Every aspect of your company benefits from a set of centralized guidelines: Your budgets are created using a pre-planned format, your ads are run on an agreed-upon list of social media networks and your colleagues follow a dress code, whether casual or formal.

Why, then, should your content writing be any different? A unified, company-wide style is essential to the success of any content writing strategy, and yet many organizations leave multiple individuals responsible for editing and stylizing their own writing.

Here, I’ll outline the key elements of a stellar style guide, so you can start producing an impressive and consistent body of content.

Learn From the Pros

You’ll want to start by selecting a respected and pre-made style guide that reflects the tone you’re after.

Here at bizbuzzcontent, we use the AP Stylebook, which is perhaps the most popular guide in the content, journalism and news industries. It’s updated every spring, and contains rules for numerals, names, capitalization and more.

Another solid choice is the Chicago Manual of Style, which is updated less frequently and is commonly used for fiction and non-fiction books.

You may have also heard of the MLA Handbook and APA Publication Manual, which are typically used in academic works.

While only you can decide which style guide is best for you, we generally find the AP Stylebook to be the best—it’s up-to-date, easy to understand and astoundingly comprehensive.

Nail Down Specifics

Choosing a major style guide is a great start, but you can’t exactly have everyone in your organization read 1,000 pages overnight. That’s why you’ll need to create an internal style guide that everyone can use as a quick and easy point of reference.

Inside, try to account for as many specifics as possible. These can include:

• Oxford commas: Are they in or are they out?
• Paragraph styles: Do you want indentations at the start of each paragraph? What about line breaks? How long should each paragraph be?
• Links: Should you hyperlink in your word processor, insert links in the form of comments, or copy and paste links into the text body?
• Capitalization: Think about words and phrases specific to your industry. For example, “agile” or “Agile?”
• Headings: Should headings be bolded, italicized, underlined or all three? What about subheadings?
• Word count: What should the target word count be for blog posts, social media updates, articles and emails?
• Images: How should images be inserted?
• Font: Should you be using Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia or another font? What size should the font be?
• Lists: Numbered or bulleted?
• Logos: How big should they be and where should they be inserted?

Of course, that list is not all-inclusive. To create the most comprehensive style guide possible, think about the issues that come up for your company. This might mean adding a section for tweets, or deciding how to sign off on emails.

Don’t Forget Personality

Figuring out how to develop a voice and tone for your brand is another beast entirely. However, your style guide should at least include a general picture of your brand’s personality.

To get started, think about the general traits you want your brand to embody. Take a look at Aaker’s five dimensions of brand personality for inspiration:

Then, come up with some general words to describe how you want your company’s content to sound. The Tuts+ style guide contains a prime example of this:

To simplify the process, start with two lists: one with adjectives you want to be used to describe your company, and one with adjectives you’d rather not be used to describe your company.

At this point, the first draft of your style guide should be coming together nicely. Now, all you need to do is clean it up, format it properly and save it in an easily-shared file. As time goes on, don’t forget to go back to it and add stipulations as needed.

Does your company have an internal style guide? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments!

Titles are arguably the most important part of the content you write. Sure, the body of your article may be impeccably crafted, but no one will read it if they aren’t tempted to click on the title first.

So, how can you write intriguing titles that drive traffic without verging into clickbait territory? Let’s find out.

Choose a Catchy Opener and Closer

To discover the most popular types of title openers, we turned to the folks at BuzzSumo. They analyzed 100 million headlines, and identified the 20 starting phrases with the most Facebook engagement:

As you can see, people love to learn, whether it’s in the form of instructional guides or handy explanations.

More specifically, the top five headlines are about numbered lists or educational information.

Similarly, the most shared closing phrases in a headline are as follows:

When it comes to numbered lists, multiples of five are a safe bet:

With this in mind, try to form a basic template for your title that revolves around learning. Here are a few examples:

• 5 Reasons Why Dogs Love Tennis Balls
• This is What Your Cat is Doing Right Now
• 10 Things You Can Do to Help Stray Cats
• This is the Cutest Puppy in the World

Of course, your titles won’t necessarily be about animals (and if they are, I’m very jealous), but you get the idea. Essentially, if your audience feels like they’ll learn something new from reading your article, you’re likely to get a boost in shares and traffic.

And, if you’re trying to attract a local audience specifically, try pairing an educational-sounding opening phrase with a location-based closing phrase.

For example:

• 10 Things to Do in Downtown Los Angeles
• These are the Best Coffee Shops in Columbus
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Check Out the Art Scene in Denver
• This is What You Can See This Weekend in Newark

Tweak the Length

Now that you’ve written the first version of your title, it’s time to play with the length.

Contrary to what some guides might tell you, there is no hard and fast rule about whether shorter or longer headlines do better. Rather, it’s about hitting a sweet spot in the middle.

