Her fingers poised above the keyboard, she waits for the torrent of words to come to her, so that she could write that absolutely brilliant article for her client.
Does that ring a bell? A tiny empathetic bell?
- Well then, get down to it! Write! The first step towards being a website content writer is putting pen to paper, or to be accurate, fingers to keyboard. The most difficult aspect of being a website content writer (or any kind of writer), is to begin the writing. Take it from us – it is not so difficult once you start. And keep writing every day. Erratic writing can take away from your natural flow and bring back your fears and worries about your writing skills.
- The next mantra to being a successful content writer – clear and precise language. You are writing and uploading in a medium accessible to virtually the whole world. Not all of them speak your variety of English (or whatever other language you use to write). So do not use obscure jargon or expressions. For example, Indian audience may understand if you write about ladoos and Chota Bheem, but not someone from, say, France. You can spice up your writing with humor or wit depending upon the client and the content.
- Concise and catchy title. Yes, a boring and longish title will put off most readers. But, your title should also tell them what the rest of the article is about. It would help to have a key term within the title or the subtitle for search engine optimization. Did the last phrase confuse you? Search engine optimization is the process of improving a websites visibility in the search results of a search engine, like Google or Bing. Break up each main idea into a paragraph and add a sub heading to each. Adding bullets in between a paragraph is another way to break up the paragraph into readable chunks.
- Tut! Tut! So many mistakes. Spell check and grammar check you work. Even if you are the most careful of all writers, chances are that you have overlooked some mistake, and then there are mistakes you do not even realize are mistakes. Read your content backwards to find some of those hard-to-spot errors. Ask your editor to go over it once (or twice) for slip-ups. A trained editor would be able to point out the punctuation and grammatical errors that you make consistently.
- And finally, summarize your article. Your reader needs to know she has come to the end of the article. You could use bullets to emphasis your points a second time. Anything worth saying is worth saying a second time, we say.
So let us recap:
- Write
- Use precise and clear language
- Use concise and catchy title
- Spell check and grammar check your work
- summarize
There, that should give you an idea of how to get started and continue in your endeavor to be the best content writer the World Wide Web has ever seen.
