• Writing Skills Development & Professional Development

5 Ways Online Writing Services Can Boost Your Professional Writing Skills

  • Felix Rose-Collins
  • 7 min read
5 Ways Online Writing Services Can Boost Your Professional Writing Skills

Intro

Let's face it:

SEO, marketers, and other digital specialists underestimate writing skills. For them, it's something related to, well, writers and possible to outsource or delegate to AI.

The truth is that writing isn't about the physical act of putting words on paper. These skills are for more than book writers or students dealing with essays in college. They include the knowledge and abilities representatives of most industries should master.

This article will show why you must develop writing skills and how outsourced specialists and online writing services can help you.

Writing Skills: What They Include

Writing skills are a set of knowledge and abilities a person needs to express ideas and communicate messages through written language.

You need them in most industries: digital marketing, business correspondence, consulting, human resources, public relations — the list is endless. Email, sales copies, social media posts, blog articles, SEO texts, and technical documents — your brand presentation and online reputation depend on the ability to communicate senses through words.

If you're an adherent of the "everyone can write" mantra, it's time to forget it. (Why do you think many address Writing Help Online services to assist with text content?) While most of us wrote essays and other academic papers in college, far from all of us turned into Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Sugarman, or David Ogilvy, huh?

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Writing skills include:

  • Idea generation
  • Research
  • Reading comprehension
  • Time management (planning, critical thinking, focus, prioritization, and organization)
  • Outlining
  • Writing styles, tones, and formats
  • Stellar grammar and punctuation
  • Vocabulary power
  • Proofreading and editing
  • Communication skills

Why You Need Writing Skills If You're Not a Writer

Here are several scenarios when you'll use writing skills — even if you don't think your role requires the above knowledge and abilities:

First, it's emailing. Whether you use it for marketing purposes or business communication with colleagues and partners, it would help to know the basic writing rules. Grammar and punctuation, clear language patterns, and email formatting for better readability — it's about your professionalism and the impression you make on recipients.

Second, writing skills serve to enhance your communication with coworkers. Whether in Slack or other messaging apps, your ability to express ideas can prevent misunderstandings, conflicts, or irreversible project failures. More than that, concise writing saves time and better organizes working processes:

One clear text message in Slack can replace an hour-long meeting in Zoom. It won't distract colleagues from tasks, thus encouraging more productive and efficient work.

Also, you'll need writing skills for** delegating tasks to others, giving feedback on their work, and reporting on the progress/results**.

Proper writing helps **outline plans and roadmaps **for the team, take notes on meetings or other online events (training, webinars, online courses, etc.), and craft contracts and other official documents.

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**In the world of digital marketing, **writing skills will come in handy for:

  • Crafting sales pitches
  • SEO writing
  • Content writing and copywriting
  • Social media marketing
  • Creating newsletters, presentations, product descriptions, power pages, and other marketing materials
  • Communicating with customers
  • Updating project management plans or revising marketing campaigns
  • Writing efficient PPC ads
  • Prescribing brand strategies

How to Boost Pro Writing Skills With Online Services

Now that we've agreed on the role writing skills play in business success and efficient communication, it's time to reveal the instruments that help you boost them and become a more professional writer in your niche.

Here's the main issue with that:

When typing the "how to improve writing skills" keyword in Google, the results will hardly meet the search intent of a marketer. They'll tell you to read more, write regularly, and enhance your grammar and vocabulary. What's the solution?

Ask experts.

Online writing services seem the most evident solution for non-writers: You need content but can't write, so why not order it from those who can, right?

Not quite.

Your win-win collaboration with outsourced specialists isn't only about placing an order and getting a complete draft. We suggest that you change your perspective:

Look at their work as something to "examine and learn," not "take and forget." Below are the five things you can get from online writing services if you use their capacities for professional growth.

1 — Understand Styles, Structures, and Purposes

Outsourced specialists and services can help you learn and distinguish between different writing styles, structures, and purposes. You'll know the proper content formats depending on the target audience and the publishing channel.

demandjump

Image: Demand Jump

A blog post, a product review, and a journal article have different writing rules and details. Reading and studying the writing types you want to master, you'll see language patterns, paragraph formatting, and information structure that would work best.

Read texts from online services like it's your job:

  • Pay attention to word choice for different writing styles
  • Examine sentence structure and the information flow
  • Note the tone: Is it conversational or more serious (academic or technical)?

Also, do your best to understand how different writing styles and tones work for the target audience.

Professional writers put themselves into a reader's shoes, considering the readers' knowledge level and expectations from the content. For example, your brand story on social media would be shorter, less formal, and more visually rich than the same story but for presenting to investors or publishing in a local newspaper.

