Everyone has two jobs these days: their own and that of the content writer. I don’t recall seeing anyone get a pay rise for doing this extra job and maybe that’s because it isn’t a real job but just a nagging sense of guilt that you should be doing more content but you just don’t feel you have the skills or the time.

Opinions matter

But stop right there. Don’t feel guilty. We don’t need your elegant prose. What we need is your knowledge, your expertise, your opinions. And, before you start guilt-tripping again, you have all of these in abundance. You just don’t have the time to get in down on paper and your year 9 English teacher is still hanging over you banging on about how important it is to not split infinitives.

Ask yourself, where do I provide value? Is it in helping companies to tackle cybercrime or helping the NHS use technology to improve patient outcomes or developing apps to improve employee engagement?  None of these involves you devoting half your time to crafting compelling content.

Health warning 1: Experience required. Effective content only comes from understanding the subject matter and there are a lot of writers out there who will simply cause you more work rather than ease your load. Only work with those who have direct experience of your tech and your market.

Health warning 2: Brief early. Give the writer the time to do the job properly. If you leave it to the last minute they will need to come back to you for a lot of the information they could have sourced themselves, (back to doing two jobs again!) And they won’t get it 100% right first time so allow time for edits and amends and to get approval from any third parties like customers or channel partners.

So, hand it over to people who do this for a living. People who know enough about your tech to be able to understand the issues and who have the knack of drawing your ideas out, finding the facts and figures to back up your opinions and who can turn it round fast. A good writer will also have a keen sense of story-telling and that’s vital if you want people to read your content.

So unless they are paying you double; stop doing two jobs and bask in the glory of seeing your ideas presented as you would have liked them to be, given the time and 20 years’ experience of writing for a living.