Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies you can employ, and the benefits are overwhelming—you’ll see higher traffic, higher customer retention, growth in other marketing areas like SEO and social media, and dozens of other benefits.
However, the process of actually writing the content can also be beneficial for you—as a business owner, as a marketer, or even as a person. User-generated content is a powerful up-and-coming trend because it reduces the burden on your marketing team to create new material, but you might not want to give up some of the biggest advantages of writing the content yourself.
Just take a look at these unexpected benefits you’ll enjoy from the simple act of writing articles for your content marketing campaign:
1. Catharsis
Expression in any form can be a powerful way to relieve stress and work through tough personal problems. Even if you’re writing about a topic related to your industry or your profession, you can choose topics that might be related to a current struggle. For example, if you’re a small business owner and you’re struggling with maintaining a positive cash flow, you could write an article to other entrepreneurs about how to keep your cash flow under control, or even how to remain calm in a crisis situation. Writing forces you to process your thoughts and feelings, which makes them easier to understand and live with. It’s a critical function of writing that shouldn’t be ignored.
2. New knowledge
One of the most important and easiest benefits to acquire is the gathering of new information. Unless you’re already a certified expert in a given topic, you’ll need to do some in-depth research in order to write knowledgeably about it. When searching for new potential topics to write, you’ll become exposed to dozens, if not hundreds of new angles from publishers in your industry and your competitors, and if you pay attention to them, your perspective will expand. Beyond that, the more research you do, the more intelligent and better informed you’re going to be. The best content out there is material that’s been exhaustively researched, so make it a point to include facts and statistics you didn’t know before you started writing the article—it’s an easy way to keep yourself sharp.
3. More articulate conversations
Writing more frequently will challenge you to develop and refine your vocabulary, as well as how you put your sentences together. You may have a fantastic idea in your head, but you can’t just give that idea to your readers; you need to find the perfect words to define and describe that idea, and use those to carry your message. In writing, this process takes time because you’re afforded the luxury of contemplation. When you first start, you may find it difficult to find the right words to describe your thoughts, but over time, you’ll become faster and more efficient at it. In line with this development, you’ll become a better conversationalist—you’ll be able to recall words faster, draw from a wider diversity of words, and put them together in ways that people understand more easily.
4. Better memory
There’s evidence to suggest that writing information down helps us retain it better in the future, which is especially important in the modern era. Because most facts and basic information is available to us after a quick Google search, our minds have adapted to become poorer at creating new memories; writing can help combat this. Whatever you write will have a higher chance of sticking in your head than anything you read or found on the Internet. Plus, writing is a mental exercise; just as your muscles need exercise to remain strong and durable, your mind needs exercise to remain in good shape too. Writing frequently and challenging yourself will help you store and recall more information from other areas of your life.
5. Productivity
Writing is a process that demands focus, attention, and goal-oriented work. As a result, writing regularly can actually help you become more productive in other areas of your life. Think of this as mental practice, giving you the opportunity to exercise your ability to get things done within a certain amount of time. For example, if you’re working with tight editorial guidelines, you’ll train yourself to pay more attention to small details. If you’re struggling with a pressing deadline, you’ll learn how to work under pressure. You’ll also learn to stop being afraid of mistakes—the first drafts of written articles tend to be imperfect, but that’s okay. Over time, you’ll become comfortable with this imperfection, and you’ll be less likely to procrastinate on other work you deem to be important.
6. Creativity and brainstorming
Writing can also unlock some of the important thoughts you might otherwise dismiss or lose. Ordinarily, our minds are buzzing with random thoughts and ideas, but we tend to let them go easily because we view them as unimportant. When writing, you’re forced to evaluate your ideas with deliberate attentiveness, sorting through them in an attempt to find the perfect ones for your piece. This is also beneficial when you’re on the lookout for new topics and generating possible new angles for development; the creative process here can help you improve your creative processes in other areas of your profession, such as coming up with innovative solutions to pressing problems.
Putting it into practice
Once you’ve acknowledged the potential power of these benefits, the trick is to develop yourself further as a writer (and more consistently). To do that, you have to commit to writing content regularly. Create an editorial calendar that forces you to write new posts on a daily (or at least weekly) basis, and stick to your schedule.
You’ll also benefit from seeking new sources, developing new ideas, and researching your topics as thoroughly as possible. In just a few weeks, you’ll start to notice the preceding benefits in your life, and it only gets better from there.
And if you’d like to know how you can start blogging consistently in 30 minutes a day or less, read our eBook!
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