Content writing

6 Steps to Start Your Content Writing Career

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Content Writing Career

Building a career in content writing is possible if you just decide that you want it and you’re willing to work hard to get there. While having great writing skills is a very good way to become a good content writer, it is not enough.                                                                                                                                                            You can become a good content writer and master it without knowing how to write well if you’re ready to stay dedicated and work hard for it.                                                                                                                      Content writing is the use of writing to pass information to inform, educate, and entertain your readers. It is done in varying formats from E-books, blogs, White paper, Product description, and also used as an important tool for social media marketing. Starting your content writing career may be confusing for you because you think you can write, and are curious as to what more there is to it. With content writing, whatever you write needs to have a purpose, and meaning to it.    The following steps will guide you on how to start your content writing career with ease:  Choose a Niche: Decide the specific space you want to write for and the things you want to write about. You can pick your niche based on: your interests, industry trend, and lucrative niche into consideration before deciding. The types of niches you can work on as a content writer include: Technical writing, Lifestyle content, Web content writer, Ghost writer, amongst many others.                        Hone your writing skills: To build your content writing career you have to learn how to write, and how to write with purpose. Most of your writings will be used to build authority for brands by informing, and educating their audience. This is why you cannot just write for writing’s sake; you have to learn the ropes and know how to structure your writing and the purpose the writing is for. You can polish your writing skills by writing continuously for a certain business, and testing how their audience reacts to it— then keep doing it over again.                                                                                                                                Know your Audience: Who are you writing for?  What do they want to hear? What type of tone do you have to use when writing for them? These are important questions that you need to answer. Your target audience are the people your writing will speak to, and those that will make use of your writings.        For example: If you’re writing for a women’s fashion blog, you know that most of its readers will be women, and your content should surround things that will appeal to them such as: the newest fashion trends, how to care for their nails, hair and female hacks that will help them in general. This will attract the specific people that you want, build your brand’s authority and reputation on that industry knowledge over time.                                                                                                                                                              Publish your Work: You need to let other people read what you have written, if you don’t do this, you won’t feel like you’ve started at all. It is easy to feel like you’re not good enough, publishing is what will boost your confidence in your work and make you want to do better as you go. When you publish your work, it positions you as an authority in that niche, and opens you to constructive criticisms; it also makes you better in the long haul.                                                                                                                  Build your Portfolio: Keep a record of every article, blog post, white paper you’ve done in your niche, and put them on platforms like; clippings, where you can share the link to your work with prospective clients. You can also do this by joining writing platforms that help you build a portfolio like The Ready Writers.                                                                                                  … Read more

2024 Content Writing Best Practices

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Content writing 2024

In content writing, there are certain writing practices that take your writing up a notch and make the writing process easy for you. Here are some of the best content writing practices that will be helpful to you in 2024:  Creating an Outline: One of the best content writing practices is to have an outline for every piece that you intend to write. Having an outline gives your writing a sense of direction, and helps keep you in check without derailing from the topic. Your audience also gets the value of what they have visited your website for.                                                                                                    Have an idea note: This may sound cliche but is very important. Most content writers often dismiss ideas because they think they are not good, but the best way to test out and see what will work is by writing down the ideas as they come and revisiting them another time to build up on them.          Be Unique: Having a unique writing style and voice makes it easy to spot your work and gives your writing a good rhythm. This doesn’t remove flexibility from doing other forms of  writing. Rather, it gives a style to how you structure your words, breeds authenticity for you, and infuses your creativity into every piece that you write.                                                              READ ALSO: 6 Steps to Start Your Content Writing Career Have your target persona in mind: Always know who you’re writing for and why. Before writing any piece, know the audience, what they like, and what they would expect from you. If you have a male audience, you need to recognize if they are working class: freelancers or 9-5 ers. This will make your content tailored and specific to them.                                                                         Plan your content: One of the best writing practices you can adopt this year is having a good content calendar that helps you plan your content before you have to write them.  This helps you fill in festive days like Christmas, New year, and also significant days like World health day, immunization day, June 4th and many others.                                                             Always have a call to action: Don’t write without having a call to action. Now, this doesn’t mean you have something to sell. Your call to action involves getting people to want to read more from you, having them subscribe to your mail list, and also building authority in your niche: this means your work has to be good, and important to every topic you write on.                                                                                                                        Get feedback: Having someone in the industry who can give you constructive feedback on your work so you can make necessary changes. Constructive criticism helps your writing improve, and make you get better over time.                                                                                                             Do more Pillar articles: Pillar articles are those that have topic clusters- Topic clusters are article collections that makes a topic understanding to the reader and provides comprehensive knowledge on that topic. For example: When you want to write content on SEO Marketing, you can start by having a pillar page which explains: Introduction to SEO marketing, have another post that will be types of SEO, How to do SEO effectively.                            All of these content clusters form the topic you’re writing on. In this case: Introduction to SEO Marketing will be your pillar content while the other topic will be clusters. This will form great information on the topic you’re writing on and show that you have authority on that topic. This is a must do practice for you in 2024 if you want to up your writing game, and also make your writing rank.                                                                                                     Be a forward thinker: The process of writing should not be writing for writing sake, but understanding that it is a part of a marketing process where you have to be meticulous and understand the user needs before going ahead to create content.  Conclusion Content writing best practices to adopt in 2024 are the writing tips that are bound to up your writing game. Some of these writing practices to adopt in 2024 are: Writing pillar articles, having a content plan, creating an outline before writing, knowing your target before writing, … Read more