Since most of the content writing on the web happens for personal websites and blogs people don’t take the editing part of it as seriously as professional publications like newspapers, book publishers and magazine publishers. In professional publications editors are big shots. In newspapers editors are slightly different from your conventional editor who goes through your writing and then improves it, but the broader importance of an editor always remains the same – maintaining the quality and authenticity of the content that is published.
According to this blog post, editing means optimizing a piece of writing for its audience (of the publication). It’s the responsibility of the editor that the writing isn’t just up to the mark it also caters to the audience of the publication.
On the web though, the content writer and the editor, there is a great chance, are going to be the same person. On bigger publications there ARE dedicated editors who go through every piece of content and make sure it adheres to the publishing guidelines of the publication but for most of the small businesses the person who writes the content is the one who also edits it.
It’s very important that you edit your content after writing it
We are normally in a rush to publish whatever we have written not just because of the vanity of displaying our skills, but also because there is little time. We all know that content is crucial to our marketing efforts and it needs to be published on a routine basis and the quality needs to be maintained. This is well and good. But since there is very little time, most of us simply hit the publish button as soon as we have written the last line.
I’m not saying that if you don’t edit your work you end up publishing lousy content – many people are very good writers and they can maintain a standard without having to spend time on going through the writing again and editing. I need to edit. I need to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, no redundancies and no superfluous expressions. Most of my writing is conversational so it’s not about the style that I’m worried; I mostly worried about typos.
How to edit after writing your content
After finishing what you have written, quickly go through it and check for typos and grammatical errors (also something like there and their). If you are not in a great hurry to publish, just close the document and start doing something else to become detached. Remember that it is not important how you feel about what you have written, what’s important is what impact your writing makes on your readers. This is why detachment is very important and it helps you look at your writing in an objective manner. Once you have distanced yourself, come back to your document and go through the following:
Have you over-optimized your content?
This happens when you are trying to optimize your content for higher search engine rankings. I’m not saying it’s bad to write optimized content, but sometimes we overdo it. We end up using our main keywords and expressions more than we should have. This can affect your search engine rankings adversely. So carefully go through your content and if you feel you have used your primary keywords excessively, remove them, and if removing them isn’t possible, use synonyms.
Have you needlessly made your content lengthier?
Google loves lengthier webpages and blog posts, but it doesn’t mean you fill your content with meaningless material. If there is something you can express in 300 words there is no need to use 600 words.
Do you even need that piece of content?
This can be very difficult decision to make especially when initially you were feeling very enthusiastic about the topic and even spent lots of time on it. But you have to make sure whether your website or blog actually need that piece of content or not.
Editing is as important as content writing
You shouldn’t underestimate editing. Spend ample amount of time going through the content you have written because after all you are creating a business asset. Every piece of content that you write and publish has a possibility of generating business opportunities for you.