If you are a writer who is passionate about delivering meaningful content, then I am sure you must have often come across the rare occasions of higher payouts. It surely would have boiled your blood. Despite having the right education, the right experience and the right contacts you often find yourself in the zone of underpaid employment. In short – Being an underpaid writer is a painful experience.
The imbalance between talented writers and the true value that they deserve is not hidden. It is highly annoying to be paid in peanuts. But what is more irking is to see heaps of mediocrity in content writing that exists without an ounce of shame. There are people who call themselves “writers” and are barely able to complete a paragraph without grammatical errors. There are big IT firms, multi-faceted digital marketing agencies that don’t mind having average content being produced. They just blatantly put it out there just because they don’t want to spend more time and money on good content. Therefore, It is painful to see skilled writers like you getting paid less, or maybe getting nothing at all.
We believe that good writers like you who are committed to their craft should be compensated fairly. Since we understand the endeavours that you put in and the struggle that you go through while providing quality content writing, we want to give certain tips that you can use to get what you truly deserve.
Here Is What You Should Do If You Are an Underpaid Writer
1. Stop Overthinking
If you are paid less for what you do, you can undermine your confidence level further by doubting your capabilities. You should completely put a full stop to questions like:
Am I good enough?
There are so many good writers out there. Why would they choose me?
Why can’t I do this?
Hence, these statements are up to no good and all they can do is to deter your fighting spirit. So if you have to be on the top of your game, then you need to project yourself as someone who is not only confident about his/her skills but also proud of them.
2. Don’t Play It Safe
What I am going to talk here is very much linked to the first point. Just because “everyone” likes a particular content type or a particular content piece is the “popular” choice, you should not limit yourself to writing what “everyone will like or what is accepted in the industries. I mean, I am not asking you to be a rebel. I am just asking you to have faith in your creativity and ability to take risks. You should not suppress the “creative thinker” in you because of the fear of rejection or because of the possibility of your content being controversial. Therefore, you should be able to pen down your honest most thoughts. This is how you will become a noticeable writer, who would be revered and valued for speaking his/her mind out.
3. Don’t Accept Low Rates
This is where you go wrong in establishing your value amongst your peers and potential clients. Just because you are at the starting point of your career or you want to please your clients, you can’t accept a price that does nothing to justify your quality of work. You know what is worse than getting paid less. It is “Quoting your priceless”. You need to build your portfolio and writing career in a way such that where you really believe that time is money and that your time is valuable. At that stage, you will have the sheer confidence of asking what you deserve. And believe you me, you will surely get that.
4. Start Upgrading Yourselves
Building your skill set at any point in life is a good idea. Whether it’s your apprehension about using social media or it’s your low frequency of writing, you need to improve on them all to sustain in the market and ofcourse establish your real worth. Staying abreast of what is happening in the world of writing is crucial for you to trod ahead in the journey of right pay. Building your skills is not only a resume-booster; it will also position you for personal and professional opportunities.
5. Have a Good Mix of Creativity and Business Strategy
I understand that you are a writer, and the creative streak in you prods you to “innovate” and “imagine”. But for you to be financially stable and get what you deserve, you need to attach a business value to your creativity. You need to be very well aware of:
The services you are going to offer
To whom you will offer your services
Your experience
The value of your time
The value you provide to your customers.
Ultimately, the answers to these questions will become the foundation of your business plan, which is your roadmap to becoming a well-paid writer. So, with this, I have arrived at the conclusion of the article which is” as a writer you should never fail to assess your true value, and you should keep honing your skillsets to establish yourself as an entity or a brand that is irreplaceable.”
While we would want you to keep a note of those above tips, we would also like to enlighten you with the fact that we at WittyPen are always on the lookout for writers who provide quality content writing.
We make sure that the writers who contribute to making our platform even better should never be valued lesser than what they deserve. So, if you think, you can be a valuable addition to the team and you don’t want to be an underpaid writer, then you can apply at our platform.
All great writers, whether freelance content writers, or otherwise are often caught up in the cobweb of insecurities and underconfidence. We are drawn towards negative thinking when we write something and we keep asking ourselves questions like
Are we any good?