CoSchedule published some handy charts based on data collected by Outbrain that can help us visualize this idea.

Titles with the highest engagement rates tend to have between 61 and 100 characters:

In simpler terms, titles with 16 to 18 words perform the best, although those with eight words saw excellent engagement as well:

The findings of HubSpot’s analysis tell a similar story:

To put this into practice, let’s rework the word count of a couple titles, so that this:

5 Cute Puppies

Or this:

5 of the Cutest Puppies in the Whole Entire World, According to the Clever Canine Connoisseurs That Follow Us on Twitter

Becomes this:

5 of the Cutest Puppies in the World

Or this:

5 of the Cutest Puppies in the World, According to Twitter

Don’t Become Clickbait

We all know that clickbait is a bad thing. But do we know what it actually means? Let’s check with Merriam-Webster:

The key word here in “dubious,” because if you provide your reader with everything the title promised, you’re not “baiting” them. If, however, your content fails to deliver, then it is clickbait.

So, when you’re writing your headlines, don’t worry about whether using emotionally charged words or numbered lists make your content clickbait. Instead, make sure that your content lives up to its title (if you promise a gallery of 15 adorable rescue dogs and only provide five, your readers will not be happy).

That being said, I personally believe you should use your own best judgment when evaluating whether your titles are catchy or manipulative. One of the biggest indicators of a manipulative title is fear-based language.

Plus, besides being ethically questionable, fearmongering simply doesn’t fly on the internet like it does on television. A study found that happy news stories spread far faster and wider than sad or concerning news stories on social media.

Another study from Fractl revealed that social media stories that create a sense of surprise, anticipation, joy and trust (represented in this graph by yellow and orange dots) fare far better than those which promote anger, fear, disgust and sadness:

The bottom line is that it’s easy to avoid becoming clickbait—just don’t make empty promises and don’t try to capitalize on the fears your readers may or may not have. You’ll be a lot more popular for it, too!

And, if you need help creating click-worthy content, check out our content creation services.

What are your tricks for writing a catchy title? Let me know in the comments!

Ever since the dawn of LiveJournal in 1999, blogging has been an integral part of internet culture. Now that entire companies are based solely online, blogging has become an effective business tool as well as a social activity.

It’s not enough for your business to have a blog—it also needs to be interesting, relevant and well written. Here, I’ll show you three tips you can use to take your blog posts to the next level.

1. Engage Your Audience

If you don’t post about interesting topics in an interesting way, there’s no reason for anyone to read your blog in the first place.

To start, identify the general theme of your topics. Since this is totally reliant on your company’s industry, this step shouldn’t be too difficult. For example, if your company sells software to car dealerships, then your blog posts should center around automotive industry news and advice.

Or, if your company sells organic cosmetics, then your blog posts should touch on beauty industry news, brand spotlights and updates on the development of safer and healthier cosmetic ingredients.

Once you’ve determined the types of topics your posts will address, you’ll need to decide on a formula. HubSpot offers free templates for five different types of blog posts:

• The how-to post
• The list-based post
• The curated collection post
• The SlideShare presentation post
• The newsjacking post

Here at bizbuzzcontent, we like to ask clients to explore the following categories as well:

• Trend analysis
• Thought leadership
• Research highlights
• Case studies
• Fun (roundups, culture, off the cuff)

To keep your audience from getting bored, try to switch up the type of post you use on a regular basis. If your last two blog posts were list-based, you might want to try a how-to post or a curated collection post next.

Or, try using Answer the Public to find out what, exactly, people want to know about any given subject. For example, here are the results it generated for the keyword “writing:”

Understand Your Readers

While you likely have a general idea of who’s purchasing your products and reading your blog posts, it’s a good idea to create a few detailed buyer personas.

Essentially, buyer personas are fictional characters that represent your target audience. For instance, your buyer personas could include a college athlete, an upper middle-class mother and an athletic coach.

Some of the details that Shopify recommends considering when you’re building your buyer personas are:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Education level
• Income level
• Favorite websites
• Buying motivation
• Buying concerns

To create your personas, you’ll need to access data on your real customers before using it to compile a few concrete characters. Then, either craft the persona yourself or use a generator (such as MakeMyPersona, Xtensio’s User Persona Creator, Digital Marketer’s Customer Avatar Worksheet or Filestage’s Buyer Persona Template) to bring your ideal customer to life.

At bizbuzzcontent, we ask clients to answer the following questions (and more) when building their personas:

1. What are their most common questions when first looking at your product/service?
2. What are their primary goals when working with you?
3. What is most important to them, and how does your organization help to fulfill that?
4. What are their greatest challenges, and how does your organization help to address them?
5. How do they prefer to interact with you? Email, phone, face-to-face?
6. What marketing assets have they responded to in the past? Why?

