“Yes, hi. We’re a content automation company and need your services.”
“I’d love to help. Can you explain your needs?”
“Well, we’ve built software to create content that hits target audiences and is personable, but we really need human writers to add words and basically clean up the text.
How good are your writers?”
“They are great at writing–they’re actually human! We’d love to help.”
**
I wish I could say we snuck in that sarcastic sentence at the end, but Sarah is actually much nicer than that.
She’s one of our Content Specialists who answers our phones daily—and that was a call she got earlier this year.
We aren’t disclosing company names for privacy reasons, but believe us when we say that a large automation company actually called in after they saw us on Google to confess that their “content automation” needed the human touch.
And they’re not the first company to feel that way.
[clickToTweet tweet=”In order to succeed today, you need to get personal, and this is something only actual people can do. -@ExpWriters” quote=”In order to succeed with today’s customers, you need to get personal, and this is something only actual people can do well. This isn’t likely to change anytime soon.”]
At Express Writers, we use and love tools that allow us to automate some form of our content marketing process: i.e., Buffer for scheduling social media posts and visuals, KWFinder for honing down the best keywords online, and SEMrush for site audit and online presence analysis.
But here’s why automation won’t come close to replacing the human writer.
The written copy, the created content that fuels the automation, is always created by humans.
Sure, you can plug the copy in any automation tool you want after it’s done, but first: you need real copy, crafted by a human.
We rely on human copywriters to create every bit of human content that fuelsour content automation part. We have a social media copywriter writing unique posts for every single scheduled post automated to go out in Buffer. We have a blogger and a content editor involved in the process it takes to create every single blog post of ours.
The day a business or brand stops relying on humans for the creation part of it all, is the day they set themselves up for failure.
On a more technical side, a few years ago WebProNews interviewed the CEO of a leading automation company, and reported that human writers aren’t going anywhere yet, because of the need for the human perspective and qualitative analysis in online content.
To further this point, let’s look at what went on when content automation has been attempted. (Because let’s face it, trying to engineer the next automated writer replacement has happened.)
A lot…went wrong.
The Facts: Stories of Content Automation Attempts that Failed
Take a look at content automation that went wrong.
Buffer: A Leading Social Media Tool Closes their Social Content Automation Feature
Remember the tools I mentioned that we use?
Well, one of them, Buffer (a leading social media tool) used to allow you to automatically schedule already-created posts. These were curated and pulled for you in a Suggestions feed. With one click, you could add their “suggested posts” to your feed and schedule – without even reading the content that you’re sharing.
It looked like this:
Guess what happened to that handy-dandy social media automation feature?
They did away with it, announcing that it was closing in 2015.
Why?
In their own words–it didn’t hold up to the standard of value they believed in, across social media. It encouraged the sharing of content that wasn’t personalized to the person sharing it.
Here’s what they said in the announcement:
(P.S. We love Buffer all the more for their commitment to truly valuable content sharing in social media.)
Now, let’s go deeper.
The last time someone tried to use actual robots for the most important part of content marketing, the writing part, things went terribly wrong.
Let’s explore the automation failures of history to show you exactly how that happened.
Content Automation Gone Terribly Wrong: The Story of Spinners & Content Farms
During the days of yesteryear, sneaky content creators tried to devise a way to spin out tons of “quality” content without bothering with hiring actual humans to write, edit, and post it.
They did this through a series of “black-hat” SEO tactics including content spinning, content mills or farms, and scraped content.
I’m going to break down the key two methods used back then: article spinning, and content farming.
#1: Article Spinning (Spun Right Down the Drain)
There were actually programs called article spinners – and they still exist today.
Take a look at the gibberish that “Free Article Spinner” gives you, once you type or copy in a block of text, enter their captcha, and hit Spin. (Yes, this program is still out there!)
Content spinning, using article spinners like these, used to actually be a thing.
Black hat SEOs used spinning software to take one article and “spin” it into dozens of new articles at the push of a button. As seen above, content spinning often resulted in low-quality, unintelligible writing that human readers couldn’t even decipher.
