Writing is a highly specialized skill. Master craftspeople take years to develop these skills, and they don’t give their work away for pennies. Upwork and other freelancing platforms have caused many to believe that all content is basically equal, and cheap. If you’ve ever tried to build organic SEO and a blog audience from scratch, you know that this is bunk.
Writing for Your Target Audience
Unless you’re marketing a commodity product that everyone uses, like toilet paper, your content requires an author who is in the community you’re aiming for. They need to understand what moves/entices/interests your audience or they won’t be able to appeal to them. They need to be able to speak (in written form) in a way that legitimizes their content to that specific audience. The more sophisticated your audience, the more highly skilled the writer needed, the more you should value the content.
Jacks of All Trades Master None
One indicator that your content strategy will fail is if the entire process falls to one individual. Can you be a great content strategist, digital marketer, community manager, and content creator at the same time? No. There just isn’t enough time to do all of them well and produce quality content at the cadence necessary to hold an audience.
Creating great, targeted content takes time – time to research, time to write, and time to edit, repeatedly. Great content is succinct and clear, and that takes time to work.
So the writer who breeds
Dr. Seuss
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.
And, it is an impossible thing to edit yourself well; your mind tricks your eyes into seeing what is supposed to be there, and mistakes are overlooked. Great writing goes through a process, and that process requires a team of professionals. Guess what that means? Great writing costs money.
There is a Payoff
Think of writing as an investment. Great pieces of content stand the test of time in most circumstances. The price you pay today for a solid piece will bring you traffic now and in the future if it’s correctly targeting your audience, of interest to them, and written in a language they appreciate.
Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash