Writing Quality Content - 6. Mistakes To Avoid

Writing quality content requires great focus and attention. You cannot be careless about your writing because even a minor error can do more harm than good. Whenever writing any form of content, you should ensure you don't make these common mistakes.

1. Improper Grammar and Spelling

No matter how genuine and informative your ideas are, they will lose their strength if they are communicated with incorrect grammar, pronunciation and spelling. This will ruin the effect that your content is intended to have with your audience. What it will do is portray you as a sloppy writer and as a result, no one will read your work.

2. Language Mistakes

Some people have a misconception that loading their content with rich vocabulary will earn them better results. However, this is not true. You should focus more on ensuring your reader understands the content rather than using complex words and phrases. The golden rule - Keep It Simple.

3. Losing Focus

A big mistake that new writers often make is to start writing before having a proper idea of what they need to write. When you are not clear of what and why you are writing, you will tend to lose focus and then you drag your writing in various directions. This confuses your audience and they wont find your content interesting or informative.

4. Working on Keywords Only

There is no doubt that keywords help your content earn good rankings with search engines. Knowing this, it is tempting to load your work with keywords and end up with article that lacks genuine information and relevance. A good writer will insert keywords only where they are required and where they gain maximum impact. A poor writer will "stuff" their content with keywords which ultimately detracts from the value of the content, and lowers the ranking in search results.

5. Selecting Wrong Niche

Good practice is to select a niche that has not been over saturated. Likewise, it should not be one where there is no interested audience. Its common for people to make the mistake of writing about something that is unique without knowing or realising that there is no audience that has any interest in that topic. Similarly, when you write about something that every writer is already writing about, it will be extremely difficult to get noticed. Kind of like the old "needle in a haystack" philosophy.

6. Having a Poor Title

A lot of people do not pay enough attention to the title of their content. However, it is very important, as it is the introduction and promotion of your content. People won't select your text, article or book from among a list of similar articles, if they find the title boring or dull. So put some creativity into creating a good title that catches the eyes and attention of the readers.

7. Copying the Content

Although you can obtain great amount of data from resources that are already published, you should limit the use of such data to preliminary research. Providing the readers with the same information would not make the content worth reading. People will like your content only if it unique and original.

8. Self Praising

A lot of writers believe that if they create hype about their work, then the audience will be attracted towards it and that the audience will automatically rate the content of good quality. Although this idea sounds great in principle, it doesn't achieve a positive result if the content doesn't include the information which the audience is looking for. Good quality, and genuine information is what will provide you with great results. Hype with no proper information is nothing but a waste of time.

9. Uninteresting Content

The content should be organized in a manner that readers don't get bored and tend to lose interest. It should be crisp enough to maintain readers attention. Before reading the entire content, your audience is likely to skim it to decide whether to read it or leave it. Having proper headings, options and bullets will make your readers task easy. Look at this article for example. Short, concise, numbered and labelled sections to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for.

To avoid these mistakes, once you have finished writing your content, you should counter check the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and all the other items listed above. In this way, you can learn from the mistakes that have been made by previous writers and make your content quality from the start.