Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

One of the number one things I get asked by people wondering how I got involved in the copywriting field is what I studied in College to get here. To be fair, I’ll admit up front that I was a Creative Writing Major with a focus in fiction and exposition. I wrote a lot and I have a degree to back it all up. It doesn’t really support my argument that you don’t need any formal training to do what I’m doing, but let’s just forget for a moment that degree and take a closer look at the things you really need to be effective as a copywriter. These are only a few of the things that go into writing. I have a few more that I’ll add in future posts. 

A Keen Eye for Language

While I won’t say that you need any kind of formal training to be a writer online, I will say that you need a keen eye for what makes language work and how an English sentence is formed. If you don’t read very often, haven’t written anything since high school and often have a hard time writing the memos on your checks, this job might be a bit hard for you.

But, even then don’t let it get you down. To develop a keen eye for the language, you need only to spend a bit of time understanding how sentences work, how words flow together and what is attractive to the human eye. It might not seem like it, but words are just as visually pleasing as a picture of the sunset or the vase your nephew made for you.

One of the number one things I tell people to do when they start writing for the first time is to read their first couple of articles out loud. This was an exercise I learned in Middle School and it quickly taught me to listen for things as I write. If you practice enough, you don’t have to read outloud anymore and your brain will start recognizing patterns that are effective without having to hear them. We’ll go into a bit more detail on how online copy needs to be structured for the Internet reader later, but things like cadence, white space, sentence length, word choice, and use of punctuation are all vital aspects of the flow of language that you’ll need to master.

Typing Skills

This is just plain simple and is something that anyone can improve upon very quickly. But, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to type quickly. Not only must you type quickly, you must type accurately, and consistently. In any given day, I might type between 8,000 and 15,000 words. That amount of text will take me between two and a half and six hours of hard typing. It might seem like a lot, but you’ll build up to it over time. When I first started, I might be lucky to write up 4,000 words in a day and 1,500 words an hour.

Not only do your fingers learn to start keeping pace, your brain will start learning how to develop thoughts and put them into position as you write. I’ll discuss this more later but it all comes down to practice, practice, practice. Most of what you learn and become better at in this job is intangible. But, trust me when I say that if you practice you will get better.

Ability to Focus and Self Motivate

If you want to work at home and write for a living, you need to be able to focus on what you are doing and above and beyond anything else, you need to be able to self motivate yourself. You cannot be effective at writing for a living if you spend your time watching the Simpsons or walking your dog, or doing chores around the house during your allotted work hours.

It’s hard to hear that because half of the allure of working at home is having the freedom to take breaks, adjust your schedule and move around at will rather than being stuck in an office for 8 hours a day every day. But, especially when you get started, you need to be able to maintain a steady schedule. The easier you make it for yourself to slack off, the harder it will be to get up to a point where you’re doing a job and not trying out a new hobby.

For the first six months I always recommend setting aside incrementally larger amounts of time every day. This is vital because if you start out trying to work 8 hours a day, you’ll burn out quickly, especially when learning. However, if you start out with 2 or 3 hours a day in the first week and build up to 8 hours a day by the fifth or sixth week, your mind and your body will be working full time before you know it.

Ultimately, this is the kind of job that you can do for 4-5 hours a day, 4-5 days a week and make $40,000 a year doing, but it is going to take anywhere up to a year to get to that point. It takes time to get higher paying jobs; it takes time to build up your stamina in typing (and thinking that much) and it takes time to build up your resolve enough to spend that much time working in your own home every day. 

chatfielda Freelancing freelance writing, make money online, writing for money