Google Panda Farmer is one of the main reasons no one is spinning articles anymore. It was one of the biggest algorithms that ever happened (it went down early February 2011), striking down over 11% of the spam on the web, de-ranking all duplicate and most of the spun content, and decreasing by 90% the rankings of big sites like Ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com, Answers.com, Articlesbase.com, and similar places that housed a lot of cheap, thin content written only for SEO. (See a more indepth analyses of Farmer on Searchmetrics.)
I like to think that Farmer was Google’s announcement to the web that it’s algorithm was human-based: created for humans, by humans. Not some robotic crap that you could “game.”
#2: Content Mills (or Farms): Not Your Old McDonald’s
Besides article spinning, there was also such a thing called “content mills”, or “content farms.” To produce a huge number of articles in a short period of time, these mills (usually offshore) used hundreds of writers to crank out low-quality content predominantly aimed at satisfying keyword requirements. Their writers, overworked beyond belief, ended up producing content that doesn’t even sound human.
Interestingly enough, big box brands were actually the ones behind many content farms–with the writer ending up getting paid between $2-4 an article, or if you were lucky, $5 and sometimes more. There’s a public email on SEObook.com showing a very typical email from a content farm.
Read the below and keep in mind that 200 orders could be 200 x 10, 100, or 1,000 articles per order = hundreds to thousands of articles in one week, for one brand, written to form and with no originality or thought.
That email is very typical.
How do I know?
We’ve encountered these brands ourselves, and I was wrapped up in being their employee back in the olden days (2011-early 2012, pre-Farmer).
Names must be kept secret since we signed an NDA, but you would not believe the common stores you walk into and their content creation process. The ones we encountered were hiring Indian offshore managers to manage their “human content” creation process, and then those Indians were doing some serious nickel-and-diming across the human writers they tried to hire and then demand crazy amounts of work from.
I hope all those brands are learning their lesson.
To the writer reading this: never settle. Ever.
Because the writer still taking work at pennies are the ones keeping those mills alive.
And with that, let’s move on to what the online content landscape looks like today.
Why Fresh, Custom Content Wins Today (& How Google is the Driving Force)
Throughout the last few years, Google has continued to release algorithm updates aimed specifically at punishing low-quality sites and scraped, duplicate, or low-quality content and rewarding high-quality sites that feature expert content written by real people. It’s last huge release was a 145-page Search Quality Evaluator Guide where it revealed that real humans review each website for several main factors (E-A-T, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust; and Y-M-Y-L, Your Money or Your Life, denoting the standards needed for content that affects your life and finances). I explored that doc in a 3,000-word blog here.
This obvious preference for fresh, relevant content necessitates great, human writers. This is especially true given the recent rise of content marketing.
Currently, 78% of CMOs believe that custom content (which let’s face it, computers can’t humanly create) is the future of marketing as a whole.
Additionally, 61% of consumers are more likely to interact with and purchase from a company that offers custom content… than they are one that doesn’t.
Something else to throw in the stat bucket…
4.6 billion pieces of content are produced every day. 83,000 blog posts are posted live every single hour. Every minute, 200 million emails are sent. (ACI Information Group)
In light of these statistics, it’s clear that you’re going to have to create really, really good content to get noticed.
A few examples:
Poo~Pourri stands out and has sold over 4 million products because of their extremely creative, humorous voice and copy. Neil Patel publishes such a thorough guide every week on Quick Sprout that his Facebook followers say things like, man, you crushed it again, this is the ultimate life guide to my next business move.
No matter how many leaps and bounds marketing automation makes in the next several years, it’s going to be impossible to replace the human touch altogether needed to create online content that truly shines and stands out online.
The Downside of Automation: It’s An Age of Relationships
Automation is great for many things: it’s helped us become more efficient, productive, targeted marketers who pull out a whole lot less of our hair in the process.
It’s also helped us measure our results, stick to schedules, and become better business people.
The one thing automation can’t do, however, is actually build a human relationship.
