Whether you’re an aspiring content writer or an established one, you would most certainly understand the power of words: a well-placed phrase can evoke powerful emotions in the reader, and a compelling opening line can set the tone for an entire blog post or article. But a good content writing process is more than just the right words in the right order; it’s a series of steps that must be followed to ensure a well-written piece that drives conversions.

And we’re here to provide you with exactly that – a guide to the perfect content writing process. (Yes, it does exist!)

With a perfect content writing process, you’ll be able to produce highly shareable, quality content that engages your readers and improves your search engine rankings at the same time. Read on and find out how you can develop, implement, and sustain a well-defined content process with the help of an AI content assistant to produce stellar content faster and with more efficiency.

TL;DR here’s a quick summary video of this article.

 

What is content writing?

Content Writing Process: Explained

Content Writing Tips: Navigating the content writing process

• Stage 1: Planning and Research
• Stage 2: Writing
• Stage 3: Proofreading and Editing
• Stage 4: Publishing and Review

 

 

What is content writing?

Content writing is essentially the method of creating engaging, valuable, and relevant text for digital media and other channels. This material can be in the form of an article, blog post, e-book, product description, whitepaper, newsletter, and more. Its purpose is to educate, inform, persuade, and entertain the target audience through the careful use of keywords, the voice of tone, and stylistic elements.

Now, here’s a follow-up question.

What is SEO content writing?

SEO content writing is basically content writing in which you take specific steps to optimize the content for enhanced discoverability and better rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Effective SEO content writing involves creating high-quality content along with SEO best practices, like incorporating relevant keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. The purpose of content SEO is to drive more traffic to your marketing channels and enhance your reach to potential customers.

💡 Must-read: SEO Writing with AI – How to Use AI SEO Content Generators

Which is the important element of content writing?

Here are some important elements of effective content writing – 

• Purpose: There should be a purpose to writing content. Whether it’s educating the reader, informing them, or persuading their purchase decision. The purpose of content writing also guides the choice of words, tone, and style.
• Audience: Effective content writing that engages and informs the reader is only possible when you have a strong understanding of your audience’s needs and interests.
• Clarity: When writing content, you have to ensure that it’s easy to understand. It should be free of errors and make sense to your readers.
• Relevance: Content writing should be done in a way that provides some value to the reader. For this, it has to be up-to-date, timely, and relevant.
• Keywords: Keywords are essential if you want your content to rank higher in the SERPs, making it more discoverable for the readers.
• Voice of tone: Content needs to be constructed using a tone that is appropriate for the target audience.
• Style: The style of content writing is also very important in making it more enjoyable and engaging for the readers. That means concise and clear language, an active voice, and an engaging tone.

 

Content Writing Process: Explained

The content writing process is an integral part of digital marketing. People today go straight to the web to search for any information. And with the right content writing process, you can fulfill these search queries and enhance the visibility of your brand on the web. Don’t be mistaken though, the process of content writing is not just about stringing words together. It’s about communicating with your audience with a purpose, some amount of thought, and an effective strategy.

To define it in simplest terms, the content writing process is a series of steps that a content creator has to go through while creating any piece of engaging content. This content creation process can vary from one project to another, depending on the specific goals and requirements. But, for the most part, it involves the following few steps –

• Planning: Before starting the process of content writing, you would have to develop and plan your content strategy, outlining all the topics you plan to cover, the desired tone and style, and the goals of the content.
• Research: In this step, you would gather all the relevant information on a topic to deliver relevant content to your audience.
• Writing: This is where the actual content writing starts. In this step, you would use your research to create content that provides value to the reader.
• Optimizing for search engines: After creating a preliminary draft, you would optimize it for Google and other search engines. This is done by incorporating keywords, and meta descriptions and using other SEO best practices.
• Editing and review: The content created by you or your team has to be reviewed for grammar, accuracy, and clarity. This step can even involve multiple rounds of editing to ensure that it meets the goals.
• Publishing: The last step of the content writing process is publishing the content so it’s available to the target audience.

 

Now, let’s take a look at all these steps in greater detail to examine how best you can streamline this process.

