On Writing “How to Improve Your Content Writing” for Grow and Convert and Solving an Angling Problem

This post examines what it looks like to write a draft that is not tailored towards your intended audience and possible ways to solve the problem.

To do that, we’re going to discuss the ideation, outline, initial draft, and final draft of How to Improve Your Content Writing, a piece I wrote with Grow and Convert. That piece took me a while to write and went through various iterations, which is why I chose it for my first retrospective.

You don’t necessarily have to read the post I’m discussing before reading this one. I quote the relevant parts below.

The Original Topic and Strategy

The original idea was to write a blog post targeting the keyword “how to become a content writer.”

This idea stemmed from a pain point Grow and Convert was experiencing:

• Grow and Convert looks for skilled, good-fit writers to bring on, as skilled, good-fit writers are needed, so we can take on more accounts.

• To increase our applicant pool and find those good-fit writers, we started to post on job boards.

• These job board posts brought in a lot of applications (150+ a month, sometimes 200+ a month), but the vast majority of them were not good-fit candidates.

I was spending more time reviewing applicants, but we weren’t bringing on as many new writers as expected.

So the problem was: how do we increase the number of qualified candidates who apply to write with Grow and Convert?

This problem mirrors the issues that many of our clients face: they’re not generating enough qualified leads from their marketing efforts. We decided to do what we know works for those companies: invest in pain-point SEO.

After some audience research, our idea was to target the keyword “how to become a content writer.”

Our logic was twofold.

First, some of the best writers at Grow and Convert had discovered G&C as they worked on improving or learning more about their own content writing. They didn’t find G&C via job boards, but rather had read G&C's content before, thought of working with G&C one day, and then applied when they felt qualified.

We know this because of one of the questions we ask new applicants: “Why are you interested in this writing role?” Knowing as much as possible about what drives your audience is key to writing good content. So we went digging.

Here is a good example of the kind of answer we’d see from time to time:

I share this specific answer because it was given to us by a freelance writer who joined G&C in December 2022, taking on one article a month, and then who, by May 2023, became a full-time Content Strategist at Grow and Convert.

In short, this answer came from our ideal candidate. Since we want more writers like that one, let’s try to grow the channel that brought them to us in the first place. This is similar to how I ideate topics with clients at Grow and Convert.

Secondly, there is another type of successful writer at G&C: those who did not have a career in content writing before working with us. They were starting on their content writing journey as a relatively blank slate. Sometimes, they were just recommended to us by other writers and had very few writing samples of their own.

Therefore, the theory was that we could improve the quality of our applications by ranking the agency in search engines for keywords that these two groups were likely to search for.

With a post ranking for a keyword like “how to become a content writer, “ we could target:

• Those just starting out / not sure how to proceed, and

• Those looking to improve their content writing career.

The Initial SERP Analysis for “How to Become a Content Writer”

When conducting my initial SERP analysis for the keyword “how to become a content writer,” I was struck by how the advice in the SERP, when compared to my trajectory and that of my peers, seemed off.

For example:

The featured snippet at the time (this is an old screenshot and the SERP has since changed) led with: Earn a degree. Granted, the post does say it’s optional, but then why the hell is it number one?

Now, I have a bachelor’s degree in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. I value both of those degrees for different reasons, but if I were making a list of 100 things to do to become a content writer, earning a degree wouldn’t make the cut.

Then there was advice like this in the SERP:

This advice isn’t necessarily wrong; it’s just saying the same thing three times, spreading its point so thin that you’re not getting anything of substance. All of that can be condensed into two sentences and then expanded upon to discuss how to ideate and execute a content strategy.

In short, I was frustrated with what I was seeing in the SERP, which was a great sign. When you have a SERP that you find underwhelming or disagree with, that’s an indicator that you have something to add to the conversation.

After ideating for a bit, I drew these conclusions:

• There are several ways to become a content writer, as it's a non-traditional career path.

• Rather than getting stuck in the weeds, I’d focus on how I become a content writer, focusing on the individual, to hopefully get at something universal.

But as I drafted the piece, I realized that writing about how I became a content writer wasn’t likely to be helpful to others. My story, while dramatic and full of ups and downs to me, is pretty straightforward:

• A friend who was an SEO taught me about content marketing at an eCommerce company

• I applied for some freelance writing jobs, most didn’t work out, one did.

• End of post.

So, without even realizing it, in the drafting, I switched the focus of the piece: how my writing improved over time, making the argument that the beginning of my content writing career was unfufilling (and low paying) because my writing was lackluster.