If you’re not sure where to start, or are having trouble answering those questions, start with a user story and work backwards from there.

Keep Things Fresh

Even if someone else has written about the same topic before, you want your blog post to stand out.

One of the best ways to accomplish that is by creating and adhering to a distinctive voice. Content Marketing Institute provides a few simple steps you can use to define your voice:

1. Gather a representative sample of your content
2. Describe your brand voice in three words
3. Create a brand voice chart
4. Get everyone onboard
5. Revise as needed

If you’re lacking inspiration, try looking at other brands’ voices for ideas. For example, trendy underwear brand MeUndies uses a voice that’s casual, energetic and a touch sarcastic, while chic skincare brand Glossier uses a voice that’s concise, friendly and liberally peppered with emojis.

And, although it’s always a good idea to blog about current events, news and other timely topics, you’ll want to add some evergreen content into the mix to ensure that your posts remain relevant. If you’re a bit fuzzy on the difference between evergreen content and non-evergreen content, keep this is mind: a post titled “How to Survive the 2020 Presidential Election” will be rendered obsolete once the 2020 election is over (non-evergreen), whereas a post titled “How to Understand Political Debates” will remain relevant for as long as political debates are around (evergreen).

While there are many more tips for writing truly spectacular blog posts, I believe those three points make for an excellent starting point.

Do you have additional advice for writing top-notch blog posts? Let me know!

Email subject lines can be tricky. If your subject lines are too impersonal, too short or too demanding, you run the risk of driving potential readers away.

Here, we’ll discuss a three quick data-driven steps you can take to ensure that your email subject lines are well written and well received.

Get Personal

Perhaps because today’s digital world is so oversaturated with content, personalization is more important than ever.

In a 2015 report, Experian Marketing Services discovered that personalized subject lines boosted open rates by a whopping 29.3 percent on average.

When you’re writing emails for your campaign, be sure to include subtle personalized touches—for example, put the recipient’s name in the subject line, or address them by name in the email’s body.

Choose Your Words Carefully

In marketing emails, particularly subject lines, words can make or break your campaign’s success.

A study released by MailChimp in 2013 revealed that words that imply time sensitivity can convince readers to open your emails.

By contrast, certain words—such as those associated with charity—are seriously off-putting to readers.

Other unpopular words and phrases include “sign up,” “last chance,” “reminder” and “cancelled.”

Length Matters

When you’re crafting your campaign’s subject lines, just remember to include at least 28 characters: statistics say that subject lines with 28-39 characters generate the highest open rates, while those with 51 characters or more are most likely to increase click rates.

That’s not to say that short and sweet subject lines are useless—after all, they do generate an average open rate of 13.1 percent. Just remember that, especially when it comes to click rates, longer subject lines are valuable, too.

Do you have any additional advice for improving email subject lines? Let me know!

In the world of writing, one of the easiest ways to distinguish an experienced writer from a not-so-experienced one is grammar. Think of it this way: with the addition of one tiny comma, a sentence can go from perfectly innocent (“Let’s eat, grandma!”) to downright alarming (“Let’s eat grandma!”).

Luckily, it’s a lot easier to clean up your grammar now than it was 10 years ago due to some handy little apps. Here, we’ll look at five grammar apps that can help you take your writing to the next level.

1. Grammarly

One of my personal favorites, Grammarly automatically checks the grammar and spelling of everything you type, whether you’re writing an email or a social media update. The beauty of Grammarly is that it can be installed as a browser extension, desktop app, Microsoft Office add-in or mobile app (either iOS or Android), so you can always rest easy knowing that your grammar is on point.

2. Grammar Up

If you’re interested in improving your own grammatical skills, it might be worth your while to check out Grammar Up, a free app for iOS and Android packed to the brim with practice questions and real-time feedback. Spend a few minutes each day testing your skills and you’ll soon get the hang of tenses, transitions, infinitives and more.

3. SenGram

For most, sentence diagrams are nothing more than an unpleasant memory from school days gone by. With SenGram, available on iOS devices for $3.99, sentence diagrams go from being a confusing homework assignment to a fun puzzle game. Solve a wide variety of puzzles to master prepositional phrases, linking verbs, conjunctions and more.

4. English Grammar Test

Available for free on Android devices, English Grammar Test is a popular app containing 1,200 tasks, 180 tests and 26 topics. What sets this app apart is the simple and straightforward explanations that accompany each task, making it a snap to learn what you did wrong and how you can do better the next time around.

5. Dictionary.com

Finally, the Dictionary.com app, free for iOS and Android devices, is an indispensable resource for writers of all levels of expertise. With over 2 million words, an easy search function and a wealth of both definitions and synonyms for every word, you’ll never have an excuse for repetitive or boring writing.

Do you use any of these grammar apps? Did I miss one of your favorites? Let me know in the comments!