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I don’t use any writing tools. On-and-off I may have tried using some, but I always find them constraining rather than helpful. Nonetheless, they can be quite helpful to many writers who are learning the ropes.
This Fast Company blog post has reviewed some free writing tools that can help you improve your writing and take care of all those nasty mistakes that creep in while you are having a go at your creativity.
Although I don’t use writing tools, I keep an eye on the latest tools and the tools that have been evolving over the years.
Take for example Grammarly. Many years ago, when they were just launching, they gave me a free account to use and then write a review. I used it for a couple of days and then found it too interfering.
Tools like Grammarly are great for people who are still struggling with grammar and spelling and a bit of sentence formation. I’m way past those hurdles and all those peculiarities highlighted by Grammarly are just a part of my writing style.
I even purchased the Hemingway Editor – the test version – a few years ago hoping that it would help me write shorter sentences. Again, as a writer, I found it too interfering. Though, I must admit that help in turning long sentences into 2-3 shorter sentences is definitely wanted.
But then, if you’re using “than” instead of “then” and if you have gotten into the habit of using lots of passive voice (I do it sometimes) such tools are certainly helpful.
Don’t I use the editing features in MS Word and Google Docs? I definitely do. In fact, that might be the reason why I don’t use the third-party tools because the editing features in MS Word and Google Docs are enough for me.
Anyway, the tools featured in the Fast Company blog post are
Upon visiting the links, you will notice that not all are conventional writing apps. For example, LibreOffice is an open-source Office Suite just like Microsoft 365 or Google Docs. Hence, just like any Office Suite, it has a word processor, and the word processor has all the writing tools.
Similarly, Reedsy is a writing community of writers and editors. It also has a book writing tool.
“The most dangerous writing app” gives you prompts to inspire you.
Not everyone will find these writing tools obstructive. They definitely have their use.
Can strategic content writing help you outrank your competitors? It can. It requires effort and persistence.
Aside from other things, what I found revealing and surprising is that the author says that the word count doesn’t really matter as long as you have structured your content well.
This means, a web page with 500 words can outrank a web page having 2500 words if the content on the web page having fewer words is organized better than the web page with more words.
I have observed this pattern even on my own blog. Sometimes I’m able to rank well even when the blog post has just 300-400 words. There might be many other reasons, but what I’m trying to say is, a blog post doesn’t always have to be very long to rank well.
So, what can you do to outrank your competitors according to the above Search Engine Rank blog post? Here are a few things you can do:
Your web page should be relevant to the query being searched for.
The information should be easy to read and longer text should be organized using headings, subheadings and bulleted points.
Schema should be well defined – what is the web page about? Is it an FAQs page? Is it a product description? Is it an information article? Is it a review? Does it explain your pricing?
You should use interlinking. The crawlers should be able to access other parts of your website and blog through the current web page or blog post they are crawling.
Aside from these tips the author has also explained a few SEO-related things you can do.
How does strategic content writing help you outrank your competitors?
First of all, at least in the beginning, don’t focus on outranking your competitors if you are just starting. Focus on publishing lots of relevant and quality content.
Your competitor – assuming he or she has used fair means – must have spent months or years to deserve the rankings he or she enjoys right now. You cannot suddenly decide to outrank just because you want to.
The better approach is, start providing information that your visitors will find useful. Write content on interesting topics.
Make a list of all the topics that you can write about. The list should be around 50-60 topics.
Then write or get written the best possible content around these topics.
Of course, simply publishing content is half the job done. You need to spread your content. Follow SEO content writing practices. Make sure that your content is written and formatted in such a manner that it is easy for search engine crawlers and human visitors to read.
Share your content on social media websites. Broadcast the links using your newsletter. You need to promote your content. You can also use paid advertisements on LinkedIn and Facebook to promote your links.
Also, focus on longtail keywords containing your main keywords for which you want to outrank your competition.
Even if it is extremely difficult for me to rank for “content writing services”, I can try “content writing services for email marketing”. Or, “content writing services for web design agencies”.
As I have mentioned above, rather than worrying about outranking your competition, try to provide better content than your competition. Your rankings will automatically improve.
Do you have a blogging calendar or a blogging schedule?
You cannot have a content strategy without publishing a blog. Of course, you can publish content on social media platforms, but if you want your website to remain the focus of the buzz that is created around your content, instead of generating content on third party websites, your time and money are better spent publishing content on your own blog.
One of the reasons why most blogs fail is that the blog publishers don’t have a schedule. They don’t have a calendar.
Why do you need a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?
To give you a direction and also to help you prepare and write quality blog posts.
Without a blogging schedule you are last. Think of a blog like any other enterprise. To run your business or to run your office, you need a schedule. There is a time for all the employees to come to office. You know that by Wednesday you need to submit a report to the higher-ups. You know that your computers need to be upgraded by the 15th of the next month.
When you have a calendar, you plan accordingly.
