Where To Begin When It’s Time To Edit Your Content

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If you can’t make it memorable, it’s not going to work. That’s the way it is. There’s little excuse for publishing uninspiring content with diluted value, on the grounds of issues relating to overcoming perfectionism. An article that is specifically crafted to work for what you do will point out what makes your business valuable. Such content is clear, educational and accurate. You can’t throw away aspects that make it memorable, and expect it to yield results.

Though memorable content does not automatically lead to conversion, forgettable articles - ones you’ve nevertheless spent a considerable amount of energy and time on - have much less impact in making customers want to buy from you. Memorable write-ups have a powerful effect on an audience, so when it’s time to make a purchase on something relating to your service, you are the first to be considered.

So, when you are “finished” writing, and preparing to edit your article to make it stand out - where do you start? Here are seven content editing tactics to take your article and make it clear, concise and memorable.

1. Find Your Goal

You should have a clear reason for publishing the content. It should point to how the article affects your business and the audience you intend it for. Though this statement won’t be included in your piece, it gives focus and direction to your communication. Your goal should be clear in your introduction. This is your chance to answer questions your readers may have. Satisfying these right from the start is a good way to begin.

Giving a taste of what to expect gives readers the assurance they are in the right place, and are going to find your article informative and educational. Hopefully, the other aspects of the article yet to be read will provide inspiring details that your readers will appreciate spending time on.

2. Style Your Message

With a goal in mind for the piece of content you intend on creating, keep in mind that others in a similar niche area also have the same goal for their content creation. There’s no problem with that. It should motivate you to only create content that is specific to you. Your unique writing and business style should be evident within it, making you stand apart from your competitors.

Are there topics in your niche that are difficult for most to understand, but you have a knack for presenting them? Perhaps you’ve spent more time than your competition gaining mastery on an unusual topic, and have a way to share it in an original way. This is where you distinguish yourself from the rest.

Use a creative delivery to show your visitors why your site should be their first stop for such information. You should focus on your target audience as those you need to satisfy in areas other websites have failed - that is what can truly be considered memorable content. This is different, because it’s not only educational but also an entertaining approach to passing on your message.

3. Clean up Text with No Value

It is that some readers won’t agree with your opinion, or may just not like your approach and writing style. You don’t need to concern yourself with these people. You need to avoid dumbing your content down to appease the few, as it will negatively affect your readers that are reasonable, committed and are viable prospects.

However, if your style and tone doesn’t go down well with your genuine and loyal readers, that’s when you should take a hard look at it and make changes. Never waste your target audience’s time.

To the layman, areas of text that have no value may appear to be customized parts of your texts. To the professional, they are just a trivial mess of cluttered words and jargon. Editing your content gives you the opportunity to retain the good, and throw away the unnecessary.

4. Weed Out the Unnecessary Parts

Context is massive when it is time to identify text that lacks value. The point is to know when the information you’re delivering has gone astray from the original post. The inclusion of anecdotes, no matter how hilarious or exciting they might be, may not fit properly.

You can start writing your articles with a section at the bottom for all the unnecessary parts you’ve cut out. You may find inspiration to craft another amazing, separate topic later, even if these cut parts are not conducive to your content now.

5. Merge Closely Related Sentences

When you get truly submerged in your content writing, you’ll find it easy to produce a highly informative, educational piece of writing with a lot of good points. However, editors pause when they find two or more sentences expressing the same message.

The words may not be the same, but the meaning and intention is hardly different from each other. Editors will quickly ring the bell to signal “time wastage.” When you are doing your own editing, it takes a lot more practice to be able to identify your own repetitions in an article.

Reverse proofreading - working through your article from the end to the beginning - can do the trick. This makes you evaluate your words from different angles, and makes errors stand out.

6. Eliminate Crutch Words

When editing, you’ll often discover there are some words you use too often. These words may convey the meaning they are intended to, but too many of them can disrupt the flow in your article, especially if they’re repeated time and time again. Go through the article thoroughly to replace or remove some of the words. You can use your writing program’s thesaurus feature to help you out, and suggest synonyms to replace these words.

7. Identify Troubled Words

Troubled words are words that are misspelled when you mean something that sounds the same. Yours can be “whether” when you mean to write “weather.” For some people it’s “its”. If you already know what some of your troubled words are, use your word processor’s review features to search for them, and check if the right variation is being used in that context. If you are not sure which one is appropriate, you can fall back to Google for help. A simple search can answer these kinds of queries most of the time.

Writing can be powerful when you know what it takes to churn out quality content in the shortest possible time. No matter how careful you may be at the writing stage, appropriate editing is absolutely necessary to improve the quality of your article. By editing your work, you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. If you take on the points raised in the above guide for your editing practices, you should have no problem turning out well-written, memorable content that will make your readers come back for more.

Got more tips on where to begin with content editing? It would be great to hear from you! Share with us via the comment section below.

Publicado 27 noviembre, 2017

NickGolding

Entrepreneur & Creator

Nick is the Entrepreneur Correspondent for Freelancer.com. He is based in Sydney, NYC, & London. His life consists of frequent flyer points.

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