How to improve your content writing skills

For most of us folks in marketing, one of our New Year goals always seems to be to improve skill x. Now x can be social media marketing, SEO, or SEM or whatever your Kryptonite is at the moment.

In case you have top-lined content writing as one of the skills that you'd like to master this year, read on. Here are some tips to help you become a better writer.

1. Writing every day

Writing is a muscle that needs to be flexed every day.

I have spoken (okay, written) about The Writing Commitment in one of my previous blog posts, How to write more blog posts in less time.

Life and pretty much everything in it, boils down to process and efficiency. You cannot hope to improve your writing on the basis of a few sporadic writing sessions. You need to write enough to get into the phase where you can edit out stuff. For that, you need to have enough writing material in the first place. In the initial writing phases, both quality and quantity are important. In my initial years with the blog, I would spend hours and hours creating what I thought was the most perfect, well-researched post. But then, I would fatigue out and not write anything for weeks. I realised that I needed to space my writing out to have both - the volume and the quality. 

The volume is necessary for you to have a buffer for your bad days, and to figure out your blog tone of voice. You need to be clear about who are you speaking to, what are their media consumption habits, what is your natural tone of voice, what tone of voice does your target audience needs? Read this post if you want to figure how you can establish your blog's tone of voice.

You need discipline in writing - that means having a schedule and sticking to it. I identified my most productive zones [morning & late evening], and forced myself to write everyday - it has worked. Mostly I have been able to draft out my content marketing schedule in advance, and write about 1500 - 2000 words a day. That has meant I have a steady content pipeline. It saves me from the headache of everyday deliberations (what do I write about?). I also get to plan important milestone days in advance, I have sufficient time to edit and also for content promotions. So my tip #1 is all about consistency - and I advise you to write every day.

2. Doing a SWOT analysis

This is the first thing you should do in case you are taking up writing for the first time. Doing an internal SWOT [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats] will place you in good stead. My SWOT for example is below:

Strengths: Vocabulary, big picture view on the story

Weaknesses: Threading the narrative, consistency

Opportunities: Collaborations

Threats: Other bloggers, time-draining activities, like, well Netflix (seriously)

Your writing sessions will validate your initial thoughts on your personal SWOT. They will help you validate if your strengths are truly your strengths and your weaknesses are indeed what you think they are.

But do you really need to do a SWOT? How doing a SWOT will help? Let me explain: if you are thinking of taking up writing assignments, you will be working on a variety of topics: finance, health, personal fitness. This would mean having flexibility in your writing, being adept at outlining, structuring, creating storyboards, characters, developing the narratives. You need to know where should you be focusing your attention when you are not writing - and that will come only from the SWOT. It will help you identify areas of improvement, honing what you already have, help you identify opportunities [for example collaborations with brands] and caution you against threats. You need to have some volume to conduct your personal SWOT [hence the need for quantity early on].

3. Understanding your target audience

Understanding the target audience and the target audience needs is the next most important thing for improving your skills as a content writer.

Many marketers and content professionals have a myopic complex - they write what they think the customer wants to hear / read. And in the language that they are comfortable with. Whereas, content should always be what the customer wants to know about and in the language the customer is comfortable in, converses daily in. Sound obvious - duh? You’d be surprised to learn how many marketers / content writers still don’t get it.

You will still see the naturally stiff, corporate communication that looks oh-so-false being peddled about. This is an era of transparency and slice of life and users appreciate the same tonality in the way brands communicate with them. So irrespective of what your SWOT says, you need to spend a disproportionate amount of time in understanding your target audience needs.

Who 

Who is your target audience? Do you have their demographic / geographic / psychographic data yet? If not, get this ASAP

Why 

Do you have evidenced information about why they consume your content? Can you talk to a few to understand where your content fits in within their daily workflows?

Where 

Where is your content getting consumed? Which platforms are being used to consume the content? Where do your consumers go for advice?

What 

What information is being read by your target audience to fulfil their needs at present

When 

At which times in the day is your target audience consuming your content

How 

How is your target audience consuming your content? In one go or in sporadic sessions?

You can’t expect to have the same tone of voice and writing style for 2 widely different audience types: Example, the reading requirements for senior finance executives aged 40+ would be very different from fresh finance graduates. The first audience segment would need more updates, career advancement, leadership type content whereas the second target audience would need more in-depth advice and guidance. The tone of voice for the first may be more conservative and formal whereas for the second audience segment, the tone of voice may be informal. You need to have an inherent deep understanding of who your target audience is and what do they want.

4. Outlining

This is the big picture thinking. Think of movies, and three pivotal things matter - the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning since it sets the course of events. Your protagonist, antagonist are all established here, motives are specified, and you build a narrative.

Content writing works the same way. Once you have an idea in your mind, you need to keep working at the structure, identifying the broad theme: the beginning, the middle and the conclusion.

Often I have tried to do the opposite - start writing to see where it goes and then filling the gap. It hasn't worked for me. Outlining makes it easier for you to build plot lines. You know the connections you need to make to make the story sound plausible, the article readable. Whenever I have skipped outlining, it has taken me an extra hour or so to set the article straight. I have realised that this kind of experimentation doesn’t work for me.