Not until we’re all a bunch of robots, at least…
Why Millennials are a Key Reason Not to Automate
I’d argue that, right now, we’re living in the age of relationships.
If you need an example, all you need to do is look at millennials. Millennials (generally defined as consumers between the ages of 18-34) currently make up a full ¼ of the U.S. population and, combined, they boast an annual purchasing power of more than $200 billion dollars.
This not only makes them one of the largest generations ever, but it also makes them the single most powerful marketing group in existence today.
In addition to the fact that they’re the largest marketing group, they’re also one of the most unique. As it turns out, millennials don’t share much of anything with other marketing groups.
The reason for this is that they’re highly connected, incredibly tech literate, and very focused on the development of relationships with brands they value.
AdAge reports that Millennials spend about 25 hours online each week and that most of that time is spent searching for custom content. When it comes to the content they choose to interact with, millennials consistently rank authenticity as being more important than the actual meat of the content they consume and they’re overwhelmingly more likely to trust personal recommendations or experts than they are random advertising and pushy sales tactics.
To put this another way: millennials value relationships – with one another and with the brands they choose to purchase from – and it’s clear that relationships are quickly becoming one of the most important factors in the purchasing decisions they make.
They value relationships so much, in fact, that 42% of millennial consumers state it’s very important to them to have a role in creating and developing the future services and products of the companies they purchase from.
Several companies have done this exceedingly well (Lays’ “Do us a Flavor” campaign is a great example) and, as a result, they’ve reaped the rewards of heightened customer loyalty and powerful advertising.
This is another example of something that’s very difficult for automated systems to do: while automated systems can schedule and scrape content, they can’t reach out and communicate directly with consumers in a meaningful and encouraging way.
Because of this, it’s clear that companies who want to build strong relationships with an increasingly millennial customer base need to do so by creating authentic, custom content using real writers.
Today is also the era of people wanting to do business with brands they LOVE.
This explains the exponential rise in the popularity of videos, images, and blog entries. In order for today’s customer to interact with a brand, that brand has to be created specifically for them.
The importance of this is evident in companies that have used storytelling to push their brand message.
Take Airbnb for example, which has used a series of beautiful, story-rich advertisements to gain favor with a millennial audience.
Another great example of the need for custom content is this: millennials are 247% more likely to be influenced by social media than previous generations, but you can bet that statistic would go out the window the moment social media started blasting millennials with stiff, unreadable, salesy content that wasn’t actually directed at them at all.
In order to succeed with today’s customers, you need to get personal, and this is something only actual people can do well.
This isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Customers will always value personalized interactions.
While automation is important in many dozens of ways, it consistently misses the mark on providing high-quality, humanized, story-dense interaction for a brand’s customers.
5 Examples of Companies Investing Big-Time in Real Writers
1. Us – Express Writers
We publish over 40 pieces of long-form, 1000+ word content every single month across all our blog platforms, and we rely 100% on human writers to ghostwrite and deliver (I come up with all the topics, skeletons, and do the editing).
Our company has never hired an automation service to create the content, and will never do so. It just isn’t feasible. Our commitment is to provide high-quality, handwritten content services—and we believe only real writers can provide that.
We’ll never change this standard.
Yes, we will use tools like Buffer to schedule our social media posts, and we’re building a CMS system that makes all of our content assignments easier on our managers and our writers—but that’s about as far as “automation” will go over here at Express Writers!
2. Elite Daily
Elite Daily is the mammoth of millennial media in many ways. Pumping out everything from listicles to serious news-focused content, Elite Daily has risen to prominence in the world of media publications.
The company staffs a team of more than 5,000 contributing writers and a small team of in-house writers who are all – you guessed it- millennials.
The content you see on the site comes from the hands of real people and has managed to earn the platform some serious success in the form of more than 200,000 Twitter followers, over 2 million Facebook likes, and upwards of 70 million unique visitors each month. How’s that for knowing your audience and delivering exactly what they want?