2 — Learn Persuasive Writing Techniques

Ask online content creators to teach you persuasive writing techniques. They're critical for digital marketers and everyone working with customers to know because such writing is about convincing the audience to agree with your idea.

The purpose of this content is to advertise, persuade, and sell; it's responsible for the Consideration and Decision stages in a sales funnel.

Learning from copywriting experts, you'll know how to craft headlines, landing pages, social media ads, case studies, and sales emails. You'll understand how texts with specific lexical items, word combinations, and visual hooks can make the readers want to respond.

Online writing services can teach you to use psychological triggers like FOMO (fear of missing out), urgency, or nostalgia to influence buying decisions. You'll get the idea behind emotional writing tactics like sensory words, neuro copywriting, and phonosemantics to make your message stand out and outperform competitors.

3 — Master Storytelling

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Image: Nathan Baugh on X

Storytelling is a powerful writing technique to make your target audience remember your brand and _want _to listen to your message. Why does it work?

The human brain retains 65-70% of information through stories and only 10% from data. A story activates the areas responsible for experiences so readers "see" it as if it happens. As a result, an emotional response arises, making the audience emphasize and remember your brand.

mediamortar

Image: Media Mortar

Ask online experts to craft a narrative based on your business background and explain all the elements to include to become a brand story:

  1. Plot — events in your story
  2. Setting — a location and time where/when the events happen
  3. Character — a protagonist driving the plot of your story
  4. Conflict — a problem your protagonist resolves
  5. Moral — what you want the readers to understand and get from your story

Speaking of the main character:

It's not your brand but your audience. By identifying their core challenges, pains, and goals, you'll know the right points to highlight in the content so it resonates with the target.

You can make this writing technique even more powerful: Ask experts to explain alternative storytelling techniques. It's an opportunity to make your sales copy stand out and lead your target customers to the desired action.

4 — Learn Self-Edit

Self-editing is an essential writing skill to master. It's the process of revising a complete draft for clarity, grammar mistakes, repetition, logical structure, readability, and other elements.

Working with online writing services, you'll learn what to check and pay attention to when revising your drafts before submitting them for review or publishing them at your resources.

While you may delegate editing to outsourced specialists, it would help to do minimum proofreading yourself to ensure you use proper terms, data, facts, tone of voice, etc. Thus, you'll communicate professionalism and build a reputation as a responsible creator who cares about the audience.

(Moreover, hired editors can only know some details about your business and the goals you pursue with this particular text. Make their work easier and save your nerves, time, and costs.)

5 — Outperform AI Text Generators

AI tools are on the rise, and specialists are exploring the possibilities of their application in different niches. At the same time, such instruments are not a panacea:

While their features impress, they aren't (yet!) as intelligent as many believe. Speaking of AI text generators, their drawbacks are evident, and they are among the top reasons why reputable resources are so strict about AI content and reject texts marked by AI detectors as artificial.

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Image: WritingBreeze on X

With that in mind, professional human writers polish skills to craft texts that outperform AI's in quality. By examining expert content from online writing services, you can see how to build texts so they don't look AI-generated:

  • Say no to complex words and constructions. AI writers love sophisticated, thesaurus-like lexical items that don't engage but distract readers. Lengthy constructions like "it plays a pivotal role" or "in today's fast-paced digital world" and redundant -ly adverbs are a no-no, too.
  • Mix short and long sentences to create writing rhythm. Add literary techniques like metaphors, analogies, or contrast to keep the audience engaged and guide them through your texts.
  • Use different text structures. AI crafts same-looking articles: one paragraph = intro, several body paragraphs of the same length and look, and a concluding paragraph. Make yours look more human: Diversify text blocks, use writing hooks, add visuals, write creative transitional phrases, etc.
  • Be specific. Avoid vague words like "thing" or "and so on;" eliminate fillers like "that" or "just." State what you mean, guide readers through each point, and share unique expertise and insights rather than generic info AI can find online and duplicate.

When using an AI article writer as an assistant in content creation, do your best to prompt it accordingly and revise its work to communicate expertise and quality.

Long Story Short

Writing skills are critical for all specialists, regardless of their niche. Whether you are a marketer crafting strategies or a web developer dealing with code and communication, the talent to express ideas will be useful. Please don't hesitate to ask writing experts and online services for assistance:

Their experience can help you boost your knowledge and (why not?) reconsider your attitude towards professionals armed with words.

Felix Rose-Collins

Felix Rose-Collins

Ranktracker's CEO/CMO & Co-founder

Felix Rose-Collins is the Co-founder and CEO/CMO of Ranktracker. With over 15 years of SEO experience, he has single-handedly scaled the Ranktracker site to over 500,000 monthly visits, with 390,000 of these stemming from organic searches each month.

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