Alright, we’re about to become writers!

Of course, writing matters for your business. Duh that’s why you’re here.

But for a lot of people, writing does not come easily.

If you think you’re a great writer based on getting all A’s in English class, you might be in for a rude awakening because writing for the internet is different from how they tell you how to write in school.

Writing is a skill set. And writing well online is another skill set. You have to learn both of these to succeed at freelancing.

One of the ways to do that is through working on your writing.

This is just like when you were a kid and had to practice coloring inside the lines or hitting a ball off a tee, or figuring out how to multiply things.

To become a better writer, you have to practice and build your writing muscle.

So you need to write. Practice writing every day.

This video highlights some of the things you can do to get there:

One thing I really want to hammer home from this video is you don’t have to publish everything you write online. I have hundreds of thousands of words I have written for fun and practice that will likely never ever see the light of day.

When you’re practicing, you’re trying things out. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

The practice serves a few main benefits:

It helps you hone your voice:

When I first started as a freelance writer, I wrote a lot of BORING content. Yes, it was technically sound, but I didn’t have a handle on me and who I was as I wrote. I had to write a lot of stuff to figure out my voice. Now, I have clients today who come to me specifically because they like the way I write.

Very few people have this figured out from the jump. You have to try to work it out for yourself.

One piece of advice, be authentic. It’s fine to try and model how you write based on other good writers or people who you admire, but you don’t want to be a carbon copy.

I think some of the best writers out there are the people who write like they are speaking to a friend.

It helps you speed up

One of the biggest roadblocks any freelancer has is time. You can only earn as fast as you type.

Luckily my mom was firing up Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on our home computer from when I was in middle school, so I’ve pretty much always been a quick typer.

But my 75 words a minute mean nothing if I spend 3 hours trying to figure out what a post looks like and not actually typing.

So writing more can help you understand how to lay out your thoughts and layout your assignments too. My very first 500 word SEO article took me, no lie, over 3 hours to do. Since I was only getting $10 total, I was not helping myself!

By the end, I was so rehearsed in what I had to do and the topic I could bang out multiple posts in an hour.

It helps with the creative juices

Even if you’re writing about the most boring topic on the face of the Earth (to you), writing is still a creative task. You’re using your words to communicate.

You also need to be creative to come up with ideas and topics that you want to write about, both for yourself and your clients.

So practice writing a lot of fun stuff too. Don’t just blankly type out 16 SEO articles and call that practice.

Try writing reported stories, try fan fiction, try making a novel, or a short story, or a tv script. All of these different modes of writing can help you build both your habit and your enjoyment.

I’ve written books and blog posts that had nothing to do with my niche and a ridiculously long theory about how time travel would work in Avengers: Endgame (I was like 43% right). All of that stuff, even though it’s off-topic, helped make me a better writer.

I mean, let’s face it, if you hate writing, this probably isn’t the career you want to get into.