11 Great Content Writing Skills You Need

Content writing skills can come in handy in a variety of areas. But not everyone is given the gift of writing texts or doesn’t have a creative bone. Sometimes people who have had to write content against their will have difficulty writing good texts. To do this, they turn to writing service. This makes them deal with content writing faster and more successfully.

Today we will talk in detail about what great content writing skills you need.

Content writing skills

Many naively think that it is enough to be relatively literate, to be able to put words into sentences, to own a computer – and voila, you can do content writing. In fact, the skills in this profession are far from the simplest – of course, if we are talking about a strong professional and not an exchange content writer. We will divide them into hard and soft skills.

Hard skills (professional skills)

Ability to solve client problems. As promised, I’ll tell you more. Inexperienced or incompetent content writers are not interested in the client’s business and the purpose of a particular text. They received the task, wrote it, checked the uniqueness, and handed it over to the customer. An experienced specialist, even for writing a short text, will ask the client:

1. 1. What should I write about? If you need to write about a product or service, what it is, what it is for, its pros and cons, its real benefit. If you write about a person – who is this person, why might they be of interest to readers, what important points should be reflected in the text?
   2. For whom do we write? It is important to ask the customer for a portrait of the target audience in order to represent who will read the material. The presentation style, the accents in the text, and the triggers that can hook the target audience depend on this. It’s one thing to write for brutal athletes, another thing – for teenage schoolgirls.
   3. Why do we write? Any text has a goal: to provide useful information, increase brand confidence, sell a product, etc. You need to decide on the main goal and build the entire text based on this.
   4. How do we write? You need to be able to maintain the style and tone of voice that the customer needs. For example, a woman may write an article about men’s cosmetics on behalf of a brutal bearded man, using strong expressions, and a man may maintain an account on behalf of a female psychologist. The main thing is to get used to the “role” and not to fake it.

Thus, a good content writer should be able to conduct a marketing analysis of the client’s business: its target audience, product, or service. It would also be useful to study what direct competitors write and write better than them.

1. Literacy, ability to write. This obvious point, which I put, however, is not the first but the second on the list. Mistakes can be corrected, style can be polished, but if the text does not solve the problem, nothing can be done about it except to rewrite it again.
2. Fact-checking. This is the ability to verify information, separate the wheat from the chaff, detect fakes, and use only reliable sources in texts. Not everyone has this skill, which is why there are so many bad and frankly harmful texts with unverified information in the search results.
3. SEO skills. A good content writer must know the basic principles of text optimization:
   1. Be able to put down meta tags – H1, Title, Description.
   2. Select keywords on your own or on the instructions of an SEO specialist. Properly insert them into the text so that there is no over-spam.
   3. To do relinking to the internal pages of the site, articles, other sections – according to the customer’s requirements specification or independently.

If a content writer knows how to do this, they can safely raise the price tag: optimization work should be paid.

1. Understanding how content management systems (CMS) work: WordPress, OpenCart, Joomla! and so on. Often the customer needs not only to write but also to publish the text. A content writer who knows how to do this earns more.
2. Knowledge and ability to work with programs and services:
   1. That check uniqueness, spelling, SEO parameters of the text, text quality.
   2. That create illustrations, infographics: Photoshop, Canva, Easel.ly, Meme Generator.
   3. That select keywords and Google Keyword Planner.
3. The ability to distribute content through all channels for maximum coverage and referrals. A content writer who knows how to write an announcement of material for social networks, a mailing letter, resize an article for a Telegram channel is worth their weight in gold.
4. Analytics skill. Inexperienced content writers are not interested in the results of the text. They wrote an article – and it doesn’t matter if it received enough views, how many clicks it had, which blog article readers liked and which didn’t. Experienced ones study Google Analytics, analyze statistics and discuss further actions with the client.

Soft skills (personal qualities)

1. Skill to work in a team. It is only in cheap advertising that a content writer sits under a palm tree in splendid isolation and types texts. In fact, if the project is not a one-time but a large one, content writers work in conjunction with editors, SEO specialists, SMM specialists, and marketers. All of them do one task – that the content solves the problem of the customer. If a content writer obviously stands out from the team and spoils well-coordinated work – does not get in touch, breaks deadlines, swears with everyone – such a person is not needed in the team; they only harm.
2. Ability to listen to the customer. This is the ability to take the necessary expertise for an article and get answers to questions, and the ability to find compromises in disputes, and even defend one’s own opinion if the customer does not understand content writing. 
3. Responsibility. Between a brilliant dunce who breaks deadlines but writes well, and a strong middle peasant who never lets anyone down, eventually they will choose the second one. They are more reliable.

These are excellent content writing skills that you need. If you don’t have them, it is better not to get involved in content writing.

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