When I was a child, I had an obsession with writing. I’d spend hours copying passages down from interesting books, and show my mother.
The habit of copying passages from books gradually developed into an essay writing skill, as my imagination and vocabulary grew.
My school teachers loved my essays. My English teacher recited my essay that I wrote in the Class X pre-boards exam.
However, after Class X, I stopped writing. Class XI and XII commerce syllabus didn’t have English as a subject.
Also, I had to focus on my career. There was no next level to writing that I knew – at least, nurturing this skill was irrelevant from a career perspective.
Very few people get success like J.K. Rowling or a Rudyard Kipling, while the others struggle.
What I didn’t realise was that in today’s world, writing is not about journalism or being a bestselling author – less than 1% of the successful writers do this.
There are many other successful writers who are earning very well by writing marketing content, viral content creators who are great at storytelling and sharing their stories, people who are building compelling narratives, people in the brand building, PR, and corporate communications industry.
I had no clue about this world. You might think that you are not cut out for these things, but that is only because of self-limiting statements like:
You should not share your weaknesses. Others will take advantage of you.
You should not share difficulties that you faced as a kid or in the family.
You should not share your plan.
You should not boast about yourself.
You should not share good things or the results that you have accomplished – nazar lag jayegi.
Selling is a bad or unethical thing – if you can’t get any other job, you’ll be a salesman or a marketer.
Well, what do you think great stories are made of?
All these things, woven together!
Start in the middle. There is a protagonist in a tight spot or difficult situation.
Explain the challenge or the problem.
Protagonist tries something. Struggles, maybe moves an inch, but fails again.
Repeat the process.
And then emerges victorious.
Sharing your own victories, vulnerabilities from your life is probably the most natural thing to do, but you may not have practised it before.
That is not a problem.
As a professional content writer, you can also help business owners and service professionals do that, and generate value for them, and they will be grateful.
If we lift the veil in front of us, we will realise that our capacity suddenly expands and the self-limiting statements do not limit us anymore.
Btw, do you think you are alone in suffering from these difficulties?
They also plague your clients.
This is one of the reasons why many great products and businesses die out because there was nobody to spread the word.
As a content writer, you have an opportunity to be the torchbearer of success for international businesses.
In the process, through your writing, narratives and storytelling, you will also emancipate the world of boredom and monotony, and breathe life into the work that your clients do, by weaving compelling content and narratives.
You will enable them to live and experience emotions in an otherwise transactional world.
Good content writing is not a ‘complex skill’.
It is just the ability to articulate points in language and make things simple.
When I started working in a law firm, most of the lawyers who were successful there said that they just had one important skill which enabled them to make money.
Guess what?
It wasn’t legal knowledge or acumen.
It was how to write and communicate properly in English.
Most people underestimate the value of simple, persuasive and honest writing from the heart.
When I started working on my first startup, there were 2 things we had to do:
- Create content for our courses
- Spread the idea that practical learning can lead to professional success without advanced degrees, class rank, or your parents’ connections and heritage
Both these tasks involved writing, but point #2 was crucial for our continued success.
We had started with a small emailing list of less than 500 people, but over time this had become around 80K.
Ramanuj used to write 1 email everyday for our subscribers.
Everyday, on a new point.
People used to wait to read his emails. It was their daily dose of inspiration.
Many people used to take up our courses after reading about our journey for months, and sometimes even more than a year.
Content writing enabled our company to build faith with customers
There was a point after which we could not grow anymore.
The content was working great, but everybody wanted to speak on the phone personally with Ramanuj or other co-founders.
Our time was limited, and we didn’t have enough callers.
So we started building email funnels so that people could get educated step-by-step.
The calls became shorter, and many students bought directly.
Everytime we created a new email funnel, we added 10 lakh revenues.
That is how we were able to scale.
However, in the market, nobody really works at this level – they will offer to post comments on social media, or make a reel or comment on our posts, or leave some fake google reviews, or generate backlinks.
Or they will send us inquiries to do generic content writing for our website or courses.
We will never engage such content writers.
Btw, it is not that our content problem is solved, we need more content writers now than ever before!
We have tens of thousands of bootcamp leads for our different courses, but we are not able to nurture them.
Imagine what could happen if we could keep them engaged the whole year round with great content.
We could share stories of the results our learners are producing around the year, we could create comparisons with our competitor’s offerings, new updates in the industry, something new that was taught in class once a month and do a lot of other engaging initiatives!
A new level of trust can be created in that way with our subscribers.
This is what is needed for success today.
Content is distribution. Content is money.
In our case content is also a core part of our product.
Today, at Skill Arbitrage, we believe in empowering you to develop the same kind of content writing skill that saved our company, and use it to power the growth engines of global startups.
Content is also a gift that you can give to the world.