Writing is essential to content marketing—and that means content marketers must work with writers.  I recently attended a webinar conducted by Matt Grant that changed the way I think about working with writers. The webinar focused on working with freelance writers, but his advice applies whether you’re a newspaper editor, a CEO with a ghost blogger, or the intern who just can’t help but proofread your boss’s work.

Matt’s biggest point: it’s essential to educate your writers. If you’re not satisfied with their work, explain why so that they can improve, which will result in less work for everyone as time goes on.

As Matt talked, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach: I’ve been doing it wrong. I’ve been focusing on getting writing ready to publish now instead of taking the time to explain problems and give the writer a chance to fix them.

You are making this mistake as an editor if you find yourself:

1. Deleting massive swaths of content without explaining why
2. Adding content without explaining why
3. Restructuring content without explaining why
4. Changing anything without explaining why—yes, even just a word or a punctuation mark (obvious typos exempted)
5. Publishing content without first sending it back to the writer for review
6. Sending content back to the writer for review without a few overall comments
7. Providing the writer with only positive, or only negative, comments

For both writers and editors, the end result of a failed editing effort is easy to spot: in a Word Doc with changes tracked, it looks like a lot of red lines, and zero comments.

So, how do you fix this? My suggestions:

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While it may steal income from writers like myself worldwide, I must state this truth:

You don’t have to be a great writer to be a great blogger.

Wait a minute, you may be thinking.  Don’t blog posts have those strange things called sentences and words in them? And thus shouldn’t writing skill and blogging skill be inherently tied together?

Think again. While being a great writer is helpful, it’s not necessary to blogging success. If you’re a horrible writer, or even worse, you hate writing, you probably shouldn’t blog. But if you’re somewhere between unable to write a sentence and not quite Ernest Hemingway, there’s hope.

As a professional writer for the web, I live and breathe blogs. I write posts for myself. I write and edit posts for Right Source Marketing‘s clients. I devour dozens of blogs, ranging from Seth Godin’s to The Dieline to The Dry Cleaners Blog. While I enjoy reading blogs by talented writers, I’ve found that bloggers who aren’t great writers can use the following methods to succeed anyway:

1. Focus on your audience. A blogger who knows his or her audience and how to engage it will be more successful than a talented writer who doesn’t understand their audience. Of course, part of being a talented writer is writing to your audience, but you can focus on your audience without being a classically talented writer.

2. Create how-to’s and lists. Lists and how-to’s are both popular and easy to write. You don’t have to be able to organize a feature article in order to slap 5 points together and call it a blog post, yet that short and sweet post can attract a lot of hits.

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Whether or not you call yourself a writer, you’ve probably experienced writer’s block. It can attack at any time: when you’re writing a 500 page novel, a blog post, an email to a client, or even a tweet.

You know how it feels: you sit down to write, and get that sinking feeling in your stomach. You stare at the screen. Get up for coffee. Sit down. Stare at the screen. Get up for a snack. Sit down. Stare at the screen.  Yet another victim to the cycle of caffeine, calories, and anguish known as writer’s block.

Never fear—you can fix this. Start with one of my tried and trusted ways to break through any case of writer’s block:

1. Write $**tty first drafts. Paralysis due to the fear of low quality writing is a far mightier enemy than low quality writing itself. That’s why I follow Anne Lamott’s advice to write “$**tty First Drafts.” How it works: write anything to get started, knowing that you don’t have to attach that file or push that send button until after you’ve revised your awful first draft. You can fix low quality writing (most of the time), but you have to write something in the first place. As Lamott says, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”

2. Skip the intro. The first sentence can be the hardest to write. If you’re stuck on the first sentence, don’t sweat it, skip it. For example, I started this blog post on point one, and circled back to write the intro later. Sometimes, you don’t know where to begin until you’ve reached the end.

3. Write an outline. An outline? That thing from high school? Yes. Outlines. They work for emails, blog posts, articles, novels, web copy, proposals—ok, maybe not tweets, but you get the point. Dashing down a couple bullet points about what you want to write by the time you’re done can help you start.

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Your website looks fantastic. Your blog is easy to navigate, full of compelling images, and keyword rich. You tweet great insights about your industry regularly. Your Facebook page has tons of custom tabs.

All of this is wonderful, but without good writing, don’t even bother. Marketing—especially online marketing—depends on skill with words (ok, a red wheelbarrow, too).

Every day at Right Source Marketing, we write for ourselves and for our clients. And rewrite, and rewrite again. Everything we write is analyzed and edited for strategy, flow, and much more.

So when we see poorly written blog posts and awkward website copy, it drives us a little crazy. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, but below are some of the writing mistakes that absolutely make us cringe:

1. Exclamation points!!! Isn’t it so exciting to be reading this blog post!?!!! Actually, you probably want to take my exclamation points, and throw them off a cliff, don’t you? Of course, there’s a time and a place for everything, even exclamation points. But next time you feel yourself using more than one every five sentences or so, stop and think. Do you really need those exclamation points? They’re annoying, immature, and a crutch for weak writers. With a little rewording and reorganizing, you can get your point across by using strong diction and syntax, not ridiculous punctuation.

2. Over utilizing utilize. People don’t read blogs and websites for vocabulary lessons.  So hold the cream and sugar and the fancy words. Of course, you should sound intelligent, and use your business’ lingo (especially if you’re writing for a business to business audience). But don’t use big words just because they’re bigger. “Utilize” is a prime candidate for this. Sure, “use” gets…over used…but most of the time, when you feel the urge to write “utilize,” a word like “use,” or even better, a more specific verb, will do the job.

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Whether you live in the Baltimore/Washington area like we do, or have only heard about it on the news, everyone knows we’ve been hit here by record snowfalls.  I saw yesterday that Baltimore just passed Syracuse NY for first place as the snowiest city in the U.S. this winter.

While technology has allowed me to continue working on just about everything I would in a normal day, some of the down time “snowed in” got me thinking about how people might use some of that down time to address items on the “marketing list” (you know, that list some people never quite get to).

With that mind, I went back through some of our posts to highlight 5 pretty tangible and actionable items you can think about, evaluate and improve right away.  And while I tried to avoid the “clip show” format — Didn’t you always hate when sitcoms did those episodes that were just recycled material? – It did seem to work best in this format.

So here you go – 5 Marketing Fixes for a Snowy Week.

1). Fix Your Core Messaging:

We all know how important it is to have a clear and consistent message – But do you have a messaging problem?

Your Marketing Message in 30 Seconds

2). Diversify Lead Generation:

In an ideal world, you are managing multiple buckets of leads, each bringing a different volume, a different quality, and a different set of metrics.  But are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

Buckets of Leads

3). Convert More Visitors to Leads:

Make sure you are getting the most from your online visitors.  Tune up your contact forms and landing pages by looking at 5 common problems.

Better Contact Forms = More Prospects

4). Improve Your Search Marketing:

Writing ad copy for pay-per-click ads, particularly for Google AdWords, is an extremely challenging task.  Are you getting the most from your paid search campaigns?

The Most Challenging Copywriting Job in the World

5). Update Your Website:

Your company may have all kinds of exciting things going on – new customers, partners, upcoming events, etc.  But if from the viewpoint of the random website visitor, you’re not doing much lately it may not be worth taking the next step to get in touch.

Keeping the Newsroom Fresh

Implementing these 5 fixes will help you to upgrade your marketing — And give you a reason to avoid that snow shovel.

Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow@willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.