5. Structure your content

You need to provide so much value as a writer that the reader is compelled to share it. Your posts should be so comprehensive that the reader just doesn’t feel the need to browse further. Easier said than done, right? But that’s what writing is all about. Providing value to your readers. For that you need to structure your content so that is easily comprehensible and understandable by your audience. Read more about how to do that in this blog post How to create content for your blog

6. Editing tools

Don’t be shy of using editing tools. I started off my career as an editor in a content role [read about my journey as a digital marketer here]. Somewhere down the line when I made a career switch, I moved onto other roles and the editor in me took a backseat. I am not ashamed to admit that I did write articles that needed to be copy-edited. This was purely due to lack of time - not the intention / skills to churn out a poorly written article. Then I decided to go down the digital intervention tools. I tried out a couple of editing tools [Grammarly] and life has been easy since.

7. Writing an in-depth article

How many times has it happened that you were reading something online, didn't find enough depth in the topic, and hopped onto another site soon after, hoping to find something that is much more deeper and comprehensive? 

If your user is reading your article and has to visit some other site to get more information - then you have already lost the opportunity. One of the most important skills in content writing is writing in-depth, insightful long format articles. If you are writing 3000 - 4000 words per article, this adds serious heft to your writing profile. 

Writing long format article has innumerable advantages: you are giving information that is so comprehensive that your users stay on your site as long as possible. Influential bloggers / marketers routinely write content that is 4000+ words. You are creating a body of background research that is contributing to your own personal knowledge development. You are creating a repository from where you can repurpose and create short format articles and content for social media.

I know it is difficult to write that word count in case you are just beginning but then - everything in life comes with discipline and practice. You need to up your blogging output - not easy, I know, but you need to write informative content if you wish to be taken seriously as a blogger. Learn more about how to write informative content for your blog here.

8. Plagiarised content

The web is full of duplicitous / plagiarized content. 

It pains me to see how many writers are still copying content - not realising they are completely eroding their profile as a writer. Innumerous tools are available online which can help detect the level of plagiarism - thus leading to blacklisting of authors / writers.

If you feel inspired by a particular article, you should cite it in the references and present your take on that author’s viewpoint. You should not blatantly lift sections from another article / report. 

Copyright infringement is a serious offence and punishable by law. You want to be on the right side of it - for the sake of your readers, and yourself.

In case you are using any image from any published report / website, cite the image source. In case you are citing any statistics from any article, cite the full article itself. Your readers will appreciate a brief unplagiarized article with your take, rather than a lengthy essay with plagiarized sections.

Remember, reputation once lost due to plagiarism is remarkably difficult to restore.

9. Don’t be boring

It is immensely hard to drive traffic to blogs and websites. Imagine the reader actually coming over to your blog and finding content that is boring and unengaging.

We owe it to our readers - creating content that resonates with them, helps them in their daily workflows in some way, or entertains them. So for me the next biggest blunder is a monotonous, dead piece of content. Write content so good that it is inherently share-worthy.

Or as Rand Fishkins explains, 10x content is “Content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.

So how do you create inherently useful, viral content?

Content: Your content should have some personality - it can be useful, engaging, shocking, or plain and simple, something that the target audience didn’t know before. If there is no novelty factor, no fresh perspective, all you will have is an insipid bucketload of content that no one wants to read.

Emotion: Eliciting an emotional response from readers is very important to get them to engage with the content. Positive emotions like awe, excitement, amusement and negative emotions - anger and anxiety, both trigger strong share emotions. Go ahead, take a stand, generate conversations.

Social currency: We all want social recognition: of being cool, thoughtful, knowledgeable. Our engagement with content is in the same way. Think of how you would rather share some funny memes on WhatsApp with your friends because it makes you look cool. While creating your content, think - is this so useful that you will forward it to your friends if you were not the author? Will someone else do the same? If not, get to the point where you think they will share.

Triggers: Make it easy for people to associate your content with a strong, relevant emotion. For example, Peanut butter and jelly is a classic combination. Is your content routinely funny? Routinely useful? What is the one defining trigger emotion for your content? For example, you can routinely associate the Amul ads with topicality. If there is a burning social issue somewhere, there is bound to be an Amul ad about it - nowadays, all brands do moments marketing, but Amul has always been the pioneer in this.

Practical value: When we share something, we are conscious of the world judging us for our choices - we want to appear smart, knowledgeable and thoughtful - sharing something of practical value makes us look all that. Make sure your content offers insights of practical value. Is it tips to do something better? Video demonstrations? How-to videos? Practical value trumps everything else, well most of the time.

10. Be you

This is my last tip to improve your content writing. Agreed, the story may have been told a thousand times, but it has never been told from your perspective. Inject your writing with your own unique perspective, bring your insights to the table, don’t be afraid of sharing opinions and your recommendations. Differing opinions create interesting conversations.

Putting it all together

Content writing is hard - especially if you are a beginner competing against a sea of trained / competitive professionals. However, experience is not an indication of competence anyway. If you follow the above recommendations, there is no reason why you cannot pick up the skills to become an accomplished content writer.

Have I missed any tips? Let me know in the content section below.