A Conceptual Basis for Content Writing
Thinking in broader context when it comes to content writing may take some more time and effort but that’s a small price to pay for the benefit of the resulting ability to create:
- texts rich enough to truly serve you to connect
- an environment that is right for your stories to grow (i.e. to attract more participants)
Publishing on the web is actually entering a huge corpus of texts. It is a way to build countless relationships with the quadrillion words available on the web and the indefinite number of associations in a person’s mind. In other words, content writing is about creating semantic networks. Through associations they connect you to people, places, concepts, you name it. They shape your identity.
Piece by Marina Soria, watercolor, ink & embroidery threads.
Source: https://goo.gl/X2yb6j
The Two Purposes of Content Writing
Web writing serves two purposes. First, it structures your digital footprint and second, it is the thread that connects your business to your customers and prospects.
Check my course Content Writing in the Semantic Web.
The digital footprint is data (content is data too) that you leave in the ever-expanding web, and the thread is the thread that sticks out from the search box, connecting you to other threads, those of other businesses and other people.
The million dollars question that follows is then two-fold: how do you shape thе above mentioned print, and how do you make sure your thread stick out and connects to the thread of the person who is searching?
Fortunately, nobody know all the right answers and that’s the beauty of today’s web. As a comparatively new discipline, knowledge representation (how we describe the things around us) and information retrieval (search) are evolving every second. The only constant in the process is change and one more thing – us and our desire to connect.
That said, I have two possible answers for the question above:
- You shape your digital footprint the way you connect the dots in a drawing book, dot by dot
- You make your thread sticks out by making it easy (i.e. strong enough, discoverable, relevant) to pull out
What creates your digital footprint?
Your mark on the web comes from everything you do online and offline. Your content writing is not something separate from your business, it is the “cardiogram” of your activities.
The first thing to make sure you have covered is consistency, the consistency of the messages you communicate with your content. For the sake of simplicity, let’s narrow down the places where you will write about your business and the things that you do in a way that will shape the impression people get: these will be your website, your social media channels and your blog.
Who are you, what you do and how you can help – answering these questions with your customers and prospects in mind is a great start. You do that with static content (e.g. the About page on your website, the description on your social media profile), with dynamic one (i.e. the blog posts you write, the news you publish) with ad hoc content (i.e. your social media stream, content written as a response to someone’s comment)
The next step is to interconnect your “digital properties”, that is put links across them and make it easy for people to follow the common thread of your business.
Last but not least, these two steps are to be united by your clear understanding of what words you will use to describe your business.
When you are done with connecting the dots for yourself on the web, you are ready to start connecting with others so that you become defined by the relationships you manage to build.
How to make your thread stick out?
If the above was the what of creating digital presence with content writing, the following is the how. The digital footprints you leave on the web, doing business, now have to cross with other digital footprints. In a word, you will be writing content searching for and initiating interactions.
Web visibility is about the connections on many levels: content to content, business to business, content to web agents (yes, exactly. If you are curious, check out: Semantic Web, Relationships and a Piece of Conceptual art) and of course human to human. Content writing is one of the tools for making enough of these connections, and what is more, with relevant texts you can make these connection stronger,more trustworthy and of bigger variety. The more connections you have, the stronger and more relevant your thread in search.
So, what did you say was the conceptual basis for content writing?
Content writing holds the potential to be a key to unleashing the power of words, web and search to help businesses build relationships, shape their online identity and, fingers crossed, make the world a better text.