3. Trello
Trello is an organizational and task management platform that’s pushing for world domination through its use of skilled, succinct copywriters. Their clear, distinct blurbs of copy are well-written:
From clear product descriptions to highly relatable web copy, this platform wins points for being obviously written for the benefit of the customers. You won’t find crappy, scraped content here!
4. ModCloth
Looking for a frock for your sister’s wedding? Why not try the Ain’t Serene Nothing Yet! Dress or the Bold to Behold dress.
Maybe you need a bag to go with it? The Maestro of Ceremonies tote is right up your alley. ModCloth is a quirky clothing company that’s been killing it in terms of copywriting for years now. From their outstanding product descriptions to their unique blog content and colorful site, ModCloth is a clear leader in the copywriting industry.
5. Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club has been making headlines lately for its quirky launch video and hilarious commercials, but have you checked out their website?
From their promise at the bottom of the home page (“No commitment. No fees. No BS.”) to their truly outstanding advertising, it’s clear to see why Dollar Shave Club has been taking the cake in copywriting for quite some time.
5 Killer Benefits of Real Writers
By now, you know that there are many things real writers can do that automated content systems can’t.
Here are a few of the main benefits of sticking with actual humans for your writing needs:
1. Real writers provide value
While it’s easy enough to schedule and curate posts using an automated content service, it’s much more difficult to provide genuine value for readers with an automated content system. Because real writers can anticipate and respond to the needs of readers, they’re always going to be better at providing valuable content than automated systems are.
2. Real writers can customize
We’ve outlined the importance of custom content in this article and while an automated system may be able to target actual dispersal of content to custom audiences, it certainly can’t create custom content. This is important because custom content is a bigger deal now than it’s ever been before.
Custom content has the potential to help increase customer engagement and help your brand stand out in its industry.
3. Real writers can respond
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that engaging with customers is one of the most important aspects of content marketing. Unfortunately, automated content systems don’t do this very well. Real writers, on the other hand, can monitor social media posts or blog interactions in order to read and respond to comments. This helps build a presence online and encourage high-quality customer engagement.
4. Real writers don’t suck
Let’s just face it –automated content sucks most of the time. (Re-read the article spinner results, circled in red.)
Because of this, real human writers have a definite upper hand when it comes to creating content people actually want to read.
5. Real writers go the distance
Real writers who are dedicated to their jobs will do almost anything to ensure their content is helpful and accurate for readers. This results in quality content, helpful information, and well-rounded sites that are valuable and exciting.
Human Writers: Here to Stay
While automated content may be the way of the future, it’s clear that human writers are here to stay.
From providing real value for readers to responding, engaging, and building relationships, real human writers can do things that automated content services never will.
Hire your expert {human} writer. Visit our Content Shop today!
As a writing team, we’re constantly hired to fill in for a missing talent: the art of writing.
We put our unique writing ability and style to good use to help companies grow organically.
Good copy enables them to improve their communication with their targeted audiences, sell faster and better, and achieve bold marketing goals – that they didn’t even know they had in mind.
Yes: written content can do all of that.
What’s your superpower?
Need a Writer? Two Solutions: Become an Overnight Creative Superhero, or Find One
Maybe you consider yourself fairly decent with words.
Let’s go further. Maybe you’re among the few wonders of the world who can solve a Rubix cube in the blink of an eye. You feel like you can count on your above-average analytical skills to deliver the best answers to your customers’ questions, challenges and concerns.
But what if you can’t string one sentence together that can convert a reader?
Turn someone visiting your site into a buyer? Activate their brain as they scan your content, so they automatically (and instantly) want to know more about you and buy whatever you’re selling?
Those “activation” words, my friend, are the product of a true artist – a writer with the compound power of creative thinking and creative writing, at their disposal.
I’ll be honest here: as a writer, you can’t just “be creative.”
You have to be able to turn your creativity into a flow of words. A well-developed vocabulary helps. Online writing skills are a big help if you want Google to read your words, too. But you can’t try too hard, because it must come naturally.
Thus, the best content is written.
Easy as pie–if you have a natural, talented expert writer at your disposal.