The same goes for your blog. If you don’t have a schedule, if you don’t have a publishing calendar, things go haywire.
A publishing calendar also helps your content writer. He or she can prepare content writing or blog writing according to the priority of your topics. By checking your calendar, you can immediately know that certain blog posts have been published or not.
A content calendar also gives you consistency. Every blog post has a unique purpose to solve. You want to target certain customers with certain blog posts. At the same time, you don’t just want to focus on a single niche.
There are some customers who need to be convinced. There are some customers who need to be educated. There are some customers who need to be informed.
You need different blog posts for these purposes. In your calendar you can assign days that on Mondays, your blog posts will cater to a certain audience, then on Wednesdays, they will target another set of audience, and so on.
The benefits of creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar
You can assign different topics to different days of the week.
You can collate all the related information at a single place such as the title, the target audience, the KPIs, the keywords, the images to be used and the people responsible for successful publication.
You can track the topics that have already been published to prevent duplication.
You can track the performance of individual topics in terms of engagement, KPIs and search engine traffic.
How can you prepare a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?
Creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar can be easy or complex depending on what all you want to include in the schedule.
I use Google Calendar. Since I don’t run a multi-author blog, my schedule is quite simple. Sometimes I don’t even schedule – I simply publish whatever comes to my mind.
I use a combination of Google Calendar and Todoist. In the calendar I make entries such as the topic and some research links that I may have come across. This entry automatically appears in my Todoist schedule.
Some blog posts are short, and some blog posts are quite long. Shorter blog post can be completed in an hour and longer ones can take a couple of days. Hence, I schedule drafting and publishing over the stretch of two days, if need be.
I don’t want to mislead you or anything. I don’t have a complex blogging schedule or calendar for myself because, as mentioned above, I go with the flow simply because I write my blog posts by myself. Sometimes I suddenly pick up my phone, write a short blog post on it, and publish it from the phone itself.
But if you’re managing multiple content writers and you are an organization with an elaborate content marketing strategy, then you cannot hope to succeed without having a documented blogging schedule.
This is an interesting question I came across while surfing the web. Content writing means writing original content. You may like to read What does a content writer do?
But what do content aggregation and content creation main?
Content aggregation: You extract content from different sources and then publish it without giving credit to the original sources.
Content curation: You manually go through various links and decide which piece of content you would like to showcase on your blog, and then publish the link to it, with your own comments, attributing completely to the original source.
Interesting. By the way, I must have come this link via a content aggregator, Flipboard.
Though, to read the full article on the link mentioned above, you need to register.
These days I do lots of content curation. Even right now in this blog post, I have linked to another article and then I’m quickly adding my own take.
Content curation normally involves gathering multiple links on the same topic. For example, I can publish something like “13 content writing tips shared by content writing experts”, and then I can find 13 different links, publish the links with individual excerpts, giving full credit to the original authors.
But even if you don’t publish multiple links, you’re curating content. If you link to another article or blog post and then add your thoughts, it is also content curation.
What about content aggregation? Many websites use content aggregation but it is mostly automated and content writing doesn’t play much role in that. You probably use a script that crawls the web looking for certain keywords or phrases and when it finds those keywords and phrases, it extracts the content and publishes it on your blog.
Lots of my content is aggregated in this way by other publishers. Sometimes a link back to my website is automatically added, but most of the time, it is not.
I don’t find the concept of content aggregation appealing because one, if you cannot spend enough time to create original and unique content for your business, how can you work hard for your customers and clients, and two, you can never be sure if the content is going to be of good quality.
Content aggregation is mostly used by people who want to make money through advertisements. For them, as long as they enjoy good search engine rankings and as long as people are clicking on ads, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the content they are aggregating is.
As mentioned above, content aggregation is also used by known aggregators such as Flipboard and Feedly.
Essential skills that a professional content writer must have.
Neil Patel rightly says in the video embedded below that there are more than a billion blogs on the Internet and pretty much everything has been rewritten. Content writers these days are mostly regurgitating old stuff.
No, it doesn’t mean you stop publishing content on your blog. I cannot find the link, in an interview Seth Godin says that when implementing a content marketing strategy, don’t worry about being unoriginal. Just be relevant to your audience.
Take for example the title of this blog post. The video above talks about the essential skills that a professional content writer must have. I’m creating a blog with more or less the same title. If you do a search on Google, you will find thousands of blog posts and web pages talking about the same topic with various combinations.
It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write about this topic.
What’s the difference? The difference is that I’m not simply copy/pasting content written by someone else. I’m not even transcribing what Neil a saying in the video. I’m presenting my own take. This makes my blog post on the same topic unique.
Besides, the audience of my blog is the audience of my blog. You may not be searching for this topic on the Internet actively. Even if you have arrived on this blog after looking for essential skills for a professional content writer, what you’re reading here is completely my own perspective.
