10 Business Writing Best Practices That Will Improve Your Writing Faster
The Dominant Business Writing Methods You Can Apply Today to Improve Your Freelance Writing Skills
What if I told you that ten fantastic business writing tips would help you improve your freelance writing skills fast? Would you buy the idea? Before you answer, please, consider the following questions:
- How excellent is your business writing skills?
- Why is your freelance writing business, not picking up?
- Why have your clients refused to call you up for another gig since you submitted your first article?
Considering the above questions (especially number three), you can see that a lot is going on here. What is happening? Let us break it down a little. You got a new client — your first writing job, and your client tells you that he wants you to publish twelve blog posts per month on his site.
But after your first submission, he paid you and didn’t call you up to complete the project. Then, you are wondering, what has happened? Why didn’t he call me back? There is a lot to it, but the obvious is that he was not impressed with your writing — the first impression matters.
That is why you need to upgrade your game to stay in business. As a consequence;
What are the top business writing tips that you can apply today to boost your freelance writing skills?
The 10 Business Writing Tips That Will Boost Your Writing Skills and Grow Your Freelance Business
In this article, we have assembled ten actionable steps that will help you enhance your business writing abilities.
1. Understand Your Buyer Persona
To have success in your business writing endeavors, you have to understand your client’s buyer persona. And to be able to follow your ideal customer, you need first to identify him. It is only then that you can figure out what is his or her pressing problem. However, if you are new to digital marketing, you may wonder;
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional image or illustration of your ideal customer. That is a consumer who will benefit from what you are offering and also offer positive returns that help to grow your business.
How can you identify your buyer persona?
One of the best ways to identify your ideal customer is to conduct market research about your target audience. Website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, will help you in this process. Social media analytics tools work amazingly great as well. Use these tools to find your target buyer.
With a defined target market, you will know the kind of content to create according to each marketing channel. You will be able to create content materials that will resonate with your clients’ buyer persona. This measure will help your client to attract more targeted leads and customers.
2. Use Fewer Words in Your Writing
In any form of writing, in-depth materials perform better. But that is not a reason for you to add up words to your content to make it seem like informative blog content. However, research has proven that long-form content ranks better on a search engine. But in business writing, brevity is vital as it will enable you to convey your brand message without deviating from the subject matter.
Strangely enough, the human race has a lesser attention span than a goldfish. Thus, it gives you more reason to be concise in your writing. It means that you should cut out the jargon and unwanted phrases, remove wordiness, and so forth. Grammarly is one of the best tools in the marketplace that will help strengthen your writing.
3. Develop A Unique Writing Tone
Developing your brand’s writing tone adds up to business writing best practices and an excellent way to stand out from the crowd and establish yourself as an expert writer in your industry. It is a component of practical business writing skills and an efficient way to attract new clients and build your freelance writing business faster.
What is Brand Tone?
Your brand tone of voice is the common attribute or style of writing that reveals the characters relating to your message.
Thus, if you are writing for a client, you have to bring in his brand voice — the general characteristics associated with your clients’ style of writing. Therefore, the tone you use in your copy is crucial in determining the nature of your brand. It also helps you to align your content with your clients’ voices.
In light of this, it is essential to choose your words wisely. Funnily enough, research reveals that over 70% of buyers stopped following a business brand because they were awkward. Furthermore, it shows that 40% of customers unfollowed companies that share inappropriate materials.
One can say the same thing about your tone. If your writing style is not connecting with your target marketing, you will lose your audience. And if the content you write for your client is not relevant to his buyer person, he will lose money. Why? Because his target buyer will shift gear to his competitors.
For this reason, strive to create a unique writing voice that will assist you in building your brand and attracting more freelance writing clients.
4. Use Calls-to-Action in Your Copy
You may wonder, ‘is calls-to-action an element of business writing best practices?’ Yes, it is, and for a good reason. The essence of business writing and communication is to achieve your brand’s desired objective; that is where calls-to-action come in handy. It urges website users to take action and complete a task.
As a result, calls-to-action in your copy will help your clients to increase website engagement, email sign-ups, CTRs, and conversions. In effect, it will improve your business performance. Moreover, it enables your site visitors to reach other areas of your online space, which they might have missed and to take decisive steps.
