What’s one tip you have for content marketers to improve their writing skills?
Only 38% of B2B content marketers are writing guest posts for other publications. Some of these experts don’t have the time. Others are concerned about whether they’re writing skills will meet high brand expectations.
To help you improve your writing skills, we asked marketing experts for their best advice. Below are seven tips to improve your content writing skills.
Why Content Writing is Important
Content writing is important because it helps to communicate information to a specific audience. Good content writing is clear, concise, and effective at conveying the intended message. It can also be engaging, which can hold the reader’s attention and keep them interested in the topic.
In addition, strong content writing skills can be important for SEO because search engines use algorithms to rank websites based on the quality and relevance of the content on the site. If a website has well-written, informative content that is relevant to the user’s search, it is more likely to rank higher in search engine results.
Resources to Improve Your Content Writing
Hemingway Editor: This is a writing tool that helps to identify and fix issues with grammar, style, and readability.
Grammarly: This is a grammar and spelling checker that can help to identify and correct errors in your writing.
The Elements of Style: This is a classic style guide that covers the basic principles of clear, concise writing.
The Chicago Manual of Style: This is a comprehensive style guide that covers a wide range of topics related to writing and publishing.
“Eats, Shoots & Leaves” by Lynne Truss: This is a book that covers the importance of punctuation and offers tips for using punctuation correctly in your writing.
The Daily Writing Tips: This is a blog that offers daily tips and resources for writers. It covers a wide range of topics, including grammar, style, and writing techniques.
Tips to Improve Your Content Writing Skills
1. Revisit Your Writing the Next Day
Look at their content the next day with fresh eyes and edit it as if someone else wrote it. Distancing yourself emotionally from your work and looking at it for what it is will help you improve it. That comes with constant editing and reworking your content. It may be great content, but taking an editor’s view of it will give you a whole new perspective.
–Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure
2. Stop Dragging Your Content
Sometimes people have lots to say and sometimes you just can’t get the words to write up your next blog. For that reason some people might be tempted to make extra long sentences in hopes to make the blog longer. What you’re doing is actually dragging content, and potentially sending some visitors away from your website.
What do you do when you just don’t have enough to write? You do more research. You tie a topic with another relevant topic. Don’t make your story longer if it’s not adding value or isn’t interesting enough for readers to stay.
–Andrei Vasilescu, DontPayFull
3. Study and Learn From The Best
Study and learn from the writing styles of prominent magazines and brands. People are probably already familiar with these businesses; therefore, adopting their writing style might be beneficial and win you fans. Pay close attention to the grammatical styles, tone of voice, and terminology employed by competing websites, particularly if they are in your niche.
–Hector Ruiz, BBQ Grill Academy
4. Cite External Sources and Data Points
Whether you’re writing for internal audiences or are trying to effectively ‘rank’ your content, both people and search engine bots love to see external data sources and data points to back-up a quote.
Essentially, you’re showing Google that you’re an authority in a space and are not being selfish with your content or data, that you’re willing to attribute others in your space where a stat or data point calls for a reference.
–James Taylor, James Taylor SEO Consultancy
Let’s take a brief break to learn how to write seven types of online content from content marketer Julia McCoy:
5. Create and Follow Your Brand Guide
Create and use your brand guide. We want to make sure our brand voice shines through and avoid words that don’t ring as authentic to who we are. Having brand standards and a bank of language that best represents us, as well as a list of words that don’t, helps us keep messaging on-point and on-brand.
For instance, if your brand has a fun and playful vibe, you’ll want to avoid stuffy words or verbose language that doesn’t resonate with your audience or align with what you are known for.
–Marilyn Zubak, Snif
6. Treat Writing as a Process
Many content marketers make the mistake of trying to make their writing perfect. They waste a lot of time focusing on details instead of publishing content that is already good enough.
When you start a blog for your business, it’s more important to publish content regularly than create a perfect post once in a while. My advice is to treat your writing journey as a process. Read many articles, ask others for feedback, watch YouTube videos or enroll in an online course.
Accept that your writing won’t be perfect from day one but will improve over time. Give yourself time, but don’t let your perfectionist attitude stop you from delivering valuable content to your audience.
–Dorota Lysienia, MyPerfectResume
7. Write to Address Your Target Consumer
Write solely to your target audience and no one else. The best conversions come from companies that know how to utilize their brand identity to attract new leads and conversions. You shouldn’t be writing content that tries to attract and capture every type of consumer. Businesses already do this tactic with attention-grabbing one-liners, but in the attention economy what is most effective is personalizing content and customizing it to a specific audience interested in brands like yours.
About the Author
Terkel creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.
