If you are regularly writing blog posts and articles, but aren’t getting enough views on them, there could be something amiss with the quality of your content.
Online readers are fickle. They have a very short attention span, and if some content does not satisfy their need and requirement quickly, they aren’t just going to exit the website.
So, it can be a bit of a challenge to come up with some content that can attract the attention of your readers and then hold it till the end.
To do that, you have to work on improving the quality of your content. If you aren’t sure where to start, fret not. In this post, that’s what we are going to be helping you with.
11 Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Content
- Plan Properly
It may not sound like it, but properly planning your content can be a great way to increase its overall quality.
Sure, it may make you feel like a genius to sit down with no prep and outlines, and then come up with a post or article completely on the spot.
But the truth is, a properly planned piece of content is very different from an impromptu one.
In the former, you can research topics relevant to your discussion and include them in your content. You can also pick up citations and references during the planning phase.
On the other hand, if you are writing something on-the-spot, you will have to extemporize it all. You could end up mentioning a few nonsensical and unrelated things in your content.
- Create an Outline…and Follow it!
When planning your content, be sure to create an outline.
Apart from how an outline can help you during the writing process, it also makes it easier for readers to navigate through the content.
Creating an outline entails listing the main topic, then a list of sub-topics, and then a list of sections to include in each of the latter.
However, merely creating an outline is not enough. When you do create one, be sure to follow it.
You may be tempted to incorporate some newly-thought ideas in your content. But then again, there is the chance that you could mention some unrelated and irrelevant points.
So, stick to the outline you prepare during the prepping phase.
- Arrange Your Content Systematically
Remember, as we said before, online readers are fickle. If you do anything that annoys them in any way, they can just leave your website and look for something else to read.
Therefore, one of the most important factors that you have to keep in mind when writing any type of content is keeping it easy to read.
We will discuss more about this in the next point as well, but for now, we want to stress the importance of breaking your content down and arranging it systematically.
You can use headings styles (h1 to h5) to create a cascading organization of your content. Doing this helps readers navigate through the text easily.
If you reach a point where you cannot use more headings, use bullet points instead.
- Keep Everything Readable
Apart from keeping the layout of the text easy to navigate, you also have to focus on keeping your content readable by keeping the readability grade low.
You can check the readability of your text by using the Flesch test or by uploading it to sites like Hemingway.
Using paraphrasing tools can also be a good way to make your content readable.
For example, if you want to add simpler synonyms to your text, you can use a free paraphrasing tool.
Rewriting tools, in general, work by replacing specific words in the given text with suitable synonyms.
You can use this to increase your vocabulary and use easier words where possible.
5. Add Visuals
This is, once again, a good place to mention how fickle online readers can be and how difficult it can be to retain their attention.
If your article or blog post is like a big wall of text, it’s going to look boring to your readers. You need to keep things lively, engaging, and colorful.
Adding visuals can, apart from giving some life to your content, can also be good for educative purposes.
You can, for example, use screenshots to demonstrate a certain step in a tutorial.
6. Check and Remove Plagiarism
Your content could be perfect in all aspects relating to grammatical perfection, formatting, and readability. But if it has any plagiarism in it, it’s not going to be worth reading.
Plagiarism is one of the worst things a writer can do to come up with content.
People like creativity. No one likes to read something that is copied from a different and existing source.
Therefore, to increase the quality of your content, you first have to make sure that there is no plagiarism in it…of any kind whatsoever.
7. Make Sure Your Grammar is Spot-On
Having perfect grammar is pivotal for quality content.
Advanced text editing tools and word processing software nowadays come with built-in grammar checkers. They can point out your mistakes as you write.
However, to be completely sure that there are no errors whatsoever in your content, you can use dedicated grammar checking software once you are done writing your draft.
8. Don’t Dilly-Dally a Lot
And yet again, this is an appropriate place to mention how fickle online readers can be.
If you don’t want to lose their attention, don’t beat around the bush a lot. Get to the point after a small introduction.
You might notice that in this heading, we mentioned not dilly-dallying a lot. A little bit of it is fine…even necessary, in fact.
Otherwise, the content will look forced and abrupt.
Take this post, for example. We started off with a few introductory paragraphs and then started listing the tips…and you’re still reading, aren’t you?
9. Add Facts, Figures, and Quotations
Adding facts, figures and quotations can be a great way to make your content reliable and authoritative.
A writer who rants on with personal opinions and conjectures won’t sound half as credible as an author who backs up every mentioned detail with research.
Even if you don’t want to add a lot of facts and figures to your text, try and add at least a couple.
You can mention certain statistics and then hyperlink them to their original source. Similarly, you can quote experts to substantiate the points mentioned in your content.
10. Blend the Keywords in Your Content
This tip applies if you are writing for SEO.
Keywords are the essence of SEO writing. And adding them alone is not enough. Balancing their density and blending them with the content is also important.
You should try and add your keywords in such a way that your readers should even realize that they have gone over them.
This is the aspect that you should keep in mind as far as the readability is concerned. However, overusing keywords is harmful even from the purely technical SEO perspective.
Your search engine will flag the write-up and mark the content as ‘spam’.
11. Read and Re-read
And lastly, be diligent about proofreading.
A major cause for having a lot of imperfections in your content is the lack of proper proofreading.
And here’s the thing, people.
Proofreading does not only mean scanning through the text once after writing it.
And while we are on it, it is also worth mentioning that reading a piece of content immediately after writing it is well-nigh useless.
When you write a post or article, you should move away for a bit. You should come back about 20 – 30 minutes later and then proofread it.
That way, you will be able to forget what you wrote and look at everything afresh.
If you have enough time, try and repeat this process 2 – 3 times. After proofreading your content two or three times, you can confidently finalize and submit it.
Conclusion
And that wraps it up.
If you want to make your content interesting and worth reading, you need to work on improving its quality.
In this post, we discussed 11 tips that you can follow to get started.
Perfecting your grammar and covering the elementary writing techniques should be your first priority. After that, you can start polishing and enhancing the finer aspects and details.
