10 Steps to Becoming a Brilliant Content Writer and Creator

So, you want to add the title “content writer” to your list of skills, eh? It doesn’t matter why you want to do it because there is almost an insatiable need for it in business today. According to the “B2B Content Marketing 2019” Report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 58 percent of marketers reported spending more on content creation in 2018 than in 2017. And that figure most likely won’t be going down—maybe ever.

Whether the job got dropped into your lap along with your other duties, you’ve made a career change, or you just figure to use it as a side gig to earn some extra cash to pay for Junior’s upcoming orthodontia bills, there is definitely a market for content creators and writers. Naturally, you want to be great at it but how do you start? What does it take to be a brilliant content writer?

As someone who has been writing content for the last quarter-century (back before it was called “content”), here’s my advice on how to do it:

Five SKILLS all content writers need:

1. Research skills—Great, sharable content is made up of interesting, helpful and/or entertaining statistics and information which you will only find through good research and a lot of digging.

2. Knowledge of SEO—Your content can be brilliant, but if nobody can find yours, it’s worthless. If the job of writing content falls to you, ask your company to supply you with effective SEO training. They owe you that much at the very least. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and resources. If they tell you that you don’t need it, see #1 above and get it on your own.

3. Be adaptable—In the span of a week in my job, I often write:

• three to four blogs on different topics and under different names with a different personality
• academic-style white papers and case studies
• scripts and questions for two wildly different company podcasts
• ghostwritten thought leadership articles for our leadership and C-suite to go out on iconic business web sites, and
• straight B2B copywriting pieces for when our regular copywriter gets snowed under with rush projects

Each thing I write requires a different tone and style and sometimes I work on three or four of them a day, so adaptability is mandatory.

4. The ability to meet deadlines—great content marketing involves a detailed social media schedule for when and where your content gets distributed. Make sure your social media person has plenty of content on hand to fling out on the interwebs by meeting deadlines. And, if it looks like you’re going to miss a deadline, let them know ASAP because the beauty of having a library of content is that you can run pieces multiple times.

5. Communicate—Outside of your writing ability, this is your most important skill. You’ll have to be able to communicate with subject matter experts, people you’re interviewing, editors, proofreaders, social media personnel and most importantly, readers. And, even though there will be times you feel like banging your head against a brick wall 70 or 80 times, you have to remain professional.

Along with working on these skills, here are five behaviors that all great content writers share:

1. Read lots of different things … and then read some more

Devour everything from magazines, bloggers and podcasts in your industry to business news sites and learn the new trends that are happening in your industry. Fresh content is much more likely to be read and shared and that only comes from staying up to date on what’s going on.

2. Develop your own voice

Becoming a successful writer usually means finding your writing “voice” that identifies you as the author. Your voice includes your tone and style, but it’s much more about the unique perspective you bring to any subject. That is what you bring to your content.

3. Know your audience and write to them

While this seems like a “no duh” kind of thing, it’s something many writers—even the really good ones—forget occasionally. It often happens when you find some really juicy statistic or information in the middle of writing your piece and you suddenly go off course of your original thesis to work it in. What you must do as a writer is decide if the stat is really central to your piece and does it add or subtract from reader engagement.

4. Accept the fact that some of your stuff—no matter how good it is—will bomb

Okay, maybe bomb isn’t the right word, but trust me … every writer under the sun has a piece they love and is some of the best work they ever did, and nobody reads it. Nobody. There are a million reasons why it might have happened, but your article just didn’t find its audience. Luckily, you can post it again later as is, or with a tweak or two, and maybe that’s when it finds its audience.

5. Never, ever stop working on your craft

Your writing will keep improving as long as you keep working on getting better. Take classes, join writing groups, be active with content writer groups online, whatever it is, never stop trying to learn to get better.

Obviously, there’s much more to becoming a brilliant content writer than just these ten things, but these will get you off to a great start.