Contrasting feedback is an integral part of working as a content writer

Dec 21, 2005

I’ve been working as a web content writer and freelance copywriter for more than two years now. This is the official time I’m talking about. Unofficially – not promoting my content writing service through a website, not advertising in AdWords, not optimizing my website for the relevant keywords, etc. — since 1995 I think. Back then I wrote many learning modules and had created a niche in the local computer learning centers by writing easy to understand, humorous tutorials. People didn’t know much about the Dummies series back then, and neither did I.

Since then I’ve come a long way. Although I’m still designing websites (and I’m about to relaunch this part of my business shortly), if all of a sudden I stop developing and designing websites, I can manage my finances easily just writing content.

Two separate incidents evoked my desire to write this post. Yesterday I received a very “disappointing” feedback from a client. I don’t want to publish the email due to a strict policy I follow, but the client said the content was written in a miserable manner, had many grammatical errors, and somethings I wrote were not even remotely connected to the service he is providing. I immediately wrote back an apology and assured him that if need be, I’d completely re-write the whole thing. Re-writing is no big deal as the first draft – especially if it is a long, specialized copy – generally requires one or two re-writes.

Anyway, I thought maybe because I’m using OpenOffice’s Writer as my word processor I messed up with the grammar part somehow. I opened the document in MS-Word and it didn’t show the mentioned grammatical errors. Then word-by-word I went through the whole thing. Maybe some style issues were there, but I didn’t find any syntactical errors. I wrote to the client, requesting him to point out the errors so that I could iron them out. Haven’t received a reply yet.

Then in the morning I received another feedback from another client, saying that her website has started making sales ever since I re-wrote her content. She wants me to write regularly for her and she hopes that my writing can make even the other website of hers successful.

I get the latter sort of comments more often and it is very rare that I receive the negative feedback. Negative feedbacks are humbling, they keep you on your toes, and even if you think that to some extent they shouldn’t be negative, the make you learn and re-learn your skill on an ongoing basis.