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The term content is widely used to describe anything created for viewing/reading by an online audience. If you love writing and researching on various topic then the job of a content writer is the one you should seriously consider. Writing interesting and impressive content (articles that are published online), is not a job for everyone. If you are good at it, it can turn out to be a very well-paying job. For women, in particular, this profession offers the liberty to be at home with your family and do freelance content writing work.A freelancer is usually paid per article created and is free to work anywhere as long as the article or content is delivered as per the deadline. She is not employed on a full-time basis, does not have fixed work hours or location and also does not draw a salary.
To understand in detail about what a content writer's job entails, we spoke to Aswathi, who works as full-time content writer at Capillary Technologies. The company works for dozens of clients from different industries. She finds the work quite challenging and exciting at the same time.
Read on to know what her job demands on a daily basis.
What is interesting about the job of a content writer?
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What does a typical day in a content writer’s life look like?
As per statistics, 24% of full-time content writers/ freelance writers work for at least 25 hours a week. Their work includes a lot of reading up, ideation, creating content strategies to market a product/service and more. To understand the job in greater detail, read Aswathi's description of a typical day in her life:
1.In the morning, she is involved in planning out the work to be done for the rest of the day. Her day planner consists of the following information- number of articles to be written in the day per client, number of social media posts, e mails, on-page content pieces, etc. to be written in the day.
- Before starting to make the copy of an article, she usually reads up about the topic across various sources on the internet in order to collect ideas. Following this, she creates a basic skeleton of the article, by putting down ideas in the order in which the article should flow. After she is convinced with the information that she wants to include, she begins to create the final copy or text.
3.The next type of content that she deals with, is social media content. These are content pieces which are very short in length, but instantly grab the reader's attention.
4.Her job as a content writer also entails generating Search engine optimized content or content that is formatted in such a way that search engines can find it and show it in the results page when the user asks a query. This is nothing but content that is composed of the right set of keywords, and written in a way so that it is optimized well for the search engine (like Google). Very precise style of writing and right structuring of the article is paramount for SEO content to work.She does some analysis and research to find the correct keywords that have to be included in the content. The website content that is written is mostly SEO optimized. Hence, these terms can be used alternatively.
5.The easier part of Aswathi's job as content writer is creating e-mails, SMS content and ad copy or text. These require to be created only using very few words as they need to impart the information as soon as the reader looks at the copy.
6.Finally, editing and proofreading are the last activities shedoes, so that her work does not get published with grammatical or spelling errors. There are tools like Grammarly which will help her correct such errors as and when she makes them, during the course of writing.
On Glow & Lovely Careers (formerly known as Fair & Lovely Career Foundation), you can find details regarding the educational path or steps to be taken to achieve your dream of becoming a content writer. The site also offers a number of online courses, such as the ones on English grammar, effective communication skills and more to help you become better in English.
To sum up, the day of a content writer involves a lot of research work, writing and structuring of content. She generally has to design her articles and creative copy in such a way that a user or potential customer would be driven to buy a certain product/ service by reading her article or seeing her ad.