Over ¼ of the websites active on the internet today use WordPress. That shouldn’t be surprising. More and more brands are discovering the platform that is easy to setup and customize. It’s a great tool for getting your message out to your audience. Your WordPress blog will likely become your content marketing flagship.
What you may not realize is that beyond being a great blogging and website platform, WordPress can also make you a better writer. It’s true! By making smart use of plugins and tools, you can become a better content creator.
Use The Writing Helper Tool to Solicit Feedback on Your Posts
The writing helper tool is found on the post editor screen, and is ideal for helping you to produce the best posts possible. If you’ve ever published a post, then realized it was just not up to par, you know how cringe-worthy that is. Writing helper allows you to loop in a collaborator or send your unpublished post to coworkers, friends, or family members for feedback.
Writing Helper also has a feature that allows you to copy a post including tags and categories to another post. This can help you to avoid duplicating your efforts. Finally, if you’d like to hide writing helper just uncheck it in the screen options menu.
Writing an EBook or White Paper? WordPress Can Help
This isn’t a tool as much as it as a technique. You’ve learned how to create a blog on WordPress. You’ve also realized what a great writing environment the tool provides. Why not put that to good use while you work on your latest e book or white paper?
With WordPress, you have the ability to set up a private blog. This is great if you want to create something you only share with an inner circle of people. It’s even better as a way to create, and work on longer form content such as white papers or ebooks.
Let’s say you are writing a white paper on selecting IT security solutions for small to medium sized businesses. You can create a private blog using the title of the paper as the title of the blog. Then, each section of the paper can be written as individual blog posts. It’s perfect for keeping larger writing projects organized, and gives you a great way to view your work in pieces or as a whole.
The Full Screen Editor Enables Distraction Free Writing
It’s great that their are editors available with all sorts of widgets and tools, when that’s what you need. It’s not so great when all you want to do is write without all the extra ‘help’. Thankfully, WordPress offers a full screen, distraction free writer. Here are video and text instructions for opening up the full screen editor.
Full screen editing is available in both WordPress’ visual and text editors. It provides a minimalistic writing experience, that aids concentration. If you are working on content that needs to be heavily researched or particularly well written try the fullscreen editor out.
The Post Title Formatter Can Polish Your Posts
Post title formatters may not be the the most complex or feature rich tool, but this one will certainly impress bloggers with the handy things that it can do. These features include adding spaces after commas, removing the full stop at the end of your title, and capitalizing the first letter of titles and headers. By having a tool take care of these nit picky little details, you will have more time to concentrate on creating the well written image filled content that your readers want.
Use The Proofreading Tool to Ensure Polished And Professional End Results
If you use the WordPress visual editor, you can click on the proofreading tab to check on the quality of your writing as you go. Color coded errors let you know exactly what is going on. Style suggestions are in blue, grammatical errors are in green, and spelling errors are in the standard red.
To get suggestions on fixing an error, you can simply click on it. There is even an ‘explain’ feature if you are unsure of why something is being marked as incorrect. You can even customize the editor. Your options include checking for bias language, hidden verbs, cliches, double negatives, and more. You can also opt to proofread automatically before publishing.
Boost Your SEO
Search engine optimization ensures that your blog or website content has the best chance of being found in relevant search engine results. On the technical side, there are many things you can do. You can use a plugin such as Yoast which will very nearly take care of all of your SEO tasks outside of writing. You can also ensure that you create a sitemap to help search engines better index your website.
For now, let’s focus on how implementing a few techniques can improve your writing and your SEO. First, break your writing into short paragraphs. Then, use a headline analyzer to ensure your title will draw people in. Finally, the earlier mentioned Yoast plugin has a tool that you can use to ensure that you are using keywords in the right ways, and in the right places.
Conclusion
How do you become a better writer? You start by getting in a lot of practice. You learn how to write a good story. You perfect your spelling and grammar skills. You develop the knowledge required to optimize your posts. You also give yourself the time and space to simply write. The tools and tips listed above exemplify ways in which WordPress can make you a better writer. Take full advantage of this platform to take your writing to the next level.
