Love to read and write? Thinking about becoming a professional content writer to make a living? You are at the right place. In this article, I am going to explain what is content writing, how to become an article writer, and how you can promote yourself online. Continue Reading!
What is Content Writing?
Article writing is when you create content to deliver a relevant, accurate, and precise message to your target audience, ensuring they get the answers they came for and stick around to keep reading.
Creative writing’s purpose is to convey the specific niche’s expertise engagingly, promoting the business, and increasing traffic in the search engines. A quality article not only drives engagement and organic traffic but also can generate conversion and revenue.
Types of Writing to Implement for a Business
There are four types of professional content writing you can apply for your business. However, their writing technique, language, voice, and tone vary. If you can deliver the content perfectly, you can fulfill the business needs and engage with the audience, ensuring dominating search engines and sales.
Descriptive Content Writing
As the name suggests, descriptive content is written to describe a product, its features, and its benefits. Though it does not have to be creative, you need to provide all the necessary information precisely and interestingly to the reader so that they find the product helpful and valuable and take action to purchase it.
Expository Content Writing
Expository articles are “How to guide and research articles” where you share actual information and facts to your target audience. For example, if you are a dentist and writing a blog post about wisdom teeth, you share the factual details of what the reader should do about wisdom teeth.
Through expository articles, you provide information logically and make readers understand the details. The purpose of expository content writing is to convey your knowledge and expertise.
Persuasive Content Writing
Persuasive content is written to persuade the audience to take a specific action. It is mostly used to promote products or services in an engaging manner so that customers understand the brand’s value, connect with it, and make a purchase.
For example, if a web content writer creates content on the importance of SEO for brand growth, it is to persuade the reader on why they should implement SEO for their brand as well as guide them to take the SEO services from the company. Thus, persuasive creative writing evokes emotions by showcasing the value of the product or service and entices the visitor to take action.
Narrative Content Writing
Narrative content is written like story writing where you tell your brand story chronologically. Good narrative writing has a strong introduction, explanation, rising action, and conclusion, ensuring keeping the readers engaged and entertained throughout the reading.
Narrative writing informs, persuades, and connects with the audience. It helps the audience know more about you, highlights your products or services’ uniqueness, and assures them to take your services.
How to Understand You Have the Potential to Become a Good Article Writer?
Good content writers are not only born but made. To become a writer, you do not need to do courses. If you have these three quality in you, you have more than enough potential to become an article writer.
- Love to Learn: If you enjoy reading books, stories, content, and other materials, like to question and analyze content, and love to learn new things, you can become a good content writer.
- Love to Write: From the content you enjoy, if you like to write random stuff and can express your feelings, you can become a writer.
- Love to Fix Grammatical Errors: While reading the content or reading your peer’s assignments, if you can find and fix grammatical errors, tones, and language, you are good to go as a writer.
How to Become an Article Writer- Professional and Successful
As a content writer, I can assure you that writing is fun. You get to read many content, learn new things, and improve yourself in the process. Now, let’s see what you need to do to become a professional content writer.
Read to Write Better
Though many people say you need to read niche-related articles to become a professional creative writer, it is not true. I say read whatever you like but read. For example, I love to read novels, comics, and stories through which I learn and understand new words, tones, and voices. It helps me write content in my style.
When you have a habit of reading, you can read and understand any content before you and create original and relevant content in your style. This is the reason you need to read, read, and read to write stunning creative content that stands out in the competition.
Think Creatively
While reading content, think uniquely in your style. Search a topic and read five or ten pieces of content that appeared in the search results. You will see though all the content written on the same topic, the tone, language, starting, and others are completely different. Why? because all the writers understand content differently and write it in their own way. Thus, think creatively while reading the content, take the idea, understand it, and write it in your style, ensuring the content is original
Research
To become a great online writer, there is no alternative to research. Researching helps you create high-quality data-driven content, answering searchers’ queries, bringing visitors, and ranking in search engines.
To research online, choose a keyword you are interested in writing and find relevant keywords. Search the focus keyword like “Topical relevance” and read the top ten content that appeared in the search results. Note the points they have covered and try to find a gap. Create an outline, write chronologically like storytelling, and cover the topic.
Your reader should find the answer in your content. Remember, the longer the target audience reads the content, the better ranking and traffic it will get.
Simple Words & Short Sentences
Professional content writing is all about engaging with your target audience. You need to write in a way your audience can easily engage and connect. How can you engage with your audience?
- Use simple words people use regularly. If you use complex words just to make your content unique, do not do it. Readers are not going to Google the words. If your words and meanings are too hard to understand, readers are going to leave, enhancing the bounce rate and damaging the ranking.
- Write in short sentences readers can easily skim and understand. Complex and long sentences are hard to understand. Thus, write in simple sentences so that readers can easily understand and have a happy time reading your content, enhancing ranking and traffic.
- Ensure grammatical error-free content. While writing with easy words and simple sentences, ensure there are no grammatical mistakes in your content. The sentence meanings need be correct and easily understandable.
Improve Technical Skills
Brands look for good web content writers who can rank content in search engines. This is why you need to get basic knowledge of professional search engine optimization (SEO) and other necessary writing tools to ensure your content is SEO-friendly.
Improving technical skills will help you write better for your targeted audience, get more clients, and rank in Google.
Create a Portfolio
To step into the world of professional content writing, you need to create a strong portfolio. As a beginner, you may think it’s hard, but it’s not. Let me help you.
What kind of niche you are interested in working in? Choose a keyword from that niche. If you do not know how to do keyword research, just read the articles that appeared in the search results and write quality content, keeping your target audience in mind. Following the same method, write a few more pieces of content and create a nice and strong portfolio to represent your client.
Experiment and Enhance Your Writing Skills
Do not stick with one niche. Gain knowledge and experiment with different niches to enhance your writing skills. For example, if you like to write content in clothing, spread your horizon, and create content on photography.
The reason is as a writer you will have to write in many niches, ensuring the content quality and meeting the client’s needs. When you have an idea of the variety of niches, your work will get smoother and faster, delivering the results your client loves.
3 Ways to Promote Yourself as a Writer
We live in an era, where if you do not brand yourself, nobody will know you exist. So, here are three ways you can promote yourself as a good content writer and popularize yourself.
- Through Your Portfolio: Your portfolio is the proven result of your capability. Make a strong portfolio that showcases your unique writing style and knowledge in niches, ensuring clients love the content you write and hire you immediately.
- Social Media: Use social media platforms to promote your content writing. You can share your knowledge on specific niches, write movie reviews, and other engaging content to connect with your audience and see how they like your writing.
- Communication: While sharing content on social media, communicate with your readers to understand them and fulfill their needs better. Especially on LinkedIn as it is a platform where professionals connect and share their expertise.
To Sum Up
Did our content on “How to Become an Article Writer” help you decide to become a writer? If yes, I am glad. Start writing on your favorite niche and eventually, you will improve your writing skills and become comfortable writing about various niches easily. At first writing content may take time but with time you can create quality content faster. Let the Content Writing Journey Begin!
