Do you know how to keep your content fresh? Anyone who’s a freelance writer will tell you that one of the most obstinate obstacles they face in their line of work is not research, writing well, or even writing often. It’s keeping their content fresh. After all, if you write day in day out, how do you prevent yourself from churning out the same old, stale material.

One can only write on a topic a few times before writing the identical, old stuff they’re used to. Writers are often asked to write within the same niche – for years in some cases. This is compounded when you have a niche blog and publish material several times a week.

We’ll look at some of the obstacles that prevent us from keeping our content fresh, and some ways of combating them.

How To Keep Your Content Fresh

Be patient with the finished product

We all have deadlines, but rushing through your writing endangers the quality of the finished work. If you race through your article you’ll find your brain going on automatic and spitting out the same old information it already knows about your expert topic.

How to tackle impatience

• Take time to research – even if you know your topic well. Even doctors have to keep studying to stay abreast with common trends. If you’re writing about Google traffic, for example, the information you knew last month may not still be applicable today.
• Take time to add something different each time you write about a topic. Personal stories work very well in these cases. No matter if you’re giving your clients the same information as other writers, your personal story will make your piece stand out because you can be assured – no one else would write about that particular event. You don’t need to expand on personal stories because they may not always be appreciated or allowed. Even a small reference will serve to make your writing fresh and different.
• Set aside time to write and edit your piece. Keep refining and building it up. Each time you re-read your article you’ll see a different slant to it – something better or more interesting to add.

Avoid complacency to keep your writing fresh

One definite way to kill your work and produce stale product after stale product is to become complacent in your writing. You readers will notice and your clients will spot this in no time.

How to tackle complacency

• Take pride in your work, knowing that you and your reputation are only as good as this present work. The glorious articles of your past mean nothing if your present work is rubbish. If you love and enjoy your work, your clients and readers will sense this.
• Leave yourself enough time to edit and don’t be afraid to ask for more time if you need to. It’s better to deliver your work a little late rather than rushed through.
• Become focused and fresh by finding areas in your niche you want to specialise in, and become an authority on. This will help you to dig deeper and inspire you to become better and more unique at what you do.

Always keep your audience in mind to keep your content fresh

You have to take pleasure from your writing in order to keep doing it on a regular basis, so in some ways we do write for ourselves. However, when you start to write only for yourself, forgetting the needs of your clients and readers, your articles cease to be fresh.

Of course, specialising is a positive element of freelance writing, but if it becomes the only thing we have in mind while writing, our work will suffer because we will alienate our audience and our content will eventually become irrelevant to them.

How to tackle tunnel vision writing

• Make sure that each article has a nugget or two of real value to your audience. Read what you’ve written critically and ask yourself if you had to learn anything new to include in your article. If you didn’t have to, chances are your audience won’t learn from what you’ve fed them.
• Incorporate your keywords naturally. Make sure readers can find your work and learn from it, but make sure that your keywords aren’t intruding on their pleasant reading experience.
• If you run a blog, research what your readers want to learn from you and give them what they want. Your content will always be fresh to your audience if they’re getting what they want from your posts. This will make them come back for more constantly.

Keeping your work fresh requires patience, staying power, being on the ball and having your readers’ interests at heart. Remember that you can’t become an expert without first trawling through different elements of your niche to see what you’re best at and what you enjoy writing/researching most.

The next time you’re thinking of just throwing a post together from Frankenstein pieces of old articles, come back and read this piece to see what you should be doing as a progressive freelance writer or blogger. Success doesn’t come to writers who wait for it. You have to dedicate yourself at working hard and applying yourself diligently.