Why Is It So Hard to Find Good Writing Online?
Written by Araminta Robertson, Managing Director at Mint Studios
Many of the prospects we talk to tell us they’ve had bad experiences with content agencies.
They tell us something along the lines of “it’s very generic content” or “no one in our target market would read this”.
But I don’t need to convince you that most online content is bad, you’ve likely seen it for yourself. Every time you Google something, read a recipe, follow a how-to guide, you’re probably frustrated with the quality. You’ll be bombarded with ads, given tons of irrelevant information, and if it’s in a B2B context, it’ll be full of vague words that don’t really say anything.
Why is that? Why is it so hard to find good writing?
I started out my career as a writer. Everyone on the Mint team starts out as a writer, and over the years I’ve reviewed hundreds of portfolios and offered over 50 writers a paid test. Very few writers get offered a paid test, and only a fraction of those are hired.
Even once hired, every writer goes through a very hands-on training process, whether they’re freelance or in-house. This usually takes at least 3 months, and it’s often 6 months before they’re considered solid, high quality writers. So yes, it takes a lot of time, effort and patience to get the quality we want (which is why don’t believe fast growth is a good thing for agencies).
Based on that experience, here are a few reasons why I think it’s so hard to find good online writers, specifically when it comes to using content marketing to sell a product or services firm.
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Most content is written for the wrong reasons
We’ve written a lot about this at Mint: one of the key reasons I think so much content is bad is that the incentives are misaligned.
In other words, a lot of content is written to rank on Google, and not to be read. But that’s not all. A lot of content is written to entertain – that’s fine if you’re a blogger or influencer, but if you’re a company that sells a product, why does this happen?
Your website is not a magazine and no one is reading your content to be entertained. Instead, you should be writing about how your product works, answering your prospects’ questions and educating them on topics you’re an expert on. Instead, most content is like this:
It’s dull, it’s not relevant and it doesn’t serve anyone: no one is reading it which means it’ll never help you hit your KPIs.
When you’re focused on word count, keywords, etc, you end up with generic content that is actually regurgitated content. In other words, nothing new and nothing of value.
But SEO isn’t the whole problem here (and yes, you can write SEO content that educates and is not dull). Thought leadership content is also a problem. Unless you’re a super famous company, no one cares about your “Top fintech predictions for 2023”. Most people get thought leadership content wrong, a topic we explored in this article: Can You use Content to Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader? It's Complicated.
I believe there are two key reasons companies end up with this type of dull, irrelevant content:
Content is seen as a “nice-to-have”. It’s an expense, it’s something you “have” to do because everyone else does it. Most people don’t believe that it has an impact on lead generation or customer acquisition (and if it did, they believe they can’t prove it). This is completely wrong – if you don’t believe you can attribute leads and customers to content, please read this article: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 4 Hubspot Reports])
The people writing the content don’t understand their readers. The bigger issue here is the people creating the content (marketers) aren’t talking to the people who talk to customers everyday (salespeople or customer success). If you don’t know who your customers are or who’s reading your content, it’s very hard to write something compelling.
Most companies are investing in content marketing because that’s what others do and they believe it’s an important part of marketing (i.e. the wrong reasons to do content marketing). They’ve resigned to the fact that you can’t track the results of your content efforts, which means you’ll never know if it’s making a real impact.
And if you ever question this, they’ll say “It’s impossible to track, we can’t know”. This is how you end up in a situation where you’re creating irrelevant content that doesn’t help you reach your marketing goals, an issue we’ve talked about here: The Content Tower of Pisa: Why Fintech Content Programmes Fail
Writers aren’t aware of customer pain points
This topic is so important that it deserves its own section.
In one of Grow and Convert’s latest posts, Devesh explains that a lot of content is written by people who are not aware of customer pain points. That’s because a lot of writing is outsourced, which means the task is given to a writer who doesn’t know much about the product, market or customer they’re targeting. Again, it’s very hard to write a compelling piece if you don’t know who you’re writing for.
Compare these two articles that target the same persona and rank for the keyphrase “B2B accounts payable”:
“B2B payment automation is a top payment trend in 2022, and an increasingly urgent priority for businesses of all sizes. There's a good reason for that: It's one of the easiest and fastest ways to optimise your workflow and cut costs. And for more and more companies, the automation of accounts payable (AP) is a key area of focus during the process. AP departments are particularly ripe for modernisation. Even at companies that have embraced automation for purchase orders and invoices, AP departments are often still grounded in legacy manual processes. Over 50% of B2B payments are still paid with cheques.”
