How stargazing can help you write compelling content.

The infinite vastness of the cosmos can make life on Earth look insignificant. But it can also teach us a thing or two about B2B content marketing.

You need to think ‘big’ when writing.

It’s always handy to get a bit of perspective when writing an article. Take the Universe, for instance. The Earth’s a pretty spacious gaff, right? Well, you can fit our planet into the Sun more than one million times and still have space to stack your DVDs.

And that’s not even all that impressive. The Sun is tiddly in comparison to the largest star we’ve discovered so far (2,000 times more tiddly, to be precise).

Avoid disappearing into a constant stream of content.

Like the Universe, the amount of content on the internet is massive. Let’s put it in perspective. Every second online sees around 7,770 tweets spring into existence, and 70,928 YouTube video views.

It’s now nearly impossible to keep up with everything, so you’ll probably only look at the stuff that really grabs your attention.

It’s the same for your prospects. They won’t read your articles if they don’t see a good reason to. So, to help you out, we’ve put together our top tips to make it happen:

Do…

• Use your people’s expertise — get your staff to write about what they know.
• Post regularly — build a body of work that shows your followers how reliable your insight is.
• Plan ahead — create a schedule and stick to it. It’ll help you organise your key messages more clearly.
• Write simply — lead your readers through a coherent argument with a clear conclusion.
• Make a point — Show how you can solve your audience’s problems.
• Be consistent — your audience is more likely to follow you if your tone of voice is consistent and becomes familiar.
• Promote your articles online — support your content by sharing it on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Don’t…

• Write for the sake of it — make sure you’ve got a clear message to put across.
• Rush to post your article — there’s nothing wrong with adding new ideas to your plan, but you need to leave enough time to create a good article.
• Overwrite — most articles are 300-500 words long. You don’t want your readers to give up half way through your message because you’ve drawn it out too long.
• Give up — you want your followers to see you as knowledgeable so you need to keep them up-to-date as frequently as you can.

Make your article writing simple.

Writing is easy. Writing something your audience wants to read is harder. Take a look at the rest of our blog to see how we do it, and get in touch if you’d like us to lend you a hand — we’ve got the Brian Coxs and Neil deGrasse Tysons of the writing world waiting to help you out.