers will not increase.
And vice versa, if your business wins an audience with compelling content, and then offers information about its goods and services to loyal readers, it will score really good results.
