For the Love of Writing (and making dreams come true)

The journey of a writer to content writer.

“Writing is about breathing life into something and then working to make sure that life becomes something beautiful.”

~ Jonathan Morrow

Go to google.com.

Type “How to write” in that rectangular magic box.

Go Ahead! Give it a try…

You will get an astounding number of over 1,29,00,00,000 answers before you can blink.

Well it’s not that big of a deal actually. (Web today is crawling with content and preachers.) The BIG DEAL is that my editor almost had a seizure when he read the first line of this post.

Go to google.com – “We’ll lose half our visitors right then and there,” he said. The SEO expert agreed.

The thing is, I didn’t write this post for those lost visitors. I didn’t write this post to post content. I wrote this post for you- and for the love of writing.

The dream

I’ve been writing for past 7 years. Initially it was just random thoughts, more like putting my very personal Eureka moments to paper; there they lie to this day resting in peace. As time went by, writing became more and more frequent for me, in a way, it sort of became my very best friend. Writing allowed me to create whole new worlds, venture into territories none dared to enter, and boldly explore the unexplored. Over the period of time I realized that writing is something I wanted to do in life.

And a dream took roots.

There’s this amazing thing about dreams. Once you’ve had a dream, you can’t go back to the moment when it didn’t exist. It transforms who you are, and gives a whole new meaning to your life. But wait. Is there a catch?

Oh yes!

Ever heard of real world? Well that’s where we live. And it’s a prohibited country for dreamers.

Just kidding!

The real problem is that reality often clouds our imagination, and that’s when we start losing our dreams. And the same thing happened with me.

And the challenge begins

Writing for myself was easy; starting out as a professional writer was tough. I had to think in terms of the value it will create. Researching vigorously about best content writing techniques and digital marketing methodologies over the past few weeks, I was literally drowning myself with “How tos…” Blogs after blogs, guides after guides my quest continued. Blogs longer than 1000 words enjoyed maximum shares. Including internal links is good for decreasing bounce rates. Write catchy headlines. Keep content relevant to the title. And on and on it went.

Marketing was the whole different fight. ROI, SOE, Traffic, Metrics, Analytics, Editorial calendars, Strategies, Leads, Engagement, Conversions… And the list is basically endless.

It’s enough to drive anyone crazy.

I managed to keep my sanity, but somehow I kept missing the message being repeated over and over again. It was right there in front of my eyes from the very start.

We write for real people. And we market to real people.

Being a Content Writer

In the end, being a content writer is not that different from being a writer.

We write for people. We market to people.

And people are people.

People are smart. They enjoy a good laugh. And they love when you touch that cord within them which makes them feel more human.

(Aren’t these the same things a writer experiences while writing? Feeling this way is what motivates a writer to write in the first place. Isn’t this what the love of writing brings to a writer?)

Your content is good when it follows certain standard guidelines. But your content is great when it creates real value for real people. And the amazing thing is, once you forget about the guidelines, and write with the intent of creating value, it will automatically turn out just right. When I sit down to write, I start thinking like a reader. I think of a knowledge gap I want to fill. I search if that piece of information is already available out there. If yes, then I try to compose it in a way which adds value, which is in some way better than what already exists. And in the end when I read it and feel like that this reading was not a waste of my time, I got something good out of it, and I would want to share it with other people, only then do I stop. And it turns out, the content automatically follows most of the stated guidelines.

It basically comes down to a very simple fact… When you write for the love of writing, it will definitely have value.