10 Clear-Cut Reasons Why You (And Everyone Else) Truly Does Need a Writer
Intrigued on what makes a writer so hire-able?
Here are some of the biggest reasons we’re hired daily (and why you need a writer).
1. You Need Better-Than-Average Copy to Win with Google Today
It’s funny my first point references a “robotic algorithm,” right?
Well, they’ve actually come to a point of reading content like a real human–so they look for great writing in the copy. Useful stuff, that people will actually want to click on and read. (I’m serious. Google’s that advanced these days.)
And they recently released their rulebook, aka Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which I’ve already discussed (read: dissected) in a previous blog here.
In a nutshell, E.A.T is Google’s new name listing all the three key components that a page needs to meet its standards: A High Level of Expertise (E), Authoritativeness (A), and Trustworthiness (T). And then there’s Y.M.Y.L., which refers to the expert level content required for those high level industries (your money or your life – great rapper style, Google).
If you think that your writing isn’t focused on expertise, authoritativeness, or trust: stop right now and rewrite everything until you come up with Google (and people)-friendlier versions, or put the pen down and let an experienced writer take charge.
2. You Don’t Want that Typo To Bring You Down
OK: let’s say you have copy already written and you like it. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here.
No matter what your content is about, a professional writer or copyeditor is your best bet to ensure your copy is error-free and solid. You don’t want to be the unintentional butt of that one humorous grammatical joke. I’m a professional copywriter, and I’ve been there: now, I always involve multiple people from our team in my own copy creation.
Your answer: Nah, I’ve got this. I can proofread.
#1: We’re all human, even the best of us. You’re going to miss an error at some point.
#2: And have you ever proofread a ton of content? Because as your business and needs grow and you create more and more content, being your own editor gets a little…tedious. Refer to the below.
Also, another short note on this point.
An expert copywriter or is the best person to consult if you’re considering launching a tagline, slogan, or some other small bit of copy that will bring serious exposure. A writer can help you bring even more direct ROI from that little conversion phrase if they catch something, or perhaps save your business a ton of dough you’d lose if it wasn’t as good as it could be.
Example: let’s say you’re starting a hashtag campaign. A professional writer can tell you if you’re falling in the danger of #SusAnalBumParty (a hashtag fail at trying to create a hashtag for Susan’s Album Party, for Susan Boyle, a few years ago).
3. Your Brand Needs Great Content to Stay Relevant & Maintain A Competitive Edge
Very few business owners have the creativity and analytical skills required to craft different types of web content that a brand requires to maintain an active presence both online and offline in today’s market.
I’m not putting anyone down–there’s actually a lot of content types now you need to be creating to succeed online.
And various types of content demand differing writing skills and knowledge.
For instance, social media content is friendly, warm, and requires some marketing and conversational skills. On the other hand, web copy revolves around content SEO optimization knowledge, the ability to write targeted taglines and engage/direct your reader to ROI.
For great blog content you have to know how to research certain topic well, and put it all together in a highly useful, informative, storified piece.
Take an infographic–you have to know how to research, dig deep, and present it in an actionable, short, useful way.
In all honesty, knowing how to mold your writing voice to each isn’t easy! You will need various writers for each type of web content that you’re planning on delivering. We have a social media manager, web copywriters, and blog copywriters who create our EW content. Our company counts on a team of specialized writers with experts in the most prominent categories of web content that any business requires to preserve its competitive advantage on its market.
Inside tip: You can’t just hire one guy who is “good at SEO” or “knows a thing or two about business blogging.” You need to rely on a team of writers who have what it takes to work with different content fields and types, and yield the best results.
Hand-in-hand with this is an overall aspect of creating content that is special enough to give you that competitive edge.
Businesses with an online presence usually don’t know where to start in terms of creating content. Simple problem, but a real one. Some companies don’t have what it takes to fuel their connection with their audiences, while others spend too much time focusing on the core of their business, and end up losing track of the customer journey and the progress of their main competitors.
