Home > Buried By Keywords? Here’s How To Cope

Buried By Keywords? Here’s How To Cope

Writing keyword fodder isn’t always easy, especially when you’ve written 70 article of a batch of 140 and are losing the will to live. Yet this is one of the tasks that many freelancers face, because clients know that content is king and want plenty of it for their sites. So what do you do when the creative well has run dry? Here are some of the strategies I have used.

Turn It On Its Head

We have to take our clients and our work seriously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use humor from time to time. Instead of writing about how to raise the perfect child, write about how NOT to do it. Trying to reverse the normal order will help to boost your creativity, and I’ve found that clients don’t mind the occasional humorous piece in a large batch.

Do Some Research

Even if you’re not setting a client’s site up, it doesn’t hurt to use a keyword research tool to find keywords similar to the ones you’re writing about. Even better is looking at related searches, because that might give you a few new ideas for ways to tackle a subject. For example, when writing about credit cards, I was able to extrapolate and write about some of the issues that students faced in getting credit cards.

Talk To Friends

It’s amazing what talking to others will do. Whether they are online or offline, you can get a lot of inspiration from chatting with people about their experiences. Real life anecdotes can help make a keyword article more interesting. For example, if you’re writing about home decorating, you could use a real example of a decorating nightmare as a starting point for your article.

Use Your Archives
If you’re writing on a familiar subject, then you’ve probably got a lot of articles on your computer. Have a look at what you’ve done for other people and see whether any of the ideas apply to your current job. It’s a great way to reuse ideas without straining your brain.

Gut It Out
In the end, you still have to meet your deadline. Sometimes the only way to do it is to do it. I usually divide up my work across the week so that I can do some difficult tasks and some easy tasks each day. I do the hard ones in the morning, which is my best writing time, and the easy ones later on.

So those are some of my tips. What are yours?

You might also enjoy:

• How To Cope With Writing Burnout
• Freelance Writing Myths
• Ghostwriting: a quick guide

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