When someone hires me as a freelance writer, the very first and most obvious thing I will do is make sure that their text is free of typos, obvi. I also make sure they don’t use trite and trendy breevs like obvi or breevs that they will roll their eyes at a month from now.
Then, whether I’m writing something new or reworking something they already wrote, I always double and triple-proof the words to make sure that every punctuation mark is in place and every verb tense matches its noun subject. However, there is a lot more to being a freelance writer than simply making sentences perfect.
When you outsource your content to a freelance writer you should also expect to get:
- A professional, yet personable, and overall clarified voice that has its own unique sound. This is a part of your brand: your business’s personality. It can be the first impression people get of you when they visit your site (coupled with good design—equally important, if not more so).
- Short and sweet sentences and paragraphs that are easy to read on-screen. Writing for the web is much different than writing for any other medium. For many of us, the tendency is to be verbose. Might as well err on the side of too much information, right? Au contraire. Lots of words overwhelm a busy reader trying to multi-task on his iPhone in line at the grocery store, or quick-Googling her way through a search for a product or service. Have you ever had the experience of opening an email, only to be turned off by its length so that you put it aside for later—aka never? The art of good business writing is to say what you need to say in as few words as possible.
- Formatted copy. Key ideas should be pulled out and formatted to draw attention to themselves so that a reader scanning the page can get the gist right away. Pull quotes and headlines make on-screen reading so much easier. But they have to be formatted well. A professional has an intuitive sense of where headline breaks should be.
- SEO keywords used impeccably so that search engines will hone right in on you, but your copy will still sound friendly and natural—not like it was written by or for robots. To see what I mean, google “freelance writers San Francisco.” My web site—Outside Eye Consulting—should come up on the first page. There are a lot of freelance writers in San Francisco with web sites, so this was no small feat! I accomplished this coup with a relentless approach to friendly SEO writing, both in the code of my site—which the reader can’t see—and in the actual words on the site, I am strategic about my wording so that my future clients can always find me easily.
All of this aside, perfect copy with impeccable grammar is certainly the most important thing I do as a freelance writer. Here’s why: because your reader, even if he or she doesn’t consciously realize it, judges you when you make mistakes. If your web site doesn’t read smoothly and perfectly, it says something about your attention to detail. It’s kind of like when you have a really nice outfit on, but your thong is sticking out. Or open-toed shoes with a bad pedicure. Not classy.
