What Do You Need to Write Good Content?

“Content is King”… almost every freelance writer knows that by heart. Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) know that to get people to visit their blogs (or websites) and keep them coming back, the site or blog has to provide good, high quality, SEO-friendly content. This is why good article writers continue to be in high demand.

Senseless articles with nothing but gazillion keywords in every paragraph do not make the cut anymore. Search engine spiders will not even give you the time of day if your articles contain nothing but words stringed together to incorporate keywords. This is why no matter how hard developers try article writing or spinning software can never take the place of human writers.

So, if you want to carve your own niche as an excellent article writer you will need to brush up on a few things.

1. Your English. The number one requirement of clients is for the writer to have excellent English grammar. Some even want their writers to be Native American English speakers; meaning English should be their first language, not their second or third, even.

Personally, unless the client requires the writer to be living in the United States I would still apply for a job posting that says, “native American English writer preferred”.

2. Your knowledge of current events. Articles should be meaty. At best, they should be relevant. You must be able to relate what you are writing to what you know for sure.

Contrary to popular belief, “current events” is not confined to what’s on the front page of a newspaper. An event can be about anything or anyone. While doing specific research for your topic can serve you in good stead, having the natural inclination to keep abreast with what’s happening around the world will save you the time and effort you would have otherwise spent researching and piecing together what you have found.

A client once asked me to write an article about men cheating on their Hollywood Star-looking wives. Quite a few names were mentioned… Tiger and Elin Woods, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Jude Law and Sienna Miller, etc. Now if I have not been keeping tabs on Hollywood news I would have had to spend a long time researching on the stories of these people and then piece them together to make the article. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.

I knew their stories because I have been reading about them, watching documentaries about them, watching ETC for the latest update on them… I know therefore I can write.

3. Your knowledge of American culture. This is on the assumption that your assignments will be from American clients or about the American lifestyle.

You have to be familiar with jargon or idiomatic expressions so you can use them well in your articles and make yourself sound like an American writer. A few examples would be, “heads up” or “in the zone”.

How will you improve your knowledge of American culture? Well, aside from working in a call center, you can watch American shows or sitcoms and pay attention to how they speak, not to catch their accent but to know how they use idiomatic expressions and jargons, and also to understand American humor.

Unless you are writing a purely technical treatise, you should try to inject some humor into your article to make it a light and enjoyable read. That is what would keep your readers coming back.