What is it that we lack to be the best writer?
Will my work be accepted ever? Should I just stop writing because of the fierce competition?
These pessimistic thoughts and insecurities will do us no good if our aim is to become the best writer and have people read your writing while beating the rest. What can help you and I is some optimism, self-confidence, and right knowledge.
Become the best writer. Read below to know how.
We did a little bit of homework on how to become the best writer in the industry. And we would love to share it with you as well,so you can become a better writer.
Read
To be the best at writing, you must read and get educated all the time.There is no “right time to learn. You should learn all the time. Learning combined with your writing skills will help you project yourself as a skilled and a knowledgeable writer in your domain.
Store Ideas
Good ideas are for the keeps. Those ideas can be your creation or they could be inspired from somewhere. But collecting them is the key. Gather your inputs at one place and refer to them as and when you require. A great tool for collecting your resources is Evernote.
Keep Writing
The saying “Practice makes you perfect” holds true if you want to be a good writer. Writing is a skill, and like any other skill, you have to practice it to get better. Write everyday,every week, improve your writingskills, write stuff for yourself, write for a blog, write for other publications. Write just to write, and have a blast doing it. It gets easier after awhile if you practice a lot.
Experiment
It is great to look up to the maestros in the field for inspiration. But it is greater when you come up with some brilliant ideas of your own. Give your reader a new piece of writing. Experiment with your style of writing, your tone, your mechanics, your themes. Try out new words. Invent new words. Experimentalize everything. And see what works, and toss out what doesn’t.This will help you in better writing and also in developing a sense of confidence in your own ideas.
Write. Erase. Rewrite.
This is a daunting task, but an important one too. Stephen King calls this killing your darlings.
It sure does feel that way, but like we mentioned above, it is important and the many writers do it too. Rewriting will help you to be concise and will help you to filter the best of your content. In simple words, it gives the ever-needed finish to your work and makes it appear more appealing.
Get Regular Feedbacks.
A good writer accepts criticism.To get a better perspective on your content piece, and for better writing, you should show it to others to get a review. These “others” need to be good writers and editors who can give an honest feedback that lacks bias. And on your part, you need to be a good listener to the criticism and accept it graciously without being defensive. This will only help you in becoming better than the rest and the best at your work.
The bottom line is we need you, the writer, to be good. Actually the best. This is crucial at a time when you are not the only one with the voice, and for your voice to be heard, it needs to not too loud, not too mellow, just perfect. Start writing!
These were tips to become best writer. We hope that you use these insights to get the most out of your writing. We at WittyPen also ensure that the writers deliver the best of their abilities, and if you feel that you have what it takes to be the best writer in the industry, then please register with us.
Content is king
Content is everything for online marketing and marketers like you and I are looking out to create fantastic content every day. Because we put in so many efforts and so much time, we expect outcomes that make our time and efforts spent worthwhile. That is why most of the marketers including me do not only rely on the traditional content discovery engines. Instead, we have befriended a variety of other content discovery tools.
Keep reading to know about them…
The New-Age Content Discovery Tools
There is a wide array of real-time content discovery tools that help in fetching great content, that can be shared, curated and repurposed. Since these tools have a “social” angle to them, therefore they will be quite handy for marketers like you. You will be able to identify trending content aligned with topics or entities you are tracking. You will be amongst the first few people to share that content and also add to the ongoing conversation. This content will be extremely valuable to both your existing and potential users.
We will talk about some of the best content discovery tools as content marketing resources through this infographic.
While you discover great content using these content discovery tools, make sure that you have a documented content strategy and you stock it properly in an editorial calendar. To know how to make one click on this Editorial Calendar.
In today’s day, Social media has taken an irreplaceable spot in our lives and is an indispensable element to our marketing. Marketers, entrepreneurs, small startups, media and advertising companies day in and day out employ strategies of social media for business. In this article, we will talk about the top social media marketing myths 2018. Read below to understand better. A research by Snapapp says that 94% of B2B marketers use Linkedin as part of their content strategy. Other widely used platforms include Twitter(87%), Facebook(84%), YouTube(74%) and Google+(62%).
