Here at Rooster, we always give the same advice to our clients because it’s a successfully tried method; regular great content will increase your traffic, increase your engagement and overall bump up your search position. However, writing great content is never easy, especially when it is for SEO.

This is because to write great content you need to write something that not only builds traffic to your site but also engages with your visitors. Writing truly great content for SEO needs to involve every individual in your office, it’s all about experiences and giving truthful, valuable and interesting advice. Whether you’re looking to write content for your website or on your company’s blog, unless you have a dedicated team that are continuously creating content it is likely that you will plateau with ideas quickly. Here at Rooster we understand that you may need a little bit of help motivating your team, and this is exactly what this article aims to do.

So, read on and in no time you’ll have your team writing great content!

What do we mean by ‘Great Content’?

It’s more simple than it sounds, it’s all about putting the time and effort into a piece that is original, interesting, useful and more importantly actionable.

But what do we mean by actionable? Well, it’s simply when your audience can take something from your content; when they learn from it.

Getting Your Team to Write Great Content

Firstly, you need to understand that time is a valuable thing and it will take delicate powers of persuasion to get people to dedicate some of theirs to content writing. This is why more often than not, one person in any organisation has the delightful task of writing content day in day out, in order to keep your website up to date. Of you could be faced with there being no content produced at all!

Usually, the first method is to ask, ask and then ask again. However, badgering someone to create content will only set you up for failure and make people resent content before they’ve even begun!

If content creation is seen as just another task on the ever long list of to-do’s, it’s unlikely to be filled with passion, let alone offer a unique twist. If your team is uninterested in producing content, you should expect to see either a Wikipedia copy and paste or an exact copy from a competitor website – and to be honest, you’d be better off without any content than content of this sort.

You need to ensure that your team sees the value of writing content. From and SEO, engagement and personal perspective; there is something to be said about satisfaction levels when seeing your own article published online and this is always a good one to push with your team!

Tips for a Team that Wants to Write Great Content

Here are a couple of Rooster’s own tried and tested tips and tricks for getting your team motivated to start writing content:

Let Them Own Their Content

When those writing content feel ownership towards their piece and see their name attached to it rather than the company’s, you will see amazing things produced. They pour passion, thought and more importantly research into it. You will notice that they begin to take pride in the article or page they have produced, it ends up not only being a completed task, but it offers more to that individual, for instance, a sense of accomplishment that they can show to other people.

Get Them Involved in Content Creation from Day One

If you were to suddenly turn around to your team today and say “right, I need you all to write some content for our blog”, what response do you think you would get? Maybe a few nods and a couple of “that’s a great idea!” But how many will actually write a piece? Probably none.

If you let your team in from the beginning, you can begin to develop a sense of reliability, and with reliability comes responsibility. The more responsible someone feels about a particular project, the more willing they are to help and share ideas, thus leading to a sense of ownership.

If You’re Dictating a Particular Writing Style, Stop!

More often than not, a company wants to be seen in a particular way, typically; professional, insightful and revolutionary. It’s part of the brand identity, that keeps your customers and potential customers familiar to you, but if you want great content to bring those new customers to you, you need to understand that everyone writes differently and that’s ok

Each member of your team will have a different style, a different approach, and a different niche. If you try to dictate everyone to become something that they’re not, you will never get the results you are looking for. By understanding each individual and encouraging (not pushing) a direction that plays to both their strengths and interests, you are on the road to success.

Give Them Topics They Want to Write About

This approach is particularly useful on blogs. Some content that you, personally, may not find the value for, may be useful for someone else. If your blog doesn’t offer a variety of different topics, your readership will be just as slim.

If you look through our own blog, for example, we have a range of different people writing with different styles that have different purposes for different people. More often than not, some blog topics that we wouldn’t find as useful from an SEO point of view (for instance UK School Years and Converting Prezi to Powerpoint) have pleasantly surprised me! And more importantly, these blog posts have proven to be some of our most successful pieces.

Bullet Points can be Great for Content Creation

Typically, starting to write content is the hardest part, especially without having any direction. You’ll find that even if you’ve given them ownership, responsibility and a topic, they may still struggle to get past the first paragraph.

As said before, great content comes from research. If a member of your team is struggling, why not try to help with some bullet points that you’ve researched from a project purpose point of view.

This article is an example of this, we have a topic of content creation but how do we steer this into something that people want to read and share? Simple, our research showed that people were looking for advice on how to write not only content but great content. Armed with this insight, this blog post was born and the following clear bullet points followed:

  • What is great content?
  • What does it involve?
  • How do you write great content?
  • How do you get your team to do it?

Need Some Help?

As a creative and digital agency, Rooster can talk to you about content creation and help get your team motivated to start writing great content either for your website, and/or your blog. Get in touch today.