And
“If you’re scaling an international business with vendors and suppliers from around the world, your B2B accounts payable team may be facing these challenges:
You’re never sure of the full cost of your international business transfers until you receive your billing statements. This makes budget forecasting complicated as your overseas transactions increase.
Large payments can take weeks to send to vendors and suppliers because of daily or weekly transfer limits. This delay can slow down and threaten to halt your business operations.
Many vendors and suppliers won’t accept credit card payments for high-value transactions, which forces you to dip into your available cash.”
It’s clear that the person who wrote the first sample has no idea who’s going to read this. You can tell because they start off with linking to a random study and continuously write absolute statements without expanding on what they really mean “AP departments are particularly ripe for modernisation”.
Compare this to the second sample. The writer is talking directly to the reader. They start off by highlighting the pain points they may be facing – which the writer would never be aware of without talking to a customer success or salesperson first.
And the introduction is the most important. The first sample bores the reader to death. The second sample perks them up: “Yes, those are my problems – how did you know?”. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter – because they are likely not our target market.
This is why we believe freelance writers usually don’t work for companies that do content marketing (not in the typical sense), and why content briefs are the spawn of satan. You need a totally different model to make sure the writer knows who they’re writing for. Interviews with salespeople and customer success people partially solve this issue.
Writing online is different to writing a novel or a dissertation
We’ve worked with writers from different backgrounds, including academia, journalism and copywriting. Asking someone who’s only written academic content to write a blog post for a company online is incredibly enlightening: it makes you realise how different the world of online writing is to the rest.
As I mentioned earlier, we spend hours training writers away from the habits that academic and journalistic writing creates. For example, academics are trained to use big words, lengthy sentences and big paragraphs to sound smart. Those who have a background in short form copy, are trained to use a lot of adverbs and to make everything sound fun.
But writing online to sell a product is different. To do it well, you need to:
Be able to write in a direct way that is easy to understand (without dumbing it down).
To use bullet points, shorter paragraphs, bolding and headings.
Use examples. The right ones.
When appropriate, link to sources or other related articles.
And so much more.
The part that always needs training is learning how to be specific. A lot of writers are trained to be vague, to use stories and cliches. When they join the Mint team, we need to retrain them to be as specific as possible.
Don’t just say “it improves the customer experience”. You have to explain how. Use examples. Explain what you mean in a different way. Every single word you write has to add something to the article. If it doesn’t, remove it.
In other words, don’t be lazy.
Writing well is thinking well (and you have to give a sh*t)
There’s this classic Paul Graham quote:
“A company asked why it was so hard to hire a good writer. I told them it was because good writing is an illusion: what people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course good thinkers are rare.”
I do believe most writers who are clever can be trained to write high quality content. But there are two things that can’t be trained:
Giving a sh*t about your writing.
Thinking well.
Giving a sh*t means that you need to care about producing the best version of this article. It means, even if the client is happy, you’re still looking for ways to improve it if you personally believe it’s not up to scratch. You want to do your best work, always. To create great articles, you have to care. A lot. You can quickly tell if a writer is lazy and just wants to get paid – those people never make it on our team.
Thinking well means that you need to know how to be able to explain a concept and articulate it well. You need to be able to put yourself in a reader’s shoes, consider what they might and might not know, and then explain that in an articulate way. If you can do that when speaking, then it’s a lot easier to do when writing.
If a writer doesn’t care about the quality of the writing and isn’t able to think clearly, then you can’t create great content that actually meets its goal, whether it’s just to educate, or to bring in customers.
Writing good online content is hard, which is why I don’t believe you can productise content. In other words, you can’t treat each article as a one off task that needs to be written by a writer. There’s so much more that goes into it: understanding the nuances of the product, understanding who the reader is and what their pain points are, understanding which case studies and examples would make this point clearer. Ideally, the writer needs to be in contact with a strategist, a salesperson and a product person. And yet most writing is done nowadays by a writer in isolation.
And this is why outsourcing to cheaper writers is not a good business model for a content marketing agency. It’s a topic for another time, but I believe content marketing only works if you embrace the fact that you are a customised services firm. If not, you’ll always end up with subpar content.
With AI writing tools and the new Search Experience, high quality writing will be vastly different from the everyday content. We’re going to have even more generic, boring content. But that will help separate the wheat from the chaff. The bad writers will quickly be replaced, and the great writers will be recognised. And maybe that’s something to celebrate.