Monday Content Copywriting – Use Your Keywords As Prompts

Last Monday you came up with ideas for content by thinking outside of your company. This Monday you can find ideas for content copywriting by looking under your hood, so to speak.

But let me digress for second. In creative writing classes, to get people warmed up, the teacher often offers the class a writing prompt. This could be a word or a short phrase: something like “telephone rang” or “the last thing I remember.” From there the writers have 6 to 10 minutes to write the first things that come to mind, and if possible to make a story out of it. They can use the phrase at the beginning, middle or end. It’s a lot of fun, and once you get over the initial panic, you would amaze yourself with what you can write in such a short time.

Taking this notion of the writing prompt to copywriting for your business, I suggest you look at your keywords for your prompts.

Behind (or under) every search optimization strategy there are your keywords – those words or phrases that you want to be found by. Most SEO specialists that I know recommend inserting keywords into your web text, whether that be a product page, about us page or a blog. Pretty basic stuff.

What if you looked over your keywords and thought about making them the subject of your blogging? Here is what I mean.

Let’s say one of your long-tail keyword phrases is ‘natural products for anxiety.’  Since you don’t want to focus too much about your products when writing your blog (remember valuable content is not about “me” but about the interests of your customers), think about the problems that your customers might have when looking for you. So here are a few prompts that can get you started:

• The first time I experienced anxiety...
• My top three anxious moments are...
• I’m anxious about the ingredients on the label because...

Now pick one and write as fast as you can for 7 minutes, and then stop. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or anything else. Just write.

By doing this you’ve put yourself into the head of your consumer. You may have a paragraph or a page of rough copy, which you can now craft into a more coherent blog post that:
A) Includes keywords that help your search optimization
B) Focuses on addressing a consumer problem
C) Probably offers your product at the end as a solutionNot bad for 7 minutes of work.
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Next Week: Recycling content.

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