7 Essential Skills Digital Content Writers Need

- What you need to do as a writer is, you need to have concise statements. (gentle upbeat music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.

- And now the first thing you list is Google Analytics. Now, can you tell us why this is so important for writers to understand as well as marketers and the companies? - Sure, so if you're a writer, you're writing to either draw more attention in and eventually convert those eyeballs and that attention into leads, customers, right?

Google analytics tells you what content they like, what they don't, what's causing them to bounce. It won't explicitly tell you what's causing them to bounce, but you can make some educational based guess based on the data that they're providing. It'll also tell you the type of content that converts the best, the type of content that doesn't.

So that way, when you're writing, you can write with the end goal in mind, which is eventually you want to have a conversion, whether that's someone buying right then and there, or turning into lead, and it'll provide you that data. If you continually write and write blindly, and you write based off what people tell you is amazing, do your friends do, that's all great and fine and dandy, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what you're writing is going to convert into revenue. - Well, that does tie into the next topic, which is content strategy.

You know, obviously this is becoming a much more increasingly important skill to have. What are your thoughts on that, and where do you see the industry right now as far as content strategy goes? And again, the opportunity for writers?

- Sure, so there's over a billion blogs on the internet. That's roughly one for every seven people. There's a lot of blogs.

The amount of content that's being pushed out each day is so overwhelming. We don't really need much more content, everyone's regurgitate the same information. If you don't have a strategy, how are you going to be different?

How are you going to stand out? How are you going to convert people? What topics are you going to cover that solve the pinpoints of your customers?

If you don't have a strategy in place and a plan of action, then all you're going to be doing is producing content that doesn't really do anything at the end of the day. Even if you think that this is better based off of analytics data, but you don't have the strategy and how you're going to attack that, and how you're going to go forward, then you're just wasting your time and energy. - So what are some end goals of strategy?

You know, when you say you need a strategy, well, how do I even know where to start creating that strategy? - So the first step in this strategy is attracting the eyeballs. And what you would want to do is see what's in your space that's popular.

So there's a tool called Ubersuggest that I have, and you can use it for free. You can type in a keyword or a phrase and click on when you're in Ubersuggest you want to go to the content ideas report, it'll tell you what's popular based off of social shares, like Facebook and Pinterest. Search traffic, what ranks well in Google and how much traffic does it get and what keywords is a rank for.

And the third thing is links. What other sites are linking to it because they like the content? So you want to look at the topics and the exact headline that are doing well, and it'll also show you in the tool, what doesn't do well.

So you want to more so focus on creating content that's popular on what people like. Now, you don't want to just copy that and regurgitate what's already existing on the web, but you want to do something that's better than that. Think of skyscrapers.

And in the United States we may have the Empire State Building, then you may have someone in Dubai who's like, ah, we're going to create the Burj Khalifa, I think was what it's called. And it's going to be even taller, it's going to be double the height. I'm making it up.

You're going to have somebody in China say, we're going to do triple the height, we're going to have our buildings go into the clouds. The point I'm making is, you want your content to stand out and be unique, go above and beyond what people are already doing. because if something's already popular and have worked well, if you do something that's double, triple better, you're much more likely to have your content do really well too.

- And I think it's also important that writers and marketers even step back further, and what is the end goal? Is it just to get- Is it the end goal actually sales, or is it just to build the list? Is there different content for different purposes?

- There is. And you know this better than anyone else, right? If you're trying to get someone to opt into lead, it's easier to get them to opt in to a lead than it is to get them to buy.

So if they opt in to a lead, you may just have to write content that provides them a quick solution or some tips or some educational advice. If you want someone to buy, you have to answer so many more objections, head-on pinpoints, social proof, all those things matter, right? So you got to think about what stage the person is in and what kind of content they want to see.

- Okay. Now, I've also heard you say that marketers need to learn how to leverage video content. Now, what do you feel is the best way to go about doing that?

- The best way is to bust out your phone (laughing) do it yourself, and straight up just upload it to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Now ones could say, Hey, how do I optimize it for SEO and get the most traffic? Don't worry about that at the beginning.

Worry about just connecting with people from a visual aspect, because nowadays everyone is watching content. YouTube is so popular and even Facebook is, Instagram is, they all have video. Even LinkedIn has video.

If you can leverage video, you can build a deeper connection with people. That connection also builds trust, and that's what helps people convert into customers as well. - All right.

And that ties into one of the other skills that you recommend writers and marketers have to, to be successful in the digital world. And that storytelling that's something that obviously AWAI focuses a lot of time and energy in, but I love hearing it from your perspective as well. - The storytelling is amazing.

If you don't do storytelling, I dunno how you bring people through the ups and the downs. People need that emotional roller coaster, just like they see in reality TV, unless it really hooks them, and storytelling has been, that thousand year old marketing tactic that still works today. - Let's, let's talk about email.

I spoke with Ryan Deiss recently and he believes email's making a Renaissance. And that it's what the cool kids are doing is what he said now. So, how does email writing tie into your strategies, even taking it to funnels and upsells and down sells and all the pieces that the emails work with?

- Yeah, so what we found is with emails, the quicker you sell them, the more likely they are to convert. Maybe that's just us. We don't find it that if they were on your list for a year, they're more likely to convert.

It's just like, they're more likely to unsubscribe by then. So try to get them as quick as possible. But the key with emails is, how can you make them custom to whatever phase they are in the journey and there's marketing automation these days.

So if someone viewed something, but didn't buy it, you would send them a different email where compared to if they're just reading some educational piece. And the key is just helping them based on where they are in their journey. And if you can have customized emails for every step of the way, you're much more likely to convert.

- So in your opinion, what's changing? What are the big changes that we're seeing in 2020? - Voice search is huge.

Over 50% of the searches now are voice, according to Comscore. So. .

. - I'm going to stop you for a minute then. So with that in mind, what does that.

. . - So what that means, our first stop before we get into, what you need to do as a writer is, you need to have concise statements.

Because if you're a writer and you're writing lengthy responses to a question, think of Quora, Quora's really popular, they get over a hundred million visitors a month, according to Similarweb. And my number could be off, but I think it was something ridiculous like that, but either way it's popular. The reason it does as well is, with Quora, you're getting short answers, right?

Here's the question, here's the answer. That's what people want to hear. They don't want to ask Alexa a question and then reads for five minutes.

But as a writer if you can't be concise and to the point, you're not going to do well. - Okay, that does tie into bite-size educational content, which I heard you talk about and you believe that that's a growing trend. Could you just speak a little bit about that please?

- Yeah, no one wants. . .

Not no one, that's actually a wrong statement. A lot of people want quicker, on demand content. So we found that bite-side education works really well.

My buddy and I, Eric Siu, we have a podcast called Marketing School, we did experiment what if we do five-minute podcast episodes a day on one thing about marketing, if you do well, and we have over a million monthly listeners every month and it's done well because people want bite-size information. Before that, he tested out longer pieces of information and did less episodes, but we found a trend in which people want quick, actionable insights in the least amount of time. And that's what shows in the study, right?

They say humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. This shows, the quicker you can get information across, the better off you are.