Your content strategy is likely focused on broad topics or generalized goals, such as promoting a specific product or building interest in one of your services. But many companies become so focused on these tasks that their writing begins to suffer. When you over-mechanize your process of writing, it becomes evident in your words—even if it’s subtle.
People won’t put up with robotic or fake sounding language, so don’t waste your time with it. You have to write and speak like a human to reach a human! It might be initially difficult for you to tell whether your written copy sounds natural or robotic, but once you learn to write organically, the quality of your content will improve dramatically.
What Do You Like to Read?
Think about what you like to see on other websites. Are you drawn to copy that’s funny? Entertaining? Insightful? Salesy? Odds are, the answer is yes to everything but “salesy.” It’s obvious when writers try and throw catchphrases and hooks into content, and it turns people off. To see whether your content is truly engaging or just fluff, examine each sentence in your material and ask “is this sentence valuable to the reader?” If the answer is no, throw the sentence out. No exceptions.
Key Traps to Avoid
There are a few traps that many writers and businesspeople fall into when writing content. You’ll need to avoid them if you want to sound like a human, and not a robot:
· Keyword stuffing. A tactic in the old days of SEO to include a specific phrase many times in one document. It can still help your rankings a bit, but only if it occurs in the context of natural phrasing.
· Selling. Yes, you want people to buy your products and services after reading your content. But you can’t sell to them throughout the piece—people can detect insincerity a mile away.
· Writing for the sake of writing. Simply filling a quota isn’t enough. You need to make sure all your written material has a real purpose, and a valuable one, rather than just filling a spot on your blog.
Don’t Overthink It!
For the most part, you won’t need some multi-layered or intensive strategy to speak and write like a human. Just write naturally, the way you would speak in a conversation, and the words will flow much more intuitively. Most people get into trouble when they try too hard to write and stuff their material full of unnecessary or artificial language.
