Content could be your best chance of making up the extra income you need to keep your writing ambitions on track. So what is it and how does it work?

Content is the material produced by businesses to market themselves and covers all of these and more: social media messages, website collateral, print brochures, brand videos, infographics, email newsletters, white papers, ebooks, and sponsored articles.

Is content the same as advertising?

It’s more a cross between advertising and journalism. The idea is that people are tired of constant promotional messages – buy this now! – and are becoming increasingly savvy shoppers: before they buy anything, they do loads of research online, for instance, in online forums and on social media. So to reach them, businesses now need to be part of that research process. And that means offering useful information and inspiration to support their decision-making: content.

So what does content look like?

It’s the difference between a mortgage website that just says, “check out our deals,” and one that also says ‘First-time mortgages: a handy guide for new homebuyers’. Since the company is an expert in mortgages, it can tell people some useful things that will help them make a choice. In exchange, the potential customer will consent to hearing a few marketing messages and hopefully feel better disposed towards this provider.

What’s the opportunity for writers?

The rise of internet search as the dominant way in which consumers interact with businesses has led to a content marketing boom. Video and visual content are increasingly popular, especially in social, but written copy is still needed in huge volumes. Pretty much every business of any size needs content, and that means they need writers.

For example, an airline might commission a series of destination guides. A supermarket site might want to develop a library of recipes. A business bank might offer funding tips for startups. A recruitment company might offer CV and interview advice. And so on.

With all these examples, there’s a strong commercial reason for doing the content: the airline wants people to buy tickets to the destinations they write about, for example. But the content still has to be editorial in flavour: if the material is too salesy it will lose its credibility.

How can you get started with content work?

Businesses employ a multitude of individual freelancers, freelance platforms and marketing agencies to create content on their behalf. Start by looking through LinkedIn and contacting local businesses and agencies with an obvious content requirement – a company site that publishes a lot of blog content, for example.

What skills and experience do you need? 

A background in journalism or copywriting is a great help, but many writers in the content world have no special training and have simply picked up skills and experience along the way. Any specialised knowledge or experience is a plus: a degree in biochemistry, for example, may be attractive to a pharma client, while experience in finance and tech are always invaluable. Commercial experience of any kind is always useful too.

To do well as a content writer, you need to be flexible and versatile, prepared to hustle a little, and ready to have a go at writing about all sorts of topics. You need to hit deadlines, be comfortable working with clients, and prepared to make changes to your work in response to feedback. But with the right mindset and skills, you can open up a significant new revenue stream for your writing career.

BIO – Dan Brotzel (@brotzel_fiction) is director of UK content agency Sticky Content and co-author of a new comic novel, Kitten on a Fatberg (Unbound). As a reader of this newsletter, you can pre-order Kitten on a Fatberg for a 10% discount – quote KITTEN10