Updates – Roll Content

Will Video Content Have Edge Over Textual Content?

No. Nada. Never!

Textual content is the cornerstone of content marketing and it won’t be an exaggeration to say that content marketing thrives on textual content. Later infograhic, videos, images and other graphical content became part of the content marketing lexicon.

However an inquisitive mind may doubt the merits of Content Writing when no content marketer is ready to run the risk of running marketing campaigns in absence of video content.

Let’s see few statistics.

When it comes to enticing visitors, videos fare better. Content consumers are more likely to share, comment or like the content if it is video.

A study reveals that 64% of digital marketers shown their keen interest to explore video marketing to step up engagement.
On an average, a consumer with Internet customers watches 206 videos per month.

Despite the conclusive evidences, it is too early to abandon textual content as reading an article and watching a video requires different video functions. Let’s examine the fact-file of textual content.

A brand that creates customized content build trust with customers in a better way. 78% consumers agree to this.
At least 60% of marketers count on creating content at least once a day.
93% of B2B marketers are into content marketing.

As a business owner, before choosing one over other, you need to understand the difference. Let’s understand these differences.

Internet Accessibility

With the advent of Internet, the world has become a global village and any information can be shared in a flick of a second but still a handful of countries have access to high speed Internet and in some countries the Internet speed is less than 1 MBPS so we can not measure every country by the same yardstick. And even though the Internet speed is slow textual content can be easily shared on the contrary it requires hight speed Internet to send and receive video files.

Behavioral Impact

A research reveals that consumers are strongly influenced by their past behaviors which means if a consumer land on a popular news site they are likely to read news through published text than shifting to video content. That being said, the decision to chose text over video and vice versa varies from person to person. The choices we make largely depends on the nature of information we are provided with, our state of mind at that time and of course our personality.

Nature of Business

You can never decide what will best suit your needs, textual content or video content without considering the nature of the business. Which of the methods will yield fruitful results? Certainly textual content will have an edge over the video content. A lot of research work support this.

Psychological Triggers

At it’s best a good content can psychologically trigger an emotion or set of emotions in an individual which is the role of content as described content marketers. We all are primarily ruled by three emotions – pain, fear and pleasure. The purchasing decisions always revolve around these three emotions.

The Solution

With evolving content marketing, your business marketing should evolve too. It is advisable to keep a healthy content type ratio in the marketing mix. You can keep the business content 80% textual and split the remaining 20% between videos and other graphical presentations. It can bee safely concluded that textual content will never lose its prominence in favor of video content.

Ingredients that Make Great Content

A school of thought believes that content for your website or forum is good enough only if it achieves high SEO rankings. However, the fact of the matter is that the good content makes your customers stay with you because of the quality of the content on your webpage.

With bad content on your website, not only the image of your brand is blemished but it also alludes to your poor and half-hearted performance. A badly-written content always receives cold reception from the readers.

Though creating good content isn’t a rocket science but it still calls for a great amount of time, hard work, and knowledge. Perfect blend of resources, productivity and originality result in production of content that strikes a chord with readers. The famous quote by Walter E. Disney is significantly applicable here, which reads, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” Therefore, irrespective the size or popularity of your brand, make sure you create impeccable content.

Now, let’s discuss some of the essential ingredients that constitute great content.

Make Applicable or Practical Content

Even if, you have awesome writing skills but if your written content does not quench the thirst of readers, it is futile to them. Put differently, if readers are seeking information on best mobile phones, they will not be interested in knowing how a mobile phone operates. All that matters to them is information on best mobile phones.

Using Relevant Headings and Subheadings

The online readers are not interested in reading long text-filled technical paragraphs and time is what they value the most. The solution to this problem is dividing the content into section and sub-sections, it not only gives the content a professional look but also allows readers to exactly find the information they were looking for. Besides using headings and subheadings within the content, it is equally important to give the content a strong headline//title.

If the title is catchy enough to capture the interest of the user, then only they will go through the rest of the content.

Original Content

First and foremost, what you write should be original and not copied form other sources on the Internet as an algorithm devised by Google detects plagiarized content on the web and weed out the content from the search engine.

Originality means that you should have an original thought or concept while writing the content.

Providing Sources

To substantiate his/her point of view, a writer, sometimes, has to add technical information in what he/she is writing. But it makes you content appear clumsy if it is too lengthy having detailed explanations of all the elements present in the content.

