As a content marketer and experienced copywriter, I write about a lot of topics that are not particularly glamorous. For instance, in the last few months I’ve written about accounting, manufacturing, and toilets. When clients request articles on these types of “boring” subjects, I find it’s easy to get bogged down during the research phase and struggle with motivating myself to start writing. At times, it can also be challenging to stay focused once I’ve gotten started to craft something that will provide value for readers. In those instances, I use these tips:
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As a content marketer and professional copywriter, I work with business owners and other marketers every day that see the value in outsourcing content creation. These shrewd businesspeople understand that hiring a professional can save their time, sanity, and most of all budget.
But for every one of these clients, I have countless more that have turned down proposals due to cost. While this is routine, especially when working with budget-restricted small businesses, it still surprises me. The irony is that while smaller companies and teams should be even more discerning with how they spend their time, they tend to simply have a knee jerk reaction to spending money – opting to do things in-house that make more sense financially to hire out. Balking at the cost of a quote without taking the time to do a thorough price comparison is never a wise decision. So, let’s take the time to look at how much your content actually costs. Quoted Price Some copywriters will just give you a total price for the project without any mention of how long it is expected to take or how many revisions are covered, but others will break down the cost on an hourly basis. Always try to find out how long the copywriter is budgeting for the project so that you can perform an accurate cost analysis comparison. Let’s say you get a proposal to have a piece of content written by a freelance content marketer. The quoted cost is 4 hours of work for a price of $160 ($40/hr). How much will it cost for your team (or yourself) to produce the same content? Creating fantastic content doesn’t mean much if no one reads it. But sadly, much of the web-based content out there these days prioritizes search engine optimization over readability. The result is well-ranking content that doesn’t achieve the brand objective of retaining and converting readers.
Many content marketers and copywriters use little tricks to break up their content, assuming that simply infusing more white space will convince readers to stick around longer. They shorten sentences and paragraphs, sprinkle in bulleted lists, and call it a day. However, these tactics can only go so far. Once you’ve exhausted the obvious techniques for making your content bite-sized, you should implement more sophisticated strategies to make your content more readable. Anyone responsible for creating content has come across a situation where they’ve been asked to make content longer. Typically, this is in response to perceived audience demand for longer form content like whitepapers, case studies, and professional articles. Novice content marketers and copywriters will just “un-edit” their content – going through it to look for opportunities to elaborate on existing information or needlessly sprinkle in more text. However, simply increasing the word count doesn’t do anything to enrich content and may even backfire by discouraging readers.
So, how do you increase content length without sacrificing quality? As a professional ghostwriter, I am often recruited to write well above my pay grade. Writing on behalf of executives for their peers can be a daunting task. C-suite executives are respected professionals and before they will put their name on anything, they need to feel confident that it is going to be professionally written and well-received. Ghostwriting for executives demands an understanding of the subject matter and the target audience to create the kind of content that adds value to the conversation.
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