Image Source: i.pinimg.com
But this enormous popularity of social media has a flipside too. Social media has been more hyped and over-used than ever and instead of prioritizing on practical measures, real returns, and limitations of the strategy, many of us have declared social media marketing as a magic wand that gives higher visibility to our brand. The reality is, that social media requires a lot of hard work, research and analysis, and this like any other marketing strategy can’t be learnt in a day’s time. Hence, I would like to start by addressing some common social media marketing myths 2018 that most of us time and again use.
Social Media Marketing Myths
1. Let’s not get personal with Social Media
Agreed that you have a brand to run that must resonate with the thought processes of your audiences, but that does not mean that you can’t publish content that reflects your brand’s persona. You should not hesitate in showcasing your brand’s humour, people that work at your company and links to news content that “you” find interesting. This makes you stand out as a brand and underpins your identity in the eyes of your audience.
Image Source: millwardbrown.com
2. Hashtag it is!
The purpose of hashtags is that they bring together common conversation threads. They have secured a popular spot on most of the social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can use it to get indexed by the social network and it becomes discoverable by other users. But you can’t leverage them to turn your marketing dreams into reality. Including hashtags everywhere spoils the purpose and makes you look too desperate.
3. Social media is just about brand awareness and engagement
Sure, Social Media creates awareness and establishes a good identity for your brand. But it is also capable of doing much more than that. Social media drives customers to your platform and eventually conversions. To convince you, I have some statistics from Hubspot right here:
Companies that use Twitter average 2X more leads than those that don’t.
Companies with 1000+ more Twitter followers get 6X more traffic.
45% of marketers note social media has a below average cost-per-lead compared to other channels.
62% of companies using LinkedIn for marketing have acquired a customer from it.
52% of companies using Facebook for marketing have acquired a customer from it.
44 % of companies using Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer from it.
Also, another research by Hubspot says that 61% Marketers in the US rely on Social Media for generation of leads.
Image Source: hubspot.com
4. Scheduled posts will do my job
There are many tools out there that help you in posting on social media. The tools are great as they save time and especially when you have too many tasks at hand or on weekends when you are away from your office. However, you should not use them as a substitute for posting in real-time. It is called social media for a reason. You “need” to socialize with your customers or followers, and for which there has to be a two-way conversation.
5. Good content means good traffic
Good content does attract customers, but only if they know about it. You can’t just create great content and sit in a corner waiting for the customers to visit your website. The need of the hour is to be more practical here, rather than imagining an ideal scenario. You are not the only “one” producing good content, and even if your content is capable of making you a differentiator, your customers probably don’t know about it. So distributing the content through right media is important as that gives the initial push. Once they come across the great content that you serve, they will automatically press the share button. And then your work is “actually” considered done.
6. Evergreen content is good enough as I don’t have time to produce new content
Social media moves at a great pace. Content is updated every second on the platforms. And this might make you feel that you do not have enough time or resources to produce fresh content every day. You might want to repurpose content or use your “evergreen” content to fight this. This is a good route to take sometimes, but not always. You can’t share the exact same content every time because this would make you lose a substantial chunk of your user base. Fresh content makes your audience stay tuned to your product and they look forward to your upcoming content. You need to figure out time and manage resources to keep your audiences engaged by providing a good balance of fresh, repurposed and curated content.
7. More followers means a successful marketing strategy
Getting likes is an accomplishment for your brand. But it is not the only parameter for measuring the success of your content marketing strategy. It is one of the surface-level metrics that somewhat helps you in assessing the effectiveness of your campaign. Your plan of action should not be to blindly chase your followers. These people might not even care about your brand and would not even end up purchasing anything from you. So, Instead of the above, your plan should be focused on more substantial actions by your followers such as clicks or their on-site behaviour. The quality of your followers can be evaluated through their engagement with your content. Few interested and loyal customers are worth more than 100 indifferent users, so it is important for you to not get lost in the number game.
