So You Think You Can Edit: Why Your Biz Might be Ready for an Editor
Hiring new consultants, contractors, and team members is a big step in your business, but once you’re ready to take it your workload decreases and your business is able to improve in multiple ways. This will leave you to work on your strengths and be the bad-ass lady boss you are (instead of the boss, chief bottle-washer and Jill-of-all-trades).
A blog editor may not have made the top of the list when you dreamed about bringing someone on to help you. But…
You only have twenty-six small letters and a handful of dots and dashes to wow, inspire, share, create, and convince. Surely you want to combine these in the best way possible?
Using a blog editor can really help to perfect your brand, reach your audience in an authentic way, improve your social messaging, and shoot SEO through the roof so that you reach exponentially more people.
Five of the signs that your biz may be ready, waiting, and wanting a blog editor to improve your content and SEO results and to save you a ton of time include:
1. You want to improve your SEO results (without having to fuss with SEO).
SEO is a long, slow process of making small and incremental changes and tweaks to each post and being consistent over time. It requires a set of tasks for each post and many of our clients find it easier to let us take these jobs off their full business and blogging plates.
Having said that, it’s a long process. We’ve had clients who have seen rapid upswings in their SEO results in their first month with us, but don’t expect to see huge change happening before three to six months. After that, it’s up all the way, baby!
The best part of improving your SEO? It starts slowly, but improves with cumulative effort. So as your Google reach improves and you attract more readers and shoppers to your site, these improved numbers improve your SEO further, and your Google reach builds on itself. One of the things we do for many of our clients is to go back into virtual archives and ensure that old posts are optimized, so that your SEO efforts don’t only depend on your brand new posts, but on your whole blog.
2. Your writing could be better.
We’re not all professional writers. But we all have something important to say. Don’t let a lack of skills in this area hold you back. If your writing isn’t as good as it should be and you’d like it to better touch your audience by delivering perfect sentences right to their screens, you may need the help of an editor.
That said, many of our clients are fantastic writers themselves who realize the potential impact of having a professional eye run over their work. Some of our clients have dyslexia or other barriers to learning. Some are really busy and want to type and dash, leaving the rest to us. It’s a universal truth that it’s almost impossible to edit your own writing objectively (unless you stick it in a drawer and take it out a few months or years later – ever find those cringe-worthy high school essays, anyone?).
Regardless of your writing level, having your posts, webpages and content edited professionally can only improve your brand and its perception. After all, you may be a colorful, interesting, talented, creative, and skillful person (yep, we know you are), but unless you use video content, the way in which your site reaches out to potential buyers or blog readers is through words. Those words need to be kick-ass so that they attract attention before viewers click away and onto another site.
Think about the last time you came across really badly-written website copy, marketing emails, or social media captions. Did it make you want to buy? Nah, me neither.
3. You have a large archive of outdated posts that are no longer attracting much traffic.
As mentioned above, we go back and edit archives to make sure that all your posts are best optimized. We also make them evergreen, if and when possible, so that you can re-post, re-use and recycle as either refreshed blog posts (yay for an easier content writing calendar!) or other types of content, such as social media posts, courses, and e-books.
4. You need help with social media content creation and posting.
In addition to editing blog posts, we also help by creating or editing (and then scheduling) social media posts so that you don’t have to be the crazy woman who is trying to cover Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and ALL the social media networks. Turn off that phone. Take a breath. We’ve got it.
5. You make mistakes in your writing, and your readers may have commented on them.
You may be surprised as to how many gremlin errors are lurking in your sales and About pages, not to mention in your most-read blog posts. Or maybe you’re not surprised. One of my clients receives nasty comments anytime there’s an (often perceived) error in one of her posts. Although we certainly don’t change our actions on the say-so of internet trolls, comments can indicate that you may have been publishing posts that contain more errors than usual. Regular errors in your writing, and the rampant disregard of spelling, grammar, and punctuation conventions, can discredit your message, detract from your voice, and diminish your shiny expertise sparkle. They also give an impression that’s not professional.
If you’d like to try out a month of no-commitment, no-strings attached editing for your business, just keep on reading and give us a shout! We’d love to give you a taster of what we do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah is a writer and online education consultant who owns a blog-editing and SEO start up, Sarah Evelyn Edits. Their mission is to spread love and add value to online businesses by perfecting copy and improving SEO through a fuss-free retainer system.
Think Creative Collective was one of her first clients, and Abagail and Emylee say:
“Sarah has been such an incredible addition to our team. We previously handled ALL writing/editing, etc. and it got to the point where we were letting things that were less than stellar head out the door. Sarah swooped in and saved the day. She got us to stop flying so much by the seat of our pants and schedule writing in advance. This not only has allowed us to be better writers from the get go, but adds time to get valuable feedback from Sarah. She is now a crucial part of our everyday process. Highly recommend!”
Would you like 30 days of free editing and SEO for your blog? No card details, and no strings attached. We’d love to connect with you! Please write to us here or email Sarah at sarah@sarahevelynedits.com
