5 Lessons About Writing I Got From Content Marketing
Writing for the internet in the mid-2000s taught me some useful tips about writing successfully in general.
I have been writing professionally now since 2008, which accounts for a lot of words under the bridge and plenty of practice at my craft.
My first job was officially billed as ‘news correspondent’, but it was actually an early role in content marketing and SEO, back when the primary goals for online businesses were to appeal to search engine ‘spiders’ in order to be noticed amid the competition.
It was a challenging yet ultimately enjoyable job — and it taught me some things about writing that are still relevant 14 years later. Here are just a few of them:
1. Work expands to fill the time available
When I started work as a content writer, we had our own portfolio of clients from a variety of sectors. They all wanted a particular number of 150-word stories (the gold standard for SEO back in the day) each month and the company I worked for was contracted to provide them with that volume.
The majority of clients wanted 50–60 stories per month in 2008, which equated to roughly two or three a day. With each writer assigned to anywhere between three and eight clients, that might mean writing as many as 24 articles every single day if you wanted to avoid falling behind.
I’m not saying that was an ideal situation. In fact, it was a good recipe for burnout and I was glad when changes were brought in at the company to focus more on quality than quantity (Google also saw to this by prioritizing longer content over the years).
However, it did show me that I could get plenty of writing done when I knew it was essential. I could write four stories a day, but I could also write 24 over exactly the same number of hours. The lesson? It’s easy to waste time with no particular target, but having a deadline forces you to focus.
2. Ideas are everywhere
A common question from new writers is ‘where do you get your ideas?’, and what I learned from content writing is that they’re everywhere all the time.
After all, when you’ve got a client who wants news about interactive touchscreen machines or heating oil (I really had those in my portfolio) and they want three stories a day come hell or high water, you’ve got to get creative or you won’t hit your targets.
Content writing teaches you to look at topics from a different angle or to take a snippet of a comment from a press release and create something relevant and on-brief from it, rather than discarding it.
For example, a PR about screen time increasing might lead to an article on how to improve eye health, while a company selling fleet management systems may benefit from a piece on how drivers can navigate storms safely.
Read between the lines of potential sources and you could find yourself brimming with ideas.
3. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be done
The fear of the blank page is a big issue for writers, and wanting everything to be perfect can really stifle your creativity.
However, there was no room in content creation for the over-zealous inner critic — not with three stories per hour to write (and sub-editing for co-workers on top of that) before even thinking about breaking for lunch. Getting the article down, the keywords in and the content sent to the clients had to be the focus.
To be clear, I’m not advocating sloppiness here. I never published anything I wasn’t happy with, and I kicked myself pretty brutally when errors did slip in. But my days in content writing taught me it’s better to have something to edit than to sit agonizing over one sentence ad nauseum.
4. Write what you don’t know
Everyone’s heard the old adage ‘write what you know, but content marketing made me realize this doesn’t have to be the case. I didn’t know the first thing about the impact of the economy on gold prices when I started, or about how companies could benefit from VoIP phones, but I learned how to research them soon enough when I was given clients in these sectors.
So, if you have the opportunity to write for a particular publication or client and are talking yourself out of it because you aren’t an expert, remember you can do more than you think you can because researching one thing is no different than researching another.
Yes, you must always double-source your facts, actually do the research, and ensure you understand the topic, bringing in expert comments to add weight where appropriate. But don’t let a perceived lack of expertise hold you back from giving something new a try.
5. There’s no room for purple prose
Everyone goes off on a tangent once in a while, but in content writing, you have to remember how to KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) and get to the point of your story quickly. My early articles often came back from subbing with a line through the first paragraph, which is a good way to learn how to achieve clarity and not waste your reader’s time (and your own).
This is becoming even more important today given the internet’s short attention span (a widely publicized study from Microsoft suggests people lose concentration in as little as eight seconds), so being clear and concise is vital if you want to keep people interested.
In conclusion, content writing back in 2008 was a different world than it is today, and it wasn’t always the best job. However, it did teach me some truly useful lessons that I continue to apply to my projects to this day — and perhaps you might find them beneficial too.