Therefore, it is practical and wise to direct the readers to the website having detailed information by simply citing the source links if they want further information on the concept.

Updating the content

Care should be taken that you feed your customers with the information which is updated and add to their knowledge-base. It is a matter of sheer observation that most of the content available online is time-specific and needs to be replaced with fresh content. With changing trends and preferences, the content has to embrace several changes as well.

Having outdated and unusable content posted on your website is unequivocally detrimental for your company’s brand image. For instance, if your website features content on iPhone 4s when Apple, on the other hand, has launched iPhone 7 in the market. In this case, the content posted on the website loses its substance and relevance. It drives the views away from your website, the viewers wants to max on timely and relevant information.

Keeping the points discussed in the article in mind, you can write compelling and impeccable content that could capture reader’s host.

9 Tips on Becoming a More Creative and Productive Writer

Well begun is half done, isn’t it? This holds true in case of blogging as well. A well-know yet unconquered problem that a good many of content writers are grappling with is not getting started. This is the biggest impediment lying on your to become a great blogger.

A great idea pops up in your mind while driving. By the time you reached home and turned on your computer, you forgot what it was. You break your head staring at the black computer screen but the idea has long vanished fro your mind.

Get up and have a cup of coffee. Nothing. Check email. Check Facebook. Resist temptation to play online games. Read other people’s Facebook pages. Got to write something. HELP!

Here are five quick tips for getting yourself unwind:

Take notes : You must have noticed that ideas come out from nowhere and in all probability at the most inopportune times. Likewise creativity and innovation can not be planned. It is better to stay alert and capture them when they occur, rather than straining to recreate them latter.

Try free-writing : This technique is designed to stimulate ideas into your mind, to get something flowing, even if it makes no sense. Just keep writing anything. Soon your brain will be free from vague ideas and some ideas that make sense will come to the surface.

Draw a mind map: We all know what mind-mapping is. In simple words, it is an outline in picture form. It helps you stretch your imagination, stay organized and ready to write.

Play with your dog: However ridiculous it appears and hard to believe, but this can distress you instantly. You are not writing when you think you should be writing creates stress which hinders with the flow of creativity. This causes even more stress and the beat goes on. Playing with your pets will bring down the stress level.

Give thanks: When your mind is devoid of ideas and you do not know what to write, you get anxious and cranky. It appears to you that whole universe is conspiring against you in that case instead of cursing anybody thank god for everything he has given you. Expressing gratitude produces a positive energy flow that helps you recognize your real you. In that state of mind whatever you pen down becomes immortal.

5 Tips to Become a Content Writer

Does traveling interests you ? Do you have good knack for writing? Do you know you can be paid for traveling ? Are we talking about making a career? Yes, you can become a travel writer which is also considered best job by professionals who do not even belong to the travel industry. Check out our 5 tips on how to become a travel writer and land that dream job.

Travel

If you don’t travel you can’t write so get ready to be globetrotter. It does not necessarily mean that you have to take the trip of world to take inspiration to write your articles. You may visit the nearest tourist destination to write about that.

Write

It might sound bizarre but if you want to get into this trade you need to be writing all the time. You need not to set about writing novels, just write accounts of your travels. Even if you visit a restaurant, pen down what all you have been there.

Make sure your work is free of mistakes

Before you send your work to places, certainly you would like it to be free from any kind of flaws. This means your written work should be devoid of all kind of grammatical errors, punctuation errors, spelling mistakes, wrong sentence structure etc.

Start knocking on doors

Once you have finished writing an article or feature and you have pored it over for errors, start sending it everywhere. This means national newspapers, local newspaper, lifestyle magazines, specialist travel magazines …. the list goes on. Make sure that it reaches the right person.

Create your own website

When sending in your work to magazines, guidebooks, newspapers and everywhere else, you do not want to saddle them with pieces. But, in case, they like your work, it’s good to let them know where they can see more of your work. This is where having your own website comes in picture . All your work showcased on the website gives the people ample opportunity to appreciate your work.

It’s good to debunk all the widely-held misconceptions and false beliefs related to the profession before you embark on your career as a travel writer . Following these tips you can not only give wings to your dreams but gain competitive mileage over your peers as well.