You already know the Dos. The Do’s of content writing will build your article, give it great content and have people reading what you wrote for a long time. What you have to watch out for are all the things you should not do when you are writing content.
The Don’ts will kill a writing career as fast, if not faster than the Do’s can build it. This is not unique to content or freelance writing. It is something you need to watch out for no matter what career you embark on.
What not to do as a freelance writer? These few tips should help you refine your writing so that it becomes top-quality material that everyone would enjoy reading. When you catch yourself doing a Don’t, just correct your mistake and move on.
That is the best way to stay on track in your writing and meet your many deadlines:
You get a few seconds to capture the attention of your audience. The intro needs to be interesting, on target while creating an interest in the reader to finish your article. There are many tricks to use that will do this and you can quote a famous person, tell a joke, ask a good question, and so on.
Your topic will influence your introduction and use items related to the topic to help you create an interesting introduction
This is a weakness for many writers. They think they should add in their personal opinion or extra information no one wants to know about in order to write a good piece. However, fluff clutters the content and makes it very uninteresting to read.
Remember being a freelance writer is all business and you need to stick to the facts. Fluff can be done at some other time when it is appropriate to use.
This works if you are writing for an engineer, scientist, or someone of that caliber. Then, this style of writing only works for experiments, technical journals, and so on. It is not for the common reader who only wants to learn a little bit more about a topic.
Keeping your content simple and easy to understand helps win readers to your blog. Technical words when used at the wrong time, tell the reader you are not writing for them but for someone with higher qualifications.
Content writing is no place to show off. People want to read an article and get the information that is relevant to them and get out. They have busy lives as well and only have so much time for reading your content.
Keep your writing concise, to the point but do not leave out the facts. To do this write, edit your outline and only keep those points the reader will find useful. When it comes to content writing, less is more.
The key in most content writing is to keep as many sentenced beneath 20 words. Then, you should strive to keep your paragraphs to no more than 4 sentences in length.
The easier your sentences and paragraphs are to read, the more your readers stay on your web page. There will be exceptions to these rules but they are few and far in between.
Be your own judge on this as you are not writing to academics who can make one sentence three paragraphs long. You are writing to people like you, so structure your format accordingly.
This is a very big Don’t as you need to back up your claims with credible sources. By doing that, you help build confidence in your readers and it tells them your content is reliable. Just making a claim, makes you look like gossip or a person who is lazy and can’t do real research.
Add links to help your readers look up what you have quoted. you never know when they will be interested in reading more on the topic.
While you should not assume that your readers do not know a topic, you should not assume that they know nothing about it either. This is a fine line that is easy to cross. You never know what knowledge your readers have so been careful here.
You do not want to assume they know a topic when they don’t and leave out key information and vice versa.
Most clients do not like this style of writing as it adds too many words to a sentence. They want an active voice that makes the content pop and more interesting to read. The only time you use the passive voice is when that style of the sentence brings the message across better.
A better way to say that would be sounding like you are being mean, discriminating, or detached from the topic. Bad criticism would also be content and reader interest killer.
Your goal as a freelance writer is to be friendly, respectable, relatable and you accomplish this by using a friendly tone in your writing. Use words like ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘ours’ ‘yours’ frequently to give the reader the idea you are talking personally to them.
Writing a good conclusion is as important as writing a good introduction. A call to action is always good to use in most conclusions as is using words that make your points easy to remember. But be concise and leave out the fluff.
Avoiding the Don’ts help refine your writing and can make your blog more interesting to read. Use them to motivate you to find higher-quality ways of writing your content.
Take a little time to do some practice writing so you can analyze your own material and see how many Don’ts you need to remove from your work. It takes a little time but that is time well spent when you want to advance your writing career.