8. Social Media Marketing Is Free
The social media networks are free of cost when it comes to logging in and this makes them a great tool to use for organic marketing. However, this aspect of social media should not let you take it for granted. Just like any other marketing channel, you need to invest in time and resources to get the best out of this platform. The return of investment matches your expectations and sometimes surpasses them too when you put in the right advertisement efforts. Have a look at the statistic that showcases how effective the social media platforms are in delivering the right ROI’s
With this, I have come to the end of the article. I hope that I have been able to give you have a clearer view on social media marketing myths 2018. Social media marketing is fruitful and worthwhile when you approach it smartly along with a content marketing plan. So do it the right way, guys!
Are you a content marketer who is super serious about making your brand omnipresent in the market?
If yes, then you must be well-versed with the fact that as a content marketer, it is important for you to have content being pushed out every day It is a fact that your audiences have a short brand recall and hence for them to imbibe your brands’ persona permanently in their minds. Therefore, it is a mandate that they see your brand more frequently. Doing this becomes incredibly efficient once you have a good content marketing calendar in place.
Having a good calendar means that you have a regular flow of content that gets pushed out to your audience This also means that you do not have to scratch your head every day to think about new content. So, a good content marketing calendar means that you as a content marketer have a focused goal with some really well-aligned strategies. This does not let you give an average content piece due to the pressure of creating something new every day. Amidst the chaotic business decisions and impulsive deadlines, a calendar is a sigh of relief for you marketers that will help you divide the sea of unmanageable content into smaller manageable chunks.
If you’re still not sold on the benefits of using content marketing calendars, keep in mind that traditional print publications have been using editorial calendars since many, many years to help them define and visualize their plans for content. Our aim here is to help you create an editorial calendar and ensure you stick to it.
How to Go About Creating a Good Editorial Content Marketing Calendar?
There are certain steps that you must take to make a good editorial calendar. They are as follows:-
Set up a clear objective for your calendar
Deciding the content types
Choosing the right tool.
Understanding your abilities and limitations
Automating tasks that take up a lot of your time
Reviewing the calendar
Storing all your content ideas
Coordinating with the team to meet deadlines
For your better understanding, I am elaborating all of these points one by one.
1. Setting up a clear objective for your calendar
Before you begin the process of creating a calendar, have an objective defined in your mind. You need to know what exactly are you trying to communicate to your audience. Are you trying to position yourself as an expert in your industry or are you trying to sell something to a very specific set of audiences?Some other goals could be tips that you want to give away to improve processes, solutions for problems, new updates about the product or services, case studies about your successful clients, failures or achievements. When your objective is set, you need to create a comprehensive list of ideas, content types and also map them to the days when you want to deliver them. Analytics from social media and your product website will help you in deciding the right content and the right date. Certain kinds of posts, or certain dates where your audiences show maximum engagement could help you in planning what to post and when to post.
2. Deciding the content types
There could be several types of content that you can use to fill up your calendar. Some of them are:-
Lists – This is a classic for marketers, magazines, and sites like Buzzfeed pull together content in the form of a list . They are very effective especially when applied to blog posts. Some of the most popular content on the Convince & Convert blog is in the form of lists posts. One of the very good examples is their list called “25 ways to create shareable content”.
Questions and Answers – These are very popular. You can see Google’s Matt Cutts using many formats of Question and answers. Matt reads through Google users questions and simply answers them through Google’s perspective.
Case Studies – Through these, you can very easily explain how you have solved the problems of your customers in the past. This helps your current or potential customers to trust your product or services.
Product Review -Do a review of your product, telling your audience how it’s helped you solve your challenges, and how you think it’ll help them out too. You can start this by asking an influencer who’s also a customer of yours to help you out by reviewing your product or service.Here is how companies use examples of customer reviews in content marketing.
Testimonials – Here a specific customer of yours tells his or her story directly from their perspective. This is the word of mouth that you can use to garner interest in your company, products, or services.
There are many other content types that you can fit in your calendar such as company news, opinions and rants, testimonials, roundups, book reviews, personal stories, successes and achievements, facts and research, statistics, why’s and how-tos etc.
3.Choose the right tool
To make things easier for you, there are innumerable tools out there that can help you make and plan your editorial calendar well. However, it is very important to choose the right tool because not every tool will suit your unique requirements.
