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Content writing – really good content writing, can convince you that the person writing it is possibly an expert from within the industry. It is not necessarily the easiest effect to achieve. Why? Because you have to research to a point where you can comfortably converse with someone that has perhaps been in an industry for a very long time, and you need to sound like you know what you are talking about. Underneath that you need to know what you are talking about.

Then, after you have hopefully satisfied the person for whom you are effectively standing in for as a communicator, you then have to fully understand who the client is wishing you to communicate with. Is your client dealing mainly with business to business, or are they dealing with a business to customer flow? In the first instance they are going to be dealing with people who have a similar level of expertise to themselves, and so the text needs to reflect the expertise of your client, in order to position them as an authority among their peers. In the second instance you need to once again create the air of authority, but you need to adopt a way of speaking that assumes less familiarity with the subject and perhaps uses more general terminology.

So, you understand your subject, you understand your client, and you understand your audience.

What tone are they looking for? Do they want playful, conversational, or would they prefer something a little dryer? It doesn’t hurt to scope out any past work they have done, or to speak to your client long enough that you get a feel for how they might pitch something themselves, but don’t get locked into this as the only approach. How you feel about what you are writing is likely to shift around depending on the volume of work you have to do for someone, and if you don’t find a way to make something interesting for yourself, it is unlikely to be interesting for anyone reading it. Writing one article is not the same as writing a hundred – if you are fresh as a daisy after twenty articles then you are a truly special individual. You have to find a way to escape patterns of talking about something that you may have fallen into by that point, or you are just going to be re-hashing your own work, and effectively plagiarizing yourself, which no one wants to do.

You Have To Find A Way Forward And It May Take A While

I generally prefer to think of any necessary SEO that needs to be present in a piece of writing as skeletal, and not determining the overall feel of the piece. You can tell when something is stuffed to the gills with terms that a marketer has researched and thinks will get his client’s website traction with a search engine, but if you write without the potential human readers in mind you are going to be serving up a mouthful of dry crackers, and while SEO may be your main aim, those guidelines are also in place, and please don’t forget this, to help Google to provide their users with rich content experiences.

Sure, it can be a challenge to shoehorn in some kind of long-tail phrase and make it sound natural, but if you aren’t able to do that, what are you doing sitting at a keyboard and claiming to be able to write?

It isn’t necessarily ever going to be easy, even if you are a talented writer, because the demands are going to take you out of your comfort zone – sure, you may luck into a subject once in a while that you can write about with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your back, but more often than not you are dropped right into the middle of a conceptual wasteland, and you have to find your way back towards some kind of idea of knowing what the hell you are talking about. I have had to sit down and diagram out the thing that I am writing about so that I can think with how it works. Sometimes pulling in non-writers that might have pertinent data is a good fix. Dictionaries. Internet searches. Taking a walk around in the real world. All of these things may put you on the right path. Or none of them may. Some days your are going to get really stuck and you are going to wonder why in God’s name you have been given the subject you have to write about, and you are going to have no clue on what the angle of approach should be. What do you have to do? Keep running at the brick wall is about all that is going to work … and at some point you may have a break through.

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