In this context, stellar content delivered by creative writers who are familiar with your industry can reignite the lost spark in your relationship with your clients, prospects and partners, making it easier for you to redefine yourself as an industry expert.
An experienced web copywriter can really bridge the gap between your brand and your segment of public, preventing any further communication problems, and turning your ineffective monologue into successful dialogue marketing.
4. Writing Creatively Just Isn’t Your Thing
Trying to summon the art of writing and end up feeling like Jack Nicholson? Crickets, crickets…
That’s okay.
Because creative writing is harder than it looks.
It doesn’t just refer to well-adorned content where you flagrantly write with a bunch of misdirected adjectives.
As a matter of fact, unnecessary embellishments can cause reader fatigue, giving your readers another good reason to bounce off your page and land on websites featuring articles and blog posts that are easier to read.
In reality, creative writing depends a great deal on the substance of the story that you create around your product or service.
(Maybe that’s why the hardest words are the fewest–that 5-word tagline that’ll sell your business?)
Your creativity also reflects your ability to rock the world, by humanizing your content and the brand that you’re representing, and making it convey emotion-rich messages that will reach your audience and trigger an immediate response.
Your ability to speak the language of your targeted audience.
The voice that you create and maintain to express your individuality and personal wit, while also stirring emotions, building trust and credibility, and prompting action.
A good flow that isn’t disrupted by any errors, asymmetries or divagations, which may bore your readers to death or kill their focus.
If you find it difficult to achieve a balance between your voice, flow and the tactics that you are currently employing to involve and engage your audience, consider hiring a team of creative writers who could lift this weight off your shoulders and show you how it’s done.
5. You’re Not Good at Telling Stories
Maybe, just maybe you have a few creative ideas that you could apply to raise the curiosity and interest of your readers.
How about this: you’re even funny, intriguing or interesting enough to create a positive, long-lasting impression through your content, and give your public something to talk about for a few days?
But–then what?
What happens after you finish your first story, get hit by a terrible case of writer’s block, and realize that you don’t really have anything else to say/write?
Maybe your readers are still waiting for a sequel, but the curtain has already fallen, and you don’t feel quite ready to get back into the spotlight.
In this situation, maybe your so-called stage fright is fueled by your inability to tell a good story from start to finish.
If that’s the case, don’t hesitate to work closely with someone who understands your brand, mission, purpose in business and vision, knows everything about your market, audience and competition, and has the skills and experience required to craft a good story.
Keep in mind that you don’t need someone who is chatty.
You need a storyteller who respects and follows the structure of a good story-including the presence of common reference points, personal connections, and a clear moral or purpose- and isn’t afraid to give it a personal touch to highlight your uniqueness.
6. You Need to Craft A Variety of Content Types
Assuming that you are fortunate enough to count on a team of writers who deliver all the articles, web page copy, press releases and blog posts that you need to stay visible and active on your market and maintain a solid connection with your audiences, maybe you should ask yourself the following question: who’s taking care of the rest?
Long gone are the days when quality content was a mere string of paragraphs that your readers had to skim and scan to get the information that you have so generously provided. In the era of TV, web, print and mobile convergence, brands feel compelled to invest more and more money, time and energy in multimedia content.
As Hubspot points out, the visual content landscape is extremely diverse and alluring in 2016. According to this source, colored visuals boost your visitors’ willingness to read your entire content piece by up to 80%, while the tactic of incorporating the term “’video” in the subject line of your emails can increase their open rates by almost 20%.
Under these particular circumstances, it becomes obvious that you need the full support of a team of savvy writers who know how to craft and deliver impressive multimedia content, and wouldn’t shy away from transcribing your conversations and recorded presentations, extract the essence from your podcasts, repurpose different types of content, and help you explore different channels to reach your audiences in their own natural habitats, get them to listen to what you have to say, and keep them engaged around the clock.
7. You Need to Form a Solid Community around Your Product or Service
Guess what? Creative writers could be your biggest resource for this one.