Below I’m listing some skills that a content writer needs for professional writing. I may not be covering all the skills, but I’m covering all those skills that I use on daily basis when writing content for my clients.
Have a unique voice
Every writer has his or her unique voice. It is called “writing voice”. This is what makes your content unique even when you’re writing about a topic that many have already been written about.
Your unique voice is your own way of saying things. It is consistent. Almost all my clients these days hire me for my writing style. They go through my blog post, they go through my website, they like the style, and they want the same style for their own websites and blogs.
Recently a client even highlighted a portion of my homepage to explain to me what sort of writing he is looking for.
Constantly improve your writing
The more you improve, the more confident you get, and then the more defined your voice becomes.
Improving your writing means learning new writing techniques, learning to use new words and phrases, and observing what works and what doesn’t.
The side benefit of learning-induced confidence is that you no longer write to impress. You write to communicate. You are done with impressing. Now you mean business. You are not even worried about committing mistakes because you know that those are not mistakes but intentional waywardness to make a point.
Learn to write in a conversational style
This is more important for a content writer. When you are writing content – whether you’re writing business content (that is supposed to be serious) or blog content (where you can let yourself lose a bit) – you are having a conversation with the reader.
Writing in a conversational style isn’t as simple as it seems. Only those writers who have written a lot and who have nothing to prove, write in a conversational style. Novice writers are constantly worried about what type of sentences they are writing and what type of words they are using. Skilled content writers on the other hand, aren’t worried about these things.
What is conversational style?
Use short sentences.
Use simple words.
Express an idea in one sentence.
Don’t have paragraphs with more than two sentences.
Avoid compound or complex sentences as much as you can.
Use the language you would use with someone sitting face-to-face.
Acquaint yourself with SEO nuances
Although as a professional content writer you are not providing SEO services, search engine optimization is a big part of writing content. Many clients hire you because they want to improve your search engine rankings.
Google uses 200+ factors when ranking content, but when it comes to writing and organising text, it is completely in your hand how you do it.
Here are a few things you can achieve as a content writer:
Creatively use the main keywords in the title.
Use the main keywords in the first 100 words of the write-up.
Not always but use the main and the LSI keywords in headings and sub-headings.
Not always but use the main and the LSI keywords when explaining a concept using bulleted points.
Don’t stuff your keywords needlessly; always use them contextually.
Creatively use the synonyms.
Learn to research
Just like SEO, research is a big part of content writing. Most of the clients will simply give you a title and a few pointers just because you force them to give them to you. Otherwise, they won’t even give you a title – they will simply tell you what keywords to focus on and then ask you to come up with a title as well as the outline.
Research helps you. Learn to do the right research. You will be mostly using Google and other search engines. Use advanced search. There are many non-mainstream search engines that can take up lots of good information. You can also look up other sources such as Reddit.
A precautionary note, though: researching doesn’t mean plagiarizing. Research to obtain information and then use your own writing to convey that information.
Learn not to get swayed by advice
This is very important. Since on the Internet it is very easy to give advice, there is an abundance of it. People can create videos. People can publish blog posts (wink wink). There are social media updates. There are podcasts. There are Pinterest pins. There are Instagram carousals. Lots of advice.
Advice is not bad. But too much of it is bad. Therefore, as I have written above, it is very important for a professional content writer to keep learning, learn to use your own discretion what you want to learn and what you want to ignore.
Learn to take and manage notes
The notes that you gather are going to be the repositories of knowledge that will come handy for years.
During client assignments, during random reading, during posting on social media and on your blog, lots of ideas and useful information pass your eyes. Don’t let such opportunities go waste. Learn to save useful information.
I take lots of notes when reading books on Kindle and other book readers. Then once I have completed the book, I go through the notes and save them either in OneNote or Google Keep. Shorter notes go to Google Keep and bigger notes go to OneNote.
Learn to manage information when working on long pieces
As a content writer you may need to work on an e-book or a white paper or a case study. A white paper or a case study may not be very long, but normally, an e-book is.
Recently I worked on an e-book that was more than 70 pages. The client had sent me lots of information. I needed to compile that information in a narrative, in a story form.
It helps if you know how to organize big chunks of information in a manner that you cannot only retrieve the information when needed, you can also grasp it to be able to use it for your writing.
Learn to listen carefully
When you listen properly, you understand, and when you understand, you write well. If you’re not in a habit of listening to what your client is saying, you may go on a tangent, and this will cause needless acrimony. It has happened with me. I was not a good listener.
The problem with not listening is that even when you have written an exceptional piece, since it is not as per your client’s expectations or the brief that he or she gave you, your entire effort goes waste.
These are some essential skills that can help you grow as a professional content writer. There may be more. You don’t have to apply all. But these will help you stand out even when people tell you that almost everything has been written and there is nothing you need to say. That’s not the case. As long as you write using your own voice, you’re always going to write something unique.
