Content Writing Guide: From Beginner to Professional

Content writing

Level up Your Skills in Content Writing

This ultimate guide will equip you with up-to-date trends for creating engaging content for a successful digital business and improving your writing skills.

If you are an aspiring writer, blogger or a professional, this guide will help you start or improve your content writing with the knowledge of new SEO trends, AEO, and responsible use of artificial intelligence, Analytics, and marketing techniques. Open more opportunities in eBusiness through creating great content with the use of marketing tricks. Use this content writing guide for monetizing your skills digitally and improving your productivity and life.

Table of Contents

Start with Idea Generation for Different Content Writing Forms

Content Forms

Content writing covers different forms of content:

Plan content based on user intent and your monetization strategy. Start with informational posts for creating awareness of your brand and monetization with AdSense. Include separate posts with product reviews and comparisons if you want to monetize with affiliate links. For this purpose, research commercial intent keywords.

The size of content can range from short-form to long-form.

Short-formLong-form
Blog posts400 – 900 words1,000 – 2,000 + words
Product descriptions50 – 150150 – 300
Copywriting for brandsup to 50 words for ads700 – 2,000 + for sales content
Social media postsup to 150 words for Instagram and Facefook
several words for X
not more than 300 words for LinkedIn
Website pagesup to 600-900 words for Home and About pages900 + words for Cornerstone content pages
Newsletters and emailsshort emails with ads up to 150 words
informative newsletters from 150 to 600 words
Video transcriptsup to 1,000 words for up to 10 minutesfrom 1,500 words for 10+ minutes
Whitepapers and case studies2,000+ words for whitepapers
1,000+ for case studies
Course modules and eBooks1,000+ words per module
5,000+ words for an eBook

Strategic Content Planning

Write your content strategically by setting a specific goal and becoming result-oriented. First, create a plan for your overall content strategy:

  • Create a semantic core with all keywords that can serve as a basis for the topic of your content – high-volume words, long-tail keywords and phrases,
  • Categorize keywords based on user intent to find information (informational), find a web page (navigational), buy (transactional), and to research products or services (commercial),
  • Choose local keywords if you target readers or users in a specific location,
  • Add brand keywords to create content promoting a specific brand,
  • Identify titles and keywords for cornerstone content or 6-8 content pillars,
  • Find ideas for 10-20 posts (content clusters) for each cornerstone page,
  • Add sub-clusters if needed (for better links between content pillars and clusters),
  • Plan names of categories and tags with descriptions,
  • Schedule publication dates for each content element.

Idea Generation Techniques

Discover several strategies to get ideas for your blog posts:

Finding ideas in the form of questions is a great way to create how-to posts and guides.

Learn

Move gradually from the beginner level to the professional through mastering the basic knowledge of content types and applying content and technical SEO. This guide will help you start a successful freelance writing business.

Begin

Start with taking the following steps:

Here is a great formula from idea generation to an original post:

BRAINSTORMING + OUTLINING IDEAS + PARAPHRASING AND CITING + ADDING YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE + WRAPPING UP INTO the CONTEXT OR BLOG NICHE + CHOOSING IMAGES + CHECKING FOR PLAGIARISM and AI = ORIGINAL CONTENT

It is necessary to admit that your ideas originate from some source, either books and other content or your experience. When relying on other sources, your should learn how to paraphrase correctly in order not to plagiarize:

  • Read and pick the main points
  • Use these points to write sentences on your own
  • Compare your writing with that of the original source
  • Include a citation referring to the original source
  • Check for plagiarism

Rise

Advance your content writing skills with the following steps:

Develop

Develop your professional skills in content writing through mastering these aspects:

AEO vs. SEO

To become a professional in content writing, start thinking strategically and mastering answer engine optimization (AEO). It will help you get your content to position zero. What does it mean?

  • You can achieve greater visibility but lower click-through-rate (CTR).
  • Links to your content may appear in Google AI Overviews with a greater audience reach.
  • However, the best strategy is to combine AEO and SEO for both high visibility and CTR.

Diversification is the best strategy in eBusiness.

Questions and Answers

There are many questions related to content writing, starting from structure to content marketing and constantly changing SEO trends, especially with the development of AI tools.

What is the best way to structure content?

Everything depends on the type of content. However, a common pattern is to include a hook drawing attention of the target audience. Include a fact, anecdote, short story fact, etc. It is something interesting that can draw attention to the product, service, or problem.

How can we use AI in content writing?

First, AI has the purpose to make human lives easier, but people should not allow it to substitute them in their work. Therefore, you can use it for idea generation, but write content on your own because Google is starting to detect AI-written content. Use Grammarly to check your content for AI parts and plagiarism. The main difference between AI content and human-written texts is experience that bring value to the target audience. Experience is what saves someone’s time when they learn from others. Therefore, bring value to the reader through your experience.

Here is a formula of successful content:

EXPERIENCE + FOCUS ON THE TARGET AUDIENCE = HIGH-VALUE CONTENT

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Use the Search option on this website to find information and examples that can help you in content writing. You can learn what SEO strategies work best, how to monetize your content, how to turn posts into social media content, and how to leverage different tools for increased audience coverage.

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