 

Content Writing Tips: Navigating the content writing process

As is evident, the content writing and development process starts much before you add words to a file. A large portion of it is dedicated to the preparation, research, and development of topics and ideas. So, it’s important to give due thought and consideration to each stage of the content writing process. Here are some tips you can follow for each stage –

Stage 1: Planning and Research

To provide your audience with relevant, factually correct, and up-to-date information, it’s important to set the foundation right. The research and planning stage of content development plays a very important role here, as it gives you an opportunity to align your content with the audience’s interest and search intent. Without proper planning and research, all your investment (of both time and money) in content marketing will prove to be futile.

Here’s how you can approach this stage of content writing –

1. Set content goals

Before starting any content marketing campaign, you also need to set a goal you want to achieve by writing that content piece. This could be building brand awareness, collecting more qualified leads, re-engaging former customers, or anything else. Setting your content goal can also guide your strategy for audience segmentation, style and tone, and even the type of content you’ll be producing.

2. Set your content strategy

Building a content strategy helps you determine how every content piece will be created, shared, and managed as it moves through the creation creation workflow. This is especially important when juggling multiple marketing campaigns at the same time.

There are many different types of content strategies you can leverage. It could be product-led content strategy, lead generation strategy, sales-centric content strategy, SEO content strategy, or a combination of several of these strategies. The type of content strategy you’ll use is largely dependent on your content goals.

3. Build your audience personas

An audience persona is a made-up profile of your perfect customer, including their demographics, personal interests, and key details. Creating these audience personas helps you tailor your content to meet your audience’s needs, making your writing clearer and more focused.

4. Determine the audience’s search intent

To create helpful content, you need to know what your audience is searching for online, i.e., their search intent. Audience search intent can be of the following types –

• Informational search intent: When the audience is looking to gain knowledge on a topic.
• Commercial search intent: When the audience is investigating their options before making a purchase decision.
• Transactional search intent: The audience is ready to make a purchase, and is looking for more information on a product/service.

 

Once you have zeroed in on the search intent, you’ll be able to create more relevant content for your audiences.

5. Do your topic research

Thorough research sets the foundation for your entire content project, ensuring accuracy and depth. It helps you uncover valuable insights, avoid misinformation, and identify gaps in existing knowledge. This can be done in a couple of ways –

• Collating information from credible sources, like reputed websites, books, and academic journals
• Going through competitor content
• Interviewing thought leaders
• Interviewing leads and customers

Content planning tools can be invaluable during this stage, especially in keyword and competitor research.

6. Keyword research

For content to be visible to your target audience, it has to be framed around relevant keywords. Keyword research is an important part of the content planning process, as it tells the search engine what exactly your content is about. Since it is not an exact science, keyword research can sometimes be tricky. Luckily there are AI-powered keyword generator tools like Narrato that make the process simpler.

AI SEO content brief generator

When you enter a seed keyword into the tool, the SEO content brief generator on Narrato generates a complete brief, along with a list of keywords, competitor references, topics to include, target word count, and more. Narrato also provides a content SEO score for easier keyword optimization on its powerful content editor. So, in a way, this tool takes care of your content outlines and topic research too.

 

 

If you want to add some more keywords to your list, you can use the AI keyword generator on Narrato. This AI keyword research tool can instantly provide you with a list of highly relevant keywords, including long-tail keywords. It also sorts these AI-generated keywords by search volume categories—high, medium, and low.

AI keyword generator

7. Create a content outline

Creating a content outline is crucial for streamlining the flow of your content writing process. This becomes all the more important for long-form content like blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and eBook writing. A content outline helps guide your research in the right direction and allows you to consider the most important parts of the content topic. Narrato’s AI content assistant offers various AI-powered micro tools for creating your content outlines, like the AI blog outline generator and the AI landing page outline generator.

8. Plan your content calendar

An editorial content calendar is another crucial part of the research and planning stage of content writing. It gives you and your team a chance to visualize all the content you have planned for the week or month, so that you can pace your content writing accordingly. It also makes it easier to create and share content pieces with your audience more consistently.

The content calendar on Narrato can be very useful for planning and managing all your content projects in a central location.