Building a massive community around your product or service isn’t exactly easy, especially when:
You’re a newcomer in your industry
You’re unable to interact with your public
You don’t really know how to make your products sell themselves
The good news is that you could also grow from zero to a few million users, just like Hootsuite and several other successful startups, even when you count on an almost nonexistent advertising budget.
Yes, you could actually achieve similar goals by developing and implementing a cohesive content strategy gravitating around:
Authentic stories based on customer testimonials and reviews that let your prospects know just how amazing your product is, how it has helped them improve their lives/business, how they value it more than the air they breathe, and how they would gladly recommend it to their friends, family and neighbors.
Tactics meant to help the brand grow locally, such as local community-oriented events allowing businesses to interact with local influencers and expand their reach, one step at a time.
New ways to build relationships online and offline, by turning employees and past clients into brand ambassadors to consolidate the image and reputation of your brand and expand the community that you have started to grow around your company.
8. Delivering First-Class Specialty Pieces
If you’re about to tell the world about how you created an entire network of fans and followers around your company through quality, consistent content, then maybe you could share your secrets with the wannabe crowd and let them know who’s behind your tutorials, SEO copywriting and infographics.
Are these some of the few elements that you’ve deliberately omitted from your content strategy?
If that’s the case, now would be a good time to reconsider.
Here’s why: as an industry expert, you actually need these specialty pieces to reinforce your status, leadership and authority.
These specialty pieces may very well consolidate your competitive advantage, encouraging others-including your main competitors-to share your content, reference you and your brand, and implicitly, support your marketing goals.
9. You Need to Boost Your Online Visibility
Perhaps you know someone who knows someone who could put pen to paper and give you a few blog posts and articles each week, but is this really all you need to stay on top of industry trends, dominate the first pages of Google, and make your rivals bite the dust? In realty, you’ll need the full support of a great writer specialized in SEO copywriting, who knows how to create content that could please both human eyes and search engine. By all means, hire an expert who knows how to write meta data, title tags and headlines to help you stay updated with the latest SEO rules and guidelines, and enhance your online visibility with less effort.
10. You Need to Write Consistently
Let’s go back to #5 for a second, shall we?
How often do you post on your blog?
How often do you satisfy your readers’ need for quality content by delivering well-researched, fun, informative articles?
How often do you interact with your fans and followers on social media?
If you can’t remember the last time you smiled while reading meaningful comments from your audience, then you’re probably posting too seldom.
This means that you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to get in touch with different categories of users who could become your devoted partners or clients.
Avoid this drawback by staying active on the social media platform where you could plant hooks for your targeted audience, and don’t hesitate to find a team of writers who could cover all your needs in terms of web content-including specialty pieces, big pieces, and the small bits and pieces that you could tailor and repurpose to share through a great variety of social networks and affiliate websites to achieve your marketing objectives.
Conclusion: There’s No Excuse for Not Delivering Stellar Online Content
My final tips: be inspired by the best in your industry.
Learn from those who attract the right people through their words.
Then, either write or go hire with guidelines in place to create rockstar content.
For our clients, their best bet is investing in a team of real experts who are familiar with every content field and types and can create and write your best content, so you have the opportunity to make a difference online. That’s us! Go visit our Content Shop or learn more about us.
Need a writer?
The people in the Pacific Northwest might…
Imagine this, you’re driving there, and you see a farm stand coming into view on the horizon.
Your mouth waters as you imagine the juicy produce, and your mind begins to fill with fantasies of fresh-picked cherries, strawberries, apples, raspberries, honeys and jams and maybe even some delicious veggies to throw on the grill during dinner that night.
As you get closer, however, you realize that this isn’t just any fruit stand. This is a fruit stand that appears to be in desperate need of a good writer, as evidenced by the spray-painted wooden sign that advertises “zookeene”, “tater + maters,” “hallopinyo” and… *Gasp*
Your favorite member of the entire vegetable family – “bail peprs.”
Zookeenes, y’all?
