Write it Right: Sending the Message You Want With Your Content

Your content can serve a variety of purposes. It, of course, pulls traffic to your site and provides value to your visitors, giving them a reason to return and bringing you closer to a contact point. However, content can, and unavoidably will, also give your readership an impression of the “personality” of your company, through a variety of aspects. Of course, as a reasonable person, you want your website to describe your business in a way to make as favorable of an impression as possible on those readers who very well could become customers in the near future. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you wish to get a complete examination of what message you are sending to your readership, here are some steps you need to follow.

First of all, you need to evaluate the “voice” in which your content and advertising are written.

Is it cohesive? Does it sound like one person is writing it, or a dozen different authors are contributing entries to it? As your business' representative, the content and marketing materials that are distributed need to be read as though they are from the mouth of a single speaker - hence the term “voice.” Fortunately, this is relatively simple to fix, if initially time-consuming. By establishing some language guidelines and compiling a style guide for your written content to follow, you can ensure that any content produced will share similar enough qualities that it appears to come from a single writer. This will reduce the discrepancies in separate pieces of content, and allow for your content to be recognizable by its tone.

Second (and really, throughout the entire process), it is critical to any message your content is trying to send that you proofread.

Nothing destroys credibility faster than a misspelled word, and typos are far too easy to miss. After all, spell check isn’t infallible, and not all programs for word processing feature spell check capabilities at all. Proofread everything before posting, Proofread it, have someone else proofread it, work on something else before going back and proofreading it again. If you cna find a quiet enough spot, proofread it out loud. It is imperative that you proofread.

See how that works? That single typo invalidated that entire paragraph, maybe even this entire article, didn’t it? All it takes is a few switched letters to ruin your credibility and make your company appear careless and sloppy. The takeaway here: always proofread your content.

Thirdly, your content should be written from a place of authority.

While it might not be obvious at first, a reader will gradually lose faith in the accuracy and/or usefulness of your content if it is filled with phrases that imply uncertainty. Is your content filled with “maybe,” "perhaps,” and other such terms, while lacking concrete statements and solutions? If so, it needs to be revisited and heavily edited, and here’s why: if the content is phrased in that way, all it will do is repeat what has already gone through the reader’s head before they sought out an answer. If someone looks to your content for a solution and finds only what they had already come up with themselves with little to no value add, they will not likely return again if they need further help. Why would they? If your content isn’t written with confidence, there’s no reason a reader should have confidence in you.

Of course, there will occasionally be times in your content where words like “maybe,” ”perhaps,” and the others will be necessary for clarity and context. In order to avoid the appearance of uncertainty, rather than just identifying what problems may be present, you should also offer more information into dealing with both problems. Is it a little more work? Yes, but it is certainly worth it if it means drawing a potential client closer instead of pushing them away.

At the end of the day, it is most important to remember that your content represents you and your business to the rest of the world. If it fails to communicate your message properly, it will fail to attract readers to your site—regardless of how important your message is for readers to see. Therefore, as important as it is to get your content right, it is equally important to write your content right as well.