Global content calendar on Narrato

You can assign content tasks to the writers directly from the calendar, and also change and set the deadlines for the tasks. There’s also an option to switch between weekly and monthly views. For a complete overview of projects-wide content tasks, there’s also a Global content calendar on Narrato.

 

Stage 2: Writing

After all the planning and research, you’ll finally arrive at the writing stage. This is the most crucial stage of the entire process, as your approach here will determine the success of your content marketing campaigns.

You can choose to entrust the writing to your content team. But if you don’t have an in-house content team, you can enlist the help of a content writing service like Narrato’s. Narrato Marketplace is a platform that can provide you with 1000+ quality-vetted and skilled freelance writers capable of serving clients across all niches and industries. There’s also an option of managed content writing services, in which a dedicated account manager handles all the content projects.

Whether you outsource content writing or use your in-house team of writers/editors, here is a look at how you can navigate the writing stage –

1. Pick the writing angle

The digital space is quite crowded, with a lot of content on the same topics. So, how can you make your content stand out? Choose your writing angle carefully, and examine new ways to build audience interest with the main body of the content. Maybe you can even target a different set of keywords on the same topic to get more traffic.

2. Write engaging content

Crafting engaging content is both an art and a science. It begins with understanding your audience—what are their interests, pain points, and aspirations? Once you’ve got that nailed down, it’s time to weave those insights into your writing. Narrato’s AI writing assistant can help with that. No matter what your content project is, you’ll discover an AI template that fits perfectly. The best part is that you can specify your topic, who your audience is, the length, and even the tonality of the content.

AI writing assistant

In case you don’t find an AI template for your needs, you can simply create a custom AI template on the platform. Here’s a video guide that explains how it works –

 

 

3. Start off right and end on a high note

While the body contains the meat of the content, you have to start off/end the content pieces on the right note too. How you construct the introduction will determine if the readers will want to continue reading your piece. A good introduction provides the reader with what they need from the start. That means keeping it relatively short and without any fluff content. As for your conclusion, it should tie together all the main points and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Sometimes, you can find yourself stuck with the introduction or the concluding paragraph. The AI Writer on Narrato can be an excellent tool for generating content for a variety of use cases, including article intros, conclusions, sectional content for blogs, headlines, CTAs for any copy, and more.

Narrato AI blog intro generator

💡 Must-read: How to Use an AI Writing Assistant for Creating Marketing Content

4. Add engaging visuals

Writing high-quality content is not just about words. You need to include engaging visuals and media to complement the text and create additional value for the reader. Breaking up the text with visuals also makes your content easier to read. This visual content can be in the form of images, videos, infographics, and charts. If you use the Narrato Workspace, adding images to your content becomes easier with the images and graphics library. There is also an AI image generator tool to generate images from textual descriptions.

AI Image generator

💡 Must-read: How to Use AI Image Generators for Best Results

5. Add CTAs strategically

The main purpose of content creation is to educate and inform your audience, and provide them with solutions to their problems. And if you want to convert these leads to customers, you need to include CTAs in your content. But filling your content with CTAs at random places will not solve the purpose. The key is to find a way to organically include your product and service as a solution to their problem, which is what product-led content marketing is all about.

6. Incorporate researched keywords into the content

The keywords you researched in the first stage of the content writing process will help your content ranking in the SERPs. While researching is half the job, you need to incorporate these keywords intelligently too. Here are some pointers for using keywords in website content writing –

• Make sure that the primary keyword appears in the introductory paragraph
• Incorporate the keywords generously in the body of the next, but make sure it fits naturally
• Include the keywords in the sub-headings
• Keyword stuffing can affect your search rankings in the long run
• Use variations of the keywords and related keywords that are relevant to a content topic
• Include the primary keyword in the meta description, to encourage readers to click

 

The SEO brief on Narrato can be very helpful in the keyword optimization process. You can track the SEO score to see how well-optimized your article is. You can also track keyword optimization with the keyword count tracker.

