12 Steps to Writing Really Good Marketing Content

You know that writing great content will help drive traffic, generate conversion, and establish thought leadership, among other key marketing goals. Yet every time you sit down in front of the computer it feels like fighting a losing battle.

You find a train of thought only to lose it immediately. Your main topic changes with every new paragraph. You fall asleep reading your own first draft.

If only you could go back to that writing class you signed up for during freshman year to meet cute people and actually pay attention this time, right?

Well, it turns out you don’t have to, because Visually has produced this supremely useful infographic with step-by-step directions for writing your next piece of content, gleaned straight from Anne Handley’s bestselling book Everybody Writes. There’s a lot of great information here, but these tips particularly stood out to me:

• The key is to care about the purpose of what you’re writing.
• Imagine the one person you’re helping with this piece of writing, and then write directly to that person.
• Spend as much time on the headline as you do on writing the piece itself.

The only thing I would add here, from a marketing standpoint and not a writerly one, is to target long-tail keywords when you can — but not at the risk of cheapening your content.

Take a look for yourself, and the next time you’re tasked with writing a piece turn here first and just follow these steps!