I am on a roll!

I have been writing away since morning – for this blog and for a favorite client of mine. My earphones be hammering some T.I.’s Heavy Is The Head so my head is a NO-GO zone for external disturbance.

The boom-twaf cuts out external noise, which is very good. The only place that I want a bedlam of activity is inside my cranium, not outside. And from the depths of – I think – my thalamus, I present this blog post.

So, are You Packing Enough Heat? In the content department that is? Do you have what it takes to fire a round of quality content to wow readers and make a sale?

Do you have the sand to pull the trigger and hit the bull’s-eye as far as your content marketing goals go?

Know how to hit this Bull’s-Eye?…

This idea might borrow extensively from all the hip-hop I’ve been listening to, but I’m gonna squeeze it out real quick to serve your busy schedule.

Without further ado, let me stock you up.

The Arsenal – The Tools You’ll Need

Bulletproof Vest

Shoot ‘em and then Hide? No.

You don’t want to go out there without your bulletproof vest on, now do you? You want to know exactly that is you’re saying. You need astute research to create effective web content.

Without sufficient research, your content will be flawed from the onset, and your competitors won’t even have to struggle.

What defines astute research? Google? No. EzineArticles? Yes and No. Wikipedia? Hell No. Too many Nos already.

What then stands for astute research?

Research begins with a plan. What topic are you addressing? What points do you wish to put across? Which sources will you borrow from? What is it that you wish to achieve?

It is best to have an outline before you begin research.

Then go to Google and sift through the fluff. Go to EzineArticles and identify authority authors. Go to Wikipedia and read, not copy-paste. Gather your major points and supporting materials. If you must quote your sources, prepare the bibliography at this point. Then write!

The Perfect Arm

Take a knife to a gun fight and you won’t live long enough to know who won.

Creating effective content is many things, but quality writing surpasses them all. Quality writing means perfect grammar; no grammatical errors: no punctuation errors; no errors in sentence structuring; no spelling mistakes and so on.

Grammar…

Photo credit: Leigh Rubin via Kittle’s Music

Good writing does not mean sacrificing brand voice for the sake of grammar. If slang works for your model, great! Coming out as formal won’t take you far. If formal defines your entire structure, going informal will blow up in your face!

Embrace the style that works for your target audience. Love them, they are doing their best to love you back!

Enough Firepower

You don’t want an empty barrel when facing your very last foe!

Many ‘specialists’ will talk nineteen to the dozen about how a huge volume of content will bog down your readers. Not true. You can never leave out valuable information just because you don’t want to ‘bog down’ your target audience! That’s like taking rubber bullets to some serious lead action.

No rubber bullets for this baby…

Your best bet is to write everything your readers need to make an informed decision. And to save them the strain, create bullet lists and summaries. You can pour some of the post into a video or an infographic to add some flavor as well.

After all, if your content is great to read, they won’t notice as they click from one page to the next.

Google will also love you if you have plenty of shareable information on your subject. That there is how you create great SEO content even without knowing.

That should be enough to have you packing and ready for the hottest content shootout of the week.

If you run out of heat, I can restock you at the end of every week! Just subscribe.

See You Around.