Coschedule: This is the first one on the list, and also a very easy one. It is a collaborative tool and lets you plan and publish content at ease with its drag and drop features. Whether you are a big group of content hustlers or you are just a one man/woman army, this tool is handy in both the cases. With this super flexible helping hand you can easily pre-plan your editorial calendar, organize information on posts and save a great deal of time as well. Trello: This has very basic boards that allow you to drag and drop ideas for your editorial calendar into different lists and organize content effortlessly. Knowing this tool inside out is not rocket science, and whether you are a team of creative geniuses or a solo marketer, this tool helps you in various ways without any complex training. You do not have to worry about going back and forth to check your plan of action as you can seamlessly sync your editorial calendar across all your devices. So basically, Trello has your back even when you are on the go. Google Sheets: This comes absolutely free of cost and is accessible on all your devices through cloud storage. This might require more time for setting up as compared to other tools, however, a lot of marketers choose this because of its flexibility. You can sync due dates with your google calendar using this tool.
To not succumb to stress, it is important to get a reality check done. Your content could be in numerous formats such as videos, audio, blogs, graphics etc. What is most important is to be certain of how much of it all is achievable for you in a specific timeframe. You should never over or under commit. If you over-commit then you would end up losing and what would win is an average content. If you under-commit, then again the purpose of the calendar remains futile. You would not be producing as much of content as you should. Make use of content marketing resources and use AI in content marketing. Even after committing just right, there might be instances where you are not able to meet your deadlines. Now, that is a factor of luck and unfavorable circumstances that you cannot possibly govern.
Hence, such situations should not deter you from abiding by the schedule of your calendar. Working some extra hours to get back on track. You can start being more efficient by clubbing your content creation into different activities. As you start to get a better understanding of the demands of each activity in your content creation process, you’ll be able to find ways to become more productive. Here are a few content creation activities to get you started:
Research
Drafting
Graphics and images
SEO
Proofing
Promotion
5.Automating tasks that take up a lot of your time
You can save a lot of your time by automating content creation and content promotion activities. For example, you can schedule your one-off tweets and Facebook updates through Hootsuite or Buffer. You can separately mark the content that you want to automate on your calendar along with setting an hour each week to schedule this content. These tools will take care of it and will allow you to be more efficient. Coschedule is very good with automating content promotion and also has inbuilt analytics that allows you to see the social media reach of all your content. New York Times bestselling author of Platform, Michael Hyatt cites the premium WordPress plugin, Coschedule as one of his major productivity breakthroughs in recent years. He uses CoSchedule to post all his blog posts on social media and given how much time it frees up, it is a bargain at $10 per month.
6.Reviewing the calendar
While your primary task is to create the content calendar, there are certain secondary tasks as well that you need to keep an eye on. You need to time and again look at the calendar to make sure there are no gaps left. You need to double-check on the type of content to make sure that whatever is being pushed out is not just pushed out for the sake of it. The sole purpose of content being pushed out is to meet the needs of your audiences and that should always be your first priority. You also need to ensure that the content is not over-populating or under-populating the calendar. It should be evenly distributed and it should be a mix rather than redundant content that gets onto the nerve of your audiences.
7. Storing all your content ideas
Keep a place where you can gather all your content ideas that occur to you. This will help you in managing your editorial calendar better.
8. Coordinating with the team to meet deadlines
Although it is you who has crafted this calendar, I am certain that there are tasks that are allotted to everyone to make this strategy work.So it is important that you connect with your team at regular intervals to get perspective on ideas, give updates and stay up-to-date and not miss deadlines. A successful calendar is defined by collaborative efforts and teamwork. Creating and managing content strategy is a whale of a task, but it becomes much easier when a calendar is mapped out that helps you stick to your tasks, be informed of your co-workers’ task, stay aligned to the broader goal and eventually deliver success. I hope that this article has helped you understand the importance of an editorial calendar in a content marketers journey. I am also attaching the content marketing editorial calendar template that we use at Wittypen. You can download it by clicking here: https://goo.gl/MUJiNE I wish you all the best in creating your first editorial content marketing calendar.