• The white tablets indicate that you haven’t included that keyword in your content
• The yellow tablets indicate that you haven’t met the keyword count
• The green tablets indicate that you’ve added that keyword to your content and also met the keyword count

 

SEO score and keyword tracker on Narrato

7. Pick a catchy title

You might be wondering why we didn’t ask you to pick your content title at the start of the content writing process. This is because it’s important to put some thought into choosing a working title for your content. After all, it is the first thing that the audience sees. So, the best way to approach it is by creating it after you’re done crafting your content. Instead of picking generic titles used by other brands, create a unique and catchy title that covers all the important elements of your text. And make sure to include your primary keyword in the title too.

Narrato’s AI Topic Generator tool can help you come up with SEO-friendly and catchy titles for your content pieces.

Narrato AI topic generator

8. Write the meta title and description

The purpose of the meta title and meta description is to provide the audience with a brief overview of what the content piece contains. As we’ve already explained, including your primary keyword in both is important to help with the indexing of your content in the search engines. The meta title should ideally be 70 characters long, while the meta description can contain 160 characters. Narrato’s AI SEO meta title and description generator is perfect for generating accurate SEO meta titles and descriptions for any web page or blog post.

 

Stage 3: Proofreading and Editing

Writing perfectly in one go isn’t always possible. Most content pieces have to go through several rounds of editing and proofreading before you can finally hit publish. Publishing without proofreading and editing can detract from the credibility of your content. So, it’s important to optimize digital content editing and proofreading processes too.

Writers often self-edit their content during the process of writing itself, checking for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, unclear segments, etc. Narrato can be useful for preliminary editing, as it automatically scans your content for grammar and readability issues to provide context-based suggestions. It also gives a readability score.

Readability assistant

In addition to that, there is an in-line AI writer with various options for improving content.

In-line AI writer and plagiarism checker

After the preliminary editing and proofreading, the content can be handed over to a quality assurance (QA) specialist for final editing and fact-checking. It’s good practice to do a plagiarism check at this point to ensure that the content meets the quality standards. Narrato comes with a plagiarism checker tool (shown in the image above), which makes it easier to run plagiarism checks on your content through the content task page itself.

What is your proofreading process for content writing?

Your proofreading process has to be efficient if you want to streamline your content-writing process. Following a standard set of steps can help in proofreading process optimization –

• Take a break: After completing a content piece, take a step back so that you can look at it with fresh eyes. This makes it easier to identify any issues and grave errors.
• Proofread slowly: Pay attention to every sentence and word while proofreading your content. If you find yourself getting caught up in the flow of content, maybe try reading the content backwards, starting from the last paragraph.
• Check for grammar and spelling mistakes: Scan the content for any spelling and grammar issues, including typos, sentence structure, and punctuation mistakes.
• Verifying data and fact-checking: Double-check the data and facts included in the content to ensure that they’re up to date.
• Consistency in the tone of voice: Examine if the tone and voice in all content pieces are consistent and suitable for the target audience.
• Review the content structure: Check whether the content has a clean structure and the flow of thought is logical from one paragraph to another.

 

Stage 4: Publishing and Review

The last stage of the content writing process involves the publishing and review of content. Publishing is not just about putting the content out there in the digital space. You need to develop a well-thought-out content publishing strategy, that outlines the channels you’ll be distributing your content to. It should also lay down the procedures for uploading and sharing the content on each channel. And if you’re looking to speed up content publishing, maybe consider investing in a publishing automation tool like Narrato’s. Narrato comes with WordPress, Webflow and Zapier integration, and also allows custom integrations through Narrato API.

Although the usual content writing process ends with content publishing, we find it useful to include another step in the process – Content Review. In this last step, you would examine each piece of content to see how it measures up to your content goals. It also gives you a chance to collect relevant information and data to perfect the next content marketing campaign.

 

Conclusion

By implementing the content writing tips and steps described above, and optimizing them to suit your needs, you’ll be able to create content consistently and efficiently. Having a step-by-step plan for your content writing process will also help in the identification of any glaring inconsistencies in your content, making accountability easier.

So yes, perfecting your content writing process might take some trial and error, but it is certainly possible. The key is to have a strong content writing framework, like the one outlined here, and to hire talented people who can make it sing.