Yes, You Too Can Become a Great Writer

Write with Impact: The Most Important Skills to Acquire to Become a Good Writer

The best writers know how to make an introduction that gets a reader’s attention. What else do they know that makes them mint money by writing online or offline?

If you too have this question pondering in your mind, this post is for you. Hang on till the end, I’m going to share 3 tips or skills you, as a writer should have in order to create appealing content for your audience.

This post is for those who want to get started with writing, already own a business but don’t have anyone for marketing (or don’t want to have at this moment). For those who don’t already know, writing is marketing.

Let’s begin.

3 skills that’ll make you a great content writer

Writing is becoming as common as engineering was, a couple of years of ago. If you’re from any South Asian country, you’d know I’m right.

Writing is one of the easiest way one can get started with their careers of making money online, even if it’s just to make some part time income.

However, its easier said than done. Getting started with writing is very easy, all you have to do is hit publish. However, if you care about what you write, you should pay a little attention (an important skill for any living being) to the fine details of writing as profession.

Let’s look at the most important skills you’d need to acquire as a writer:

#1 Research

One thing I regret not doing sooner is research. I’ve always created content with one perspective, my own. I used to only take up writing projects that I can actively write on, which turned out decent enough for me.

However, I did not grow. I couldn’t. Nobody can’t. Because I was operating in my comfort zone. Nothing fruitful grows there.

Effective writing is all about researching, finding evidences to back all your claims.

Also, understand the real meaning of researching. If you haven’t already realized, researching means finding what already exist, as in, ‘re’ searching (searching again)

Finding something that already exist but don’t know where to begin looking is very annoying. Don’t believe me? Try finding that sock you lost. That’s researching in disguise.

Here’s a simple process I follow for researching for articles:

1. Identify the central idea/goal of the post
2. Find what people are talking about it online. I prefer Twitter, Reddit, YouTube video a blog post or other relevant forums. It can be memes like this or confessions like these & these. This gives you a very wide perspective of the topic
3. Organize all your research based on the outline you’ve created in the first place
4. Finish & sleep over. Edit with fresh mind

In a world where there are over 700 million blogs & over 2 billion website, there’s way more than enough for people to consume & search engines to rank.

If you want to stand out, research really throughly. Crowdsource your content & that’s surely gonna resonate with a lot of people. Lastly, even 30 minutes of good research, will help you save hours of writing time.

#2 Discipline

Watch the video below to understand what discipline means & why we’re so bad at being disciplined.

I’ve started practicing to sit at my writing desk for two hours & not get up, no matter what, not even for bio-breaks. Doing this will do three things:

1. Prove to you that you can actually get things done within the deadlines you set
2. How difficult it is to sit in one place for extended period of time & understand the value of each minute that you force yourself to not get out the chair
3. You’ll get better at being mindful

You can do whatever you want but get out of you chair. Initially, you’ll feel jailed, sleepy, lousy & bored.

But when you have your desk setup for work, you’ll eventually start working. Your brain cannot sit idol, it needs something to work on, why not that post from draft?

Your consciousness & your brain are two different things. Understand this basic concept to be more disciplined at whatever you want to do, in context of this post, writing.

#3 Editing

Have no mercy for own work. Remove everything that doesn’t add value. Coming back to what you wrote in the past also helps:

 — @AshittaShah

What seems daunting at the beginning can be easily done if you follow these simple tips to make your blog post highly readable.

On top of that, here are some macro steps to edit your writing like a pro:

• Organizing & structuring: Google has gotten very smart at understanding the search query & hence the intent. I was looking for a quote by Blaise Pascal & this is what I Googled & I found exactly what I was looking for. Organizing & structuring your blog posts logically will help you land in front of the right audience.
• Outlining: This will save a lot of time. At the time of researching, spend some time to add sub-topics you want to cover in the post. This can be questions you want to address (I highly recommend doing this for every post you write) or various points of view you want to include in the post.
• On-page SEO: If you’re writing for a business, it’s very important to optimize for On-Page SEO. When you optimize the post for SEO, you are signaling search engines what your post is all about & hence it can rank your posts for relevant search intent. Never optimize for search queries, optimize for search intent.
• A strong CTA: The whole point of writing a post has to be something. Why would you sit for hours & still make nothing out of it? A strong CTA will ensure you make something out of every post. Make it crystal clear of the action for the reader at the end of the post. This is why you held on to their attention for this long. Make it count.

Bonus & Final thoughts: Change your point of view

See writing as a profession and not a skill. I know this is in contrast to what I began this post with, but hear me out. It will make sense now.

When you see writing as a skill, you’ll be inclined practicing way too much, remember, anything in excess is poison. You will not allow yourself to think professionally & start working like you’d do if writing for a 9 to 5 job.

On the other hand, when you see writing as a profession, you’ll have a mature approach towards it and you’ll give yourself room to grow. There’s science behind it.

You’d practice in an controlled environment & almost nothing is out of your control. Check out this thread I found on Reddit where the user talks about how playing more is making him worse. Furthermore, checkout this & this to understand my point.

You don’t face adverse conditions while practicing, & when you face adverse condition, you outperform yourself, better than you practiced. Without facing adverse condition, you’ll never see yourself outperforming yourself.

If you be honest with yourself, just practicing won’t help. There’s a difference between practicing & performing. If you see writing as a skill, you’ll be very good at practicing. However, if you see writing as a profession, you’ll not only practice well, but you’ll also perform well when it counts.

Did you know: I’ve created this Notion template for those who want to pursue Blogging as a profession. This can be someone who wants to make a career out of blogging or a founder who wants to promote their business by blogging about it.

Yes, You Too Can Become a Great Writer was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.