3 Things I Learnt Working for a Content Creation Company
At the start of this year, during a period of unemployment, I worked as a writer for a content creation company. The work and pay was consistent — albeit light; the job staved off boredom and gave me a sense of purpose in a time that otherwise felt like moving through a thick fog (I had recently returned to my home country before I was ready, didn’t yet have a place to call home, and was in a pretty serious depression funk).
I worked for this company for 4 months before finally managing to land a full-time job and a flat 3 weeks before New Zealand went into lockdown. Talk about timing.
Not long after I started my full-time job, I handed in my resignation to the content creation company. This was spurred in part by lack of time to devote to research and writing (little did I know that lockdown was around the corner) and in part to a growing feeling of unease with the company’s values.
Here are three things I took away from that job, and why I’m ultimately glad I took it even if it didn’t last:
1. How to Align my Values with my Writing
Getting paid to write is the dream — or so I thought.
Here I was, getting paid to write at least 5,000 words a week about a variety of topics, from baby products to golf to dehumidifiers. And every word felt inauthentic.
It wasn’t so much what I was writing that was the problem; what made me feel constricted inside was who I was writing it for and why.
Most of the content I produced was product reviews… for products I’d never used. Yes, I know. I should have run for the hills when they asked me to do that — but a job is a job, and when you’re spending hundreds of dollars a week on hostels just so you have a roof over your head, you take what you can get.
But there was always a twinge of guilt in me when I pulled opinions from Amazon reviews and spun them as if they were my own (or, rather, the owner of the blog that was making money from the affiliate links).
I wasn’t being honest to myself or the readers, and frankly I wasn’t doing my best work. There’s only so much you can say in a 4,000 word article about baby scales, you know?
The sense of guilt I felt writing these articles taught me that I don’t just want to write; I want to write words that matter for people I believe in. I want my words to glow, to fill me with inner warmth because I believe in their message.
In my copywriting business, that translates to working with women, queer folk, and BIPOC to tell their stories and support their work. I am intentionally picky about who I work with now; if a person or business doesn’t align with my values, I don’t want to help it thrive.
I value my writing more.
2. How Keyword Stuffing Stifles Creativity
Keyword stuffing is a fail-proof way to kill an article. I wrote for a lot of clients who valued keywords over quality, and the worst part was my editors and managers didn’t care.
Some of my worst work was for clients who insisted on using a keyword tracking extension to enter dozens of keywords and the number of times they wanted those keywords to appear in the article.
The extension would track our drafts and highlight any targets we hadn’t met in red. At best, this was distracting. At worst, it led to work that I wouldn’t have been proud to publish under my own name.
Often, the keywords were grammatically incorrect. Or the client would include three different versions for SEO purposes — consistency be damned!
In one article, I had to use the phrases “nonstick frying pan”, “non-stick frying pan”, and “non stick frying pan”. It still hurts my writer’s heart to think about it. When I pointed it out to the editor, they didn’t seem phased.
It didn’t matter to them or the company that this sort of inconsistency detracted from the article or made my writing worse. The client wanted what the client wanted — who were we to provide advice or produce better work?
Keywords have their place in online writing, especially if you want to capitalise on search engine traffic. But structuring an article around too many keywords means spending more time worrying about the keywords than writing an excellent piece that audiences will want to read.
3. The Value of a Clear Outline
One of the golden rules during my 4-month stint at this company was that writers were to stick to the project outline like glue. The trouble was, the company didn’t put any effort into tailoring the outlines to individual projects.
More often than not, the briefs were a mish-mash of previous outlines with key bits of information missed out or left in when they shouldn’t have been.
I would get briefs encouraging me to write in first person and incorporate “personal” stories (that I made up), only to be told in the editing phase that the client only ever publishes impersonal articles in the third person.
Several times I sourced images for articles when I didn’t need to, because the overarching Company Guidelines stated that we should always source at least one image. “You don’t need to do that, unless we specifically ask you to in the brief,” editors would say. After a while I stopped questioning why the Company Guidelines told a different story.
Without clear briefs, I often felt like I was feeling around in the dark hoping I was paying attention to the “right” parts of the outline.
This isn’t something unique to this company, however. It’s started happening in my copywriting projects as well. To combat the frustration that comes with a poorly written brief — and to get my clients thinking about what they really want to get out of the project — I’m creating a template they can fill in so I can get all the information I need up front without worrying that I’m missing something vital about the client or project.
(As an aside, I received several briefs from this company that recommended keeping the introduction short because “you get less bullsh*t from the writers”. I thought this was a comment from a particularly rude client until I saw the same comment on a brief for a different client and realised it came from management. It didn’t exactly endear them to me.)
Despite this, the job wasn’t all bad.
I wrote more in those 4 months than I had in years. There’s something to be said about being told what to write about each week; it staves off decision fatigue and gives you space to practice your craft.
The job allowed me to keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth. It also gave me something productive to do between my daily rituals of writing cover letters and perusing flat viewings. I also got to work with some great editors who gave me valuable feedback and made my writing better.
I was, in many ways, lucky to be able to resign when I did. I consider it a privilege to be in a position where I can be picky about the work I do and who I do it for — especially in 2020. Many are not that lucky, and I don’t begrudge anyone for working a job that doesn’t totally align with their values.
I now work a full-time job that gives me the financial freedom to pursue the writing I want to do. I don’t regret the previous hustle of churning out content for the sake of content, but I’m ultimately happier now that I can be the writer I want to be.