The Initial Draft

Here’s the initial introduction to the article:

When I first started out my career as a freelance content writer, I struggled to find meaningful, well-paying, and consistent work. While I eventually found what I was looking for, it was a messy journey with drastic ups and downs in both job satisfaction and monthly earnings.

Looking back, I can see how my process – and the default process of becoming a content writer – was fundamentally flawed.

My process might look familiar. I applied for content writing jobs on job boards like ProBlogger, Indeed, and iWriter. Any content writing job I could find, as long as it was freelance and remote. I also cold-pitched a few companies who I wanted to write for, trying to show them the value of my services.

But there were some issues with this process.

• The jobs didn't pay well. When I started my freelance content writing career, I wrote blog articles for as little as .02 a word. This meant a 2,000-word article, which could take me 6+ hrs, would get me $40, or under $7 an hour. I did have some higher-paying gigs, but they never seemed to last long. I spent the first six months of my freelance career wondering if I could make a living from content writing.

• The jobs didn't last long. Contracts, if I got them, were short-lived.

• The jobs didn't teach me really anything about being a better content writer. I thought content writing jobs would come with significant feedback. In my experience, however, there was actually a vacuum of feedback – or at least, feedback that seemed to make me a better writer. In fact, as I'll argue below, a lot of the feedback made me a worse writer and I had to "unlearn" some bad habits.

For a while, I struggled to see why I was struggling so much. I had been an in-house content manager at an eCommerce company. I knew how to write. I knew SEO. Why was it so hard to make good money?

Eventually, I would learn the heart of the issue, and it was sobering – I was writing content that didn't bring value to my clients and readers. Or at least, not a lot of value, and that lack of value was made explicit via the content writing process, the lack of long-term commitments, and the low pay.

The argument put forth in this intro is that my writing career started rocky, and I later learned it’s because I wasn’t writing valuable content.

I had set up that thesis because 1) it was true and 2) it makes a good segue into how to write content that delivers value (which puts us in the ballpark of making a G&C pitch, where the content we write delivers real leads to our clients). It also sets the foundation for pitching G&C as a good content writing job that pays more and is more fulfilling.

Then I positioned, after that long intro, the first H2 as “how to become a content writer (tips from real writers)”.

This post is written to target a specific keyword: how to become a content writer. A quick side-note: Curious about AI's influence on content writing? Read our post on how we tried (and failed) to write this article using ChatGPT.

I started by analyzing the SERP of the target keyword "how to become a content writer." I wanted to see what advice was already readily available. But the tips I found online were misguided or even downright bad.

For example, here are 3 tips pulled from top-ranking posts in Google for the keyword "how to become a content writer":

1. Get a degree

2. Have a social media presence

3. Hook readers from the first sentence

Let's break down one of these content writing tips and stack it against real experience.

The focus of this section was on how bad some of the tips were and how they had no part in helping me establish a successful freelance content writing career.

Keep in mind, at this stage, I’m stoked to turn this piece into my editor. I got that first draft high. The words resonated with me. They flowed and they pulled the reader in. I thought this was a strong, compelling piece.

The Angling Problem

Despite my initial positivity, the article had a serious problem.

Devesh, co-founder of Grow and Convert, and Content Strategist for this article, identified the problem: my writing and angling was not fulfilling the search intent of “how to become a content writer.” That is, it was not written for the audience I was tasked to write for.

He reasoned that “how to become a content writer” is a very specific query. Based on the SERP analysis, he maintained that our piece was unlikely to rank, because it didn’t discuss things such as:

• Cold emails

• Job boards

• Internal vs External Content Writing Roles

• Etc

Those are things you have to do to get a job as a content writer. I did them as well, I just don’t have anything unique to say about them, so I avoided writing about them.

But as a result, the piece, as I had written it, said very little about how one becomes a content writer.

He was right. Take a look at where my intro starts.

It begins with the fact that I’m a content writer. I’m not being paid well, sure, and I don’t like life at the moment, but I’m still a content writer.

Without realizing it, I had drafted what was interesting to me (how to improve my writing) and avoided what was not interesting to me (an article about applying for jobs or building a Linkedin presence).

I want to pause here and say this is a common problem and a big one in writing content. Staying focused on the audience is difficult. Often, it involves research and rounds of revision. It’s common for writers to default to what they know, even if what they know is not pertinent to the audience. I had spent a lot of time on the draft above. I had written a whole draft, not just the intro and the sections and while the piece reads fine, it was entirely off.

