Does My Writing Really Suck?

Yeah, I wouldn't hire you, and I do hire lots of writers.

The work is uninspired and bland.

Granted, you are writing SEO articles, which by their very definition are uninspired and bland, but any good writer can turn that kind of content into something interesting and useful.

Compare yourself to a Cosmopolitan Magazine writer, and you will see the difference.

As a SEO writer, your clients are not focused on telling a story that people want to read. Instead, they are focused on putting words on a page that will trigger a search engine placement, so that makes it harder for you, because you are writing for the wrong customers.

Generally, if you want to increase your earnings as a writer, then you must absolutely market your services to different people. The people who pay a penny a word will always pay a penny a word, no matter how talented you are.

I advise that you take two steps:

1. Improve your story telling, by observing writers who write in your niche and get paid well for their writing... Print magazines is a good place to look for that caliber of writing...

2. Market yourself to people who are willing to pay you more money.

An important consideration in this is to stop selling your services to people who want articles for SEO. Those people don't pay good wages for writers, because they consider writers to be a commodity that they can pay rock-bottom wages.

However, if you find an employer who values the story that you tell, and the subsequent benefits they can receive as a result of your work, in terms of traffic and sales, then you will find yourself working for people who value their writers more than a penny a word.

hi mekap04,

i went through your sample. no, youre not a bad writer at all. in fact, youre a good writer. for one thing, what you say makes perfect sense. for another, there was an inherent logic flow, which is another sign of good writing.

on the neg, what i noticed is your "voice." this is a subtle thing, but i think you know what im talking about. i would read the most professional authors and reviewers in the fields you want to write about.

read their work out loud, then read your work. you will find that your work does not sound quite as "mature" as theirs or as business-like.

that is my only criticism and it is something you can overcome and get paid better. the challenge of developing your "voice" for a given type of material is one every writer faces.

once you have it established, your writing gets much easier as well as better. its almost as if you are "listening" to the voice and writing down what it says rather than having to write everything from scratch and wrestle and tussle with the blank page.

hope this helps, much success, david

If I'm going to pay 0.02-0.03/word, I want seriously interesting and engaging content that I wouldn't be able to produce myself.

That being said, I wouldn't pay the 0.02-0.03 based on the example you've provided.

From what I've seen, your writing is very well structured and well informed, but it just doesn't have that exciting and engaging factor that I'm paying a premium for.

I think the golden rule of marketing is that story telling sells. Look at successful brands like TOMS and method. The story of these brands and what they stand for is why people constantly buy their products.

I try to integrate a story with whatever I do.

Judging by your OP (and the quality of English in the article posted) there is nothing stopping you from charging more.

However you have to go after the right clients.

Those $0.01 per word clients will drop you once your prices rise to 2 or 3 cents. However you may find better clients at 10 cents per word. You may also be able to write more appealing content.

Just a thought.

An excellent reference for writing is the classic and now public domain The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (1918)

You can find a PDF here:

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jms/doc/elos.pdf

Mahlon

I'll not say your article writing sucks but needs little improvements, following is style that most of the writers adopt while writing articles

Title Is Important
Note that the image does not includes the title of your article, all customers want attention grabbing content and the very first attention grabbing element of article is title which you forgot to mention in image of your article.

The Beginning
Every article starts with introduction to what article is about. This is second attention grabbing part, this is where you have to first introduce your article. You managed to introduce article but needs little improvement.

The Body
After the introduction ends, body of article starts, here you must provide some quality information, solve problems of your audience or in some way wake up their emotions. The problem part in your article writing is this section where after sometime your readers may feel to stop reading. Improve on this section.

The End
There are three types of information articles. Which end with
1. Call of action
2. Conclusion
3. No call of action nor conclusion

According to me you article matches second category of information article but you adopted 3rd type to end your article. You provided no proper end to article and reader might feel article someone has posted an article which is incomplete.

Finally there are thousand opinions on how you should write article and writing style, they differ according to targeted audience and niche. Your article is not really targeting any particular group of audience, it appears like information written in academic text books whose sole purpose is to teach not focus problem of people.

My words might sound harsh but you know what TPW said above

its just because you missed above elements in your article.