You want to produce content for any number of reasons – perhaps you want to draw more visitors to your website or improve your conversion rates of visitors to customers.
In most cases, you want to establish yourself or your company as a leading bigwig in your industry. You may have tried writing this content yourself but found that it took too much of your time, or perhaps you discovered you are a terrible writer.
These revelations might have led you to hire writers but you are still not convinced you need one. You might also wonder just how much information you need to give the writer for him to do a better job than you did. There is, after all, a fine line between providing adequate instructions and just writing the whole darn article yourself.
The best reasons to hire writers are that a professional can do a better job of expressing your thoughts and she can do it in less time. In order to make it cost-effective for both you and the writer, though, you need to supply just the right amount of information. Too much information causes unnecessary and time-consuming reading that might lead the writer astray or just plain annoy him. Supplying too little information causes your writer to hunt around for a clue or, worse yet, just take a wild guess about what’s in your head.
Supply Vital Information
Start with a title that describes the content you expect. The title tells the writer exactly what you want the readers to learn, feel or do. For example, the titles “Midtown Veterinary Clinic Warns of Rabies Epidemic among Cats” and “Midtown Veterinary Clinic Now Offers Rabies Vaccines” seem similar at first glance but actually require completely different content.
Give a detailed description of your idea. Provide an example of a similar blog, article or website. Attach a word document containing a lengthier description when the information is unavailable elsewhere on the internet. Post a video on YouTube; be sure to direct the writer to a specific timestamp on the video if you need them to listen to just a few moments of a very long video.
Tell your writer which ‘person’ you want to use. You remember this from grammar school:
- First person is “I think we should do this”
- Second person is “You should to that”
- Third person is “He should do it again”
Use first person when you want the article to give the reader a warm, fuzzy hug. Second person is best when you want to convince readers to do something. Opt for third person when you want to sound stiff and official.
Finally, provide your website address. Writers can usually hunt down what they need on your site, from capturing your “voice” to creating dynamic copy without costing you a lot of time.
Lynn H is a medical writer. When she is not writing, she likes to impress and bore unsuspecting people with medical facts she really believes to be interesting.