The Strategic Solution

Devesh could have asked me to rewrite the intro and outline and re-angle the piece to match the search intent.

But instead, he recognized that I was writing something of value, something interesting, and something that could still resonate with our audience. The piece just needed another keyword that could orient us.

This is the key takeaway here: this piece exists as it does because its editor was not so focused on one keyword that he couldn't see the opportunities that existed outside of it.

That’s a key reason that I’m continuously proud of the work we do at Grow and Convert. The topic and the audience are essential; the keyword is just a proxy for those two things. (I can easily contrast this with work I did early on in my career for other content marketing agencies, where strict loyalty to keywords above all else often led pieces into disarray.)

In his research, he found two potential keywords we could target that aligned with what I was writing

1. How to improve your content writing

2. Content writing tips

The New Intro and Outline

Initially, I changed the header while keeping the intro unchanged. I was going for the quick fix, so I still stuck to the same argument: I was dissatisfied with my initial foray into content writing because the jobs paid poorly, they didn’t last long, and they weren’t helping me grow.

Then I went into the tips I’d cover in the piece.

(Side note: You can see that I like long blog intros. I don’t usually get to write them, unless I’m writing for Devesh, so when I do write for Devesh, I tend to go all out.)

But this article wasn’t done yet. The quick fix wasn’t cutting it. Now that we knew the keywords we wanted to target, “how to improve your content writing” and “content writing tips,” I went back to the draft and read through it and optimized each part of it towards that audience.

Finding and Expanding on What’s Valuable

As I wrote and rewrote the piece, I found that the first tip — Create a Better Writing Process — was becoming longer than the others. This made sense. I had more to say here. That tip also ties in nicely with describing the content writing job at Grow and Convert, as we have a fully developed process that we ask writers to use to ideate, outline, and draft good content.

As I revised the piece, it became clear that the focus of the article should be that first tip, not my story, as my story primarily serves to illustrate the importance of that first tip. That led to the final big change and the intro as we see it now:

In this post, we share 7 content writing tips based on 8 years of experience creating content that ranks for bottom-of-the funnel keywords and drives leads for our clients.

Content Writing Tips

1. Use an interview-backed research process

2. Be your own editor

3. Organize your thoughts into bullet points

4. Look for symmetry between your intro and body sections

5. Read your piece only by its headings

6. Get to the value of a sentence faster

7. Write towards the job, not job titles

The first tip — use an interview-backed research process — is the most important on our list.

At Grow and Convert, we interview our clients to 1) generate blog post topics and 2) help us write those posts to deliver value.

Notice the changes:

• The intro leads the actual content writing tips (a significant move, meant to signal to the reader that these aren’t your usual, vague, general tips).

• Tip #1 was changed from “create a better process” -> “Use an interview-backed research process.” This is more concrete and visceral. “Better” is vague and unhelpful.

• I removed the personal narrative; now the piece focuses on the importance of the first tip.

Two Key Takeaways

1. Good writing takes time and trial and error

Here’s a simple tl;dr of the above:

• My first draft for a piece targeting the keyword “how to become a content writer” was not written towards the search intent

• The piece’s editor found a different keyword, “content writing tips,” that worked better.

It’s so obvious and simple, in retrospect. But I spent dozens of hours (if not more) on writing this piece. I can’t speak for how long Devesh spent reviewing it, but I know he’s an insightful reader and a detailed critic (I have the 15-minute Loom video he recorded discussing my initial draft as evidence). So what was elusive becomes, in the end, obvious. That’s another way of saying we wrote ourselves out of a problem and into a solution.

But that takes time, rumination, revision, and back and forth between writer and editor.

While I do think I made some mistakes in my initial planning and outlining of this piece, which led to a longer-than-usual drafting phase, I also think a fair expectation of good content is that it’s going to take time.

2. Don’t be blinded by a keyword and miss the real value of your piece.

We initially targeted a specific keyword based on our research, but as I was drafting, the story kept leaning towards being about “improving content writing” vs “finding a content writing job.”

In short, I didn’t have much of value to tell the world about becoming a content writer. It’s a non-traditional career, and everyone I’ve spoken to has sort of fallen into it randomly. Yet, I had a lot of experience with improving my content writing.

After some discussion, we realized this topic is just as good for our purposes (finding good-fit writers) and then went to find keywords that corresponded to our new topic.