3 Other Major Sign Mistakes (Aka Why You Need a Writer)
Hold your giggles now folks, because this is exactly what happened to customers at the infamous “zookeene” farm stand and, while there is certainly a decent amount of power in sounding out difficult words, we can probably all agree that this is just one piece of evidence that indicates the need for good writers in all industries.
Why you need a writer is about to be illustrated in 3,2,1…
1. The Case of Patterson School 20’s Misspelled Sign
There is one misspelling mishap that might be slightly more tragic than the colorful “zookeene” and “bail peprs” sign and that is the infamous misspelling on the Patterson School sign.
When students arrived at Patterson School 20 in Patterson, New Jersey in December 2014, they were in for a surprise. There, on the school’s marquee sign prominently located directly above the entrance to the prestigious establishment, was the newest of the school’s monthly information boards. This one, however, read like this:
Watch out kids, those teachers are out to dice and reepor you this month!
It didn’t take long, of course, for students and faculty to notice that, not only was December misspelled “Dicimber” and report as “reepor” but also that there was a ‘1’ facing noticeably backwards.
To make matters worse, the school’s principal, who earned a salary of roughly $108,000 per year, left the sign up for an entire week, seeming not to notice the multiple mistakes.
As a result, the school board grew angry and the principal, Antoinette Young, was quickly relocated to a different school district – all over a proofreading failure that went embarrassingly public. And that my friends is why you need a writer (or just a good copyeditor).
2. The Montgomery Debacle
As if losing a job weren’t bad enough, imagine losing several thousand dollars over a misspelling. This is exactly what happened in Montgomery, Pennsylvania when the Montgomery County Court House left an important ‘m’ out of “commissioners” and produced a grand total of 26 signs throughout the county that had glaring and obvious misspellings on both sides, resulting in the need to fix a whopping 52 sign panels to rectify the mistake.
After a call from the public and elected officials to fix the signs, Montgomery did so, at a cost of $4,000. To add insult to injury, the city projects that the signs will need to be replaced yet again after the local general election, resulting in another several thousand-dollar expenditure.
3. The Case of the Misspelled Spelling Bee
When two young girls, Maiesha Akhand and Anamaria Brown came out as victors of the Centennial Elementary spelling bee, they expected local fame and maybe their name on the school’s marque sign. In the end, they got both but they were in for a bit of a surprise when their bus rolled by the billboard on the way out of town and they were met with this:
Little did the girls know that the students would soon become the teachers, both in spelling and in irony.
There’s A Growing Epidemic, And It’s Called Bad Spelling
If the state of our spelling is this bad with all of our current technology, just imagine a civilization without spell check. Misspelled signs are popping up in everything from “A State Sales” to homemade billboards advertising “farwood fer sale.”
Although these signs seem funny, and indeed they are, they also provide a pretty obvious reminder that there is no end to the value of a good writer – no matter what you’re selling.
Although the “zookeenes” example is hilarious in its absurdity, it’s clear that these mistakes also make their way into high-level affairs, such as official city signage and school billboards and it goes without saying that it’s difficult to be taken seriously as an individual or an institution when your literature is riddled with misspellings.
In addition to writing, optimizing sites for search engines, incorporating keywords into content and helping devise marketing and promotional materials, a great writer can also play the important role of proofreader and editor, which evidence has shown may be more important than anything else, in some cases. Businesses need a good writer more than they know.
Although misspellings like Westar Mart’s “Ice Cold Bear” are hilarious at first glance, oversights like this can be detrimental for business at a higher level and spelling, as it turns out, is an indiscriminate and persistent scourge.
Misspellings affect everyone from fruit salesmen to lawyers (as was the case when one attorney misspelled public as ‘pubic’ – as in “in consideration of important pubic matters” – all throughout a27 page legal document) and can cost a business time, money and sales.
That said, the moral of the story is clear: hire great writers and keep yourself out of Elite Daily’s list of the “25 worst public spelling errors ever seen”. Need a writer (or two)? To learn more about the importance of hiring a great writer and how it can benefit your business (so you don’t let any “zookeenes” sneak in)… check out our Proofreading services.
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