On this account, make sure to add calls-to-action in your copy. Please, here is how to optimize your call-to-action to increase conversion.
5. Practice Writing Daily
With all consciousness, writing is an art that requires skills, and you must practice regularly to master the technique. One way to develop your writing skills is to read excellent text daily. And as you read, please, take note of the choice of words used in the material. Also, notice how the writer structures his content.
Then put what you are learning into practice by scheduling time to write daily. Create a calendar to enable you to maintain consistency. After completing your text, read your material loudly to yourself so that you can listen to what you have written. Then reverse engineer, edit your work and continue the process the next day.
6. Focus on Clarity of Expression
Focusing on the clarity of expression is one of the most underrated business writing best practices. Clarity of speech allows you to write in a way that your target readers will quickly understand the meaning of your content. It enables them to see the intent of your material. Therefore, write your copy with the average reader in mind — showing your ability coherently so that the ordinary person can easily understand your point.
7. Use Prepositions Correctly
A preposition is a part of speech that lets you connect word phrases to make it readable. It makes your article more comfortable to read. In other words, a proposition is a word frequently seen before a noun or pronoun connecting another word or phrase.
Let’s look at these examples, ‘He is standing in front of the car,’ ‘why is the truck on the driveway?’ In these instances, “in” and “on” are the prepositions linking other words and phrases. But since this part of speech is a link to other words, make sure not to end a sentence with a preposition.
8. Get Feedback From Experts
Getting feedback from fellow freelance writers and expert business writers will help you improve your business writing faster. Why so? One of the outstanding business writing best practices is to learn from those who have been in the business way longer than you.
Professional writers, for instance, have been writing for years, honing their skills and have mastered the art of writing — which is why they are considered specialists and experts. These individuals can quickly identify issues with your document that you probably cannot see.
Feedback is the facts or statistics you receive to be effective in the performance. The most influential leaders are always asking for feedback to aid them to enhance their operations. Why? Because they acknowledge the energy and influence of feedback.
Furthermore, they can pinpoint problems that your fellow freelance writers will possibly miss. For this reason, try as much as you can to get professional feedback for your written materials, since the remark will aid you to make the best changes and improve your writing. Put differently, learning from expert business writers is a quicker way to boost your business writing practices.
9. Use Active Voice to Strengthen Your Copy
The use of active voice is a powerful business writing skill that will strengthen your content copy and make your ideas more credible. But we often fall victim to using passive voice when writing content materials, which is the opposite of active voice. See the difference here.
Using more passive words in your article will make your material weaker and wordy. For instance, the difference between passive and active voice:
- Passive: Your author’s bio was written by John.
- Active: John wrote your author bio
Yes, I make a mistake of using the passive voice as well but endeavor to use a more active voice to help strengthen your copy.
10. Proofread Your Articles Before Hitting Publish
Proofread your content to ensure that your spelling and grammar are error-free, which is one of the practical business writing skills you need to learn. Several tools can help you in this process, but you need to remember that these spelling and grammar checker tools are not humans and cannot be perfect.
However, the best one for me, which I’m using is Grammarly. This tool will pick up spelling and grammatical errors in your content pieces. It shows you these mistakes in red and yellow wavy lines, with the red indicating spelling error and the yellow for misplaced grammar, wordiness, and so forth.
Because of this, make sure you proofread your articles before submitting it to your client or hit the publish button. Read your post aloud to yourself or ask someone to read aloud to you. This technique will enable you to pick up grammar errors and missing words.
Wrapping Up The Top Business Writing Best Practices Every Freelance Writer Should Know
Business writing is a lucrative trade and requires you to learn practical business writing skills if you want to make it big as a freelance writer. You can also invest in a business writing course to assist you in your efforts to master business writing best practices.
However, you need patience and persistence because improving your writing skills takes longer than you can imagine. Nevertheless, the tips in this article will help you streamline the procedure. In our previous article, we outlined the types of business writing you need to master as a freelance writer.
Have a look at it because it will also assist you greatly. Here is a recap of the tips we outlined in this post:
- Understand Your Buyer Persona.
- Use Fewer Words in Your Writing
- Develop A Unique Writing Tone
- Use Calls-to-Action in Your Copy
- Practice Writing Daily
Tell us the steps you have taken to improve your business writing.
This article first appeared at https://www.mossmedia.biz
