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Break These Bad Habits for Good to Become a Better Content Manager

It’s never been easy to be a content manager. Cooperating with numerous people: clients, creative directors, marketing managers and designers can take a toll of your patience and passion. In this working process it is really important to act professionally. Still, there are hundreds of factors that could influence badly your career.

Bad Habit #1: Making your copy “good enough”.

Content managers are often under pressure so they have to write good enough texts. If the copy is of a low quality the page will be dragged down in Google results. If you write for yourself, you decide how good your copy should be, but if you are writing for a boss and he understands this principle, just good enough copy is no longer good enough. Low-quality remix is what most content writers do! They take somebody’s text that was already rewritten couple of times. You can make a high-quality copy by analyzing up to dozen sources what will help you to make an awesome text. But there are people who lack their own brain activity and as a rule they copy somebody’s works and present it as their own art. The plagiarism can be easily revealed by using special software.

Bad Habit #2: Writing only for SEO.

Old habits die hard. For a long time we’ve been trying to optimize texts according to some modern SEO principles, but this is not enough. The copy should be not only optimized but also original, engaging and useful. You need to write copy that would be liked by your readers and would be gladly shared through the social medias.

Bad Habit #3: Making web pages with text only.

This method is the easiest and allows creating blog posts really quick, but this is not really interesting for the user to browse through the pages of blog of a website that have text only, unless it’s a wiki page. Blending some awesome content into the page, images or videos would make users much more interested in the resource and will engage him to read more and more.

Bad Habit #4. Poor text readability.

One common mistake that most content managers usually do is the use of a wrong font size. The 8px or 10px size font allows accommodating huge amount of text on the page, but how is the user with impaired vision, for example, is supposed to read this? If you write texts with font 12px size nobody will tell you that this is totally wrong and has to be redone, but do not over do it, pages with huge font size are not very pleasing for an eye. 12px size font is read easily by all users, so do not make your text illegible trying to stuff as much content as it possible into one page.

Bad Habit #5. Dull Headlines.

Writing headlines takes patience and practice. A snazzy headline will stop readers’ in their tracks — they’ll have to read your web content. Most copywriters will spend at least 30 minutes or one hour writing the perfect headline. This may seem outrageous, but it really isn’t. Think about it. How much do you think writers at top selling magazines earn for writing headlines? I won’t keep you in suspense — they earn a boatload of money! It is worth it to pay writers a high salary if a magazine receives a high ROI. It’s all about return on investment.

Bad Habit #6. Absence of color understanding.

The content manager should have a strong understanding of colors, contrasts and combinations that can appeal to the readers. If the whole page looks like a rainbow or if the text colors are so bright that they make the eyes water, that nobody will be interested in such content.

Bad Habit #7. Presenting wrong images.

Pictures are always worth thousands of words, users like balance on the pages when it’s enough of text to read and pictures to enjoy. If there are too many pictures on the page it may seem cluttered and unorganized. Find that golden mean and your users will thank you for presenting awesome content with “Likes” and sharing. You need to avoid using looping animation and flashing ads, too, as these can make your site or blog post seem unprofessional. Do not forget about the section with relative content, this is useful not only for the user, but for you also, this function increases your page views and overall user’s interest in the resource.

Bad Habit #8. Not sketching ideas.

Each content manager should start his/her work from drawing some sketches that would reasonably ease the process. Sketching is one of the many ways humans have adapted to, to express and expand their ideas. A sketch is more like bringing an idea to a three dimensional view rather than imagining it in the head, which causes our idea to evolve over time as we forget certain elements of our ideas, and replace them with things we thought were part of the idea or ideas.

When these or some other mistakes are used unintentionally they can be forgiven, but when a web designer fulfills these mistakes on a regular basis how can we call him a professional, practicing these poor habits make you a bad content manager. Mistakes are NOT allowed anywhere in the professional world!