Writing Skills

improve your writing skills

15 Ways To Improve Your Writing Skills As An Entrepreneur

Have you ever thought about finding quick ways to improve your writing skills as an entrepreneur?

Business owners tend to feel an immense amount of pressure to be able to do it all and do it all well. Writing for your business is one skill you must nail to feel successful.

However, we also understand that even the most high-achieving entrepreneurs can feel burnt out, against a wall, and just plain ol’ uninspired when writing for their business.

For some, it’s been a while since you’ve sat in a classroom fine-tuning your creative writing brain. And for others, writing anything is your worst nightmare – even with all of the coffee in the world to keep you going (we’ve been there, too).

But we’re not here to gatekeep the best ways to improve your writing skills as an entrepreneur, which is why we’ve created the list below.

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Improve Their Writing Skills

As an entrepreneur, you have many many many hats on your head. Writing is one of those hats that will continue to serve you over and over again. 

Similar to accounting, you need to know how to do it. Whether you should do it – that’s an entirely different question. 

But when it comes to your words, you need to have the skill sharpened. When you know how to communicate effectively through the written word, you are able to: 

  • Close sales on the deals you actually want
  • Attract the right types of clients
  • Secure financing through traditional loans or investment
  • Motivate your team, vendors, and clients
  • Limit the back and forth in email because you got your point across clearly

The limits are endless when you know how to write well.

How To Improve Your Writing Skills

Yes, writing is a skill. This means you need to practice every now and then to avoid making mistakes while getting your message across clearly. Here are 15 ways to improve your writing skills as an entrepreneur.

1. Create A Daily Practice To Write

Again, writing is a skill much like swimming or cooking. You can excel at it, but it takes time and practice.

To clarify, you don’t need to sign up for another college course or set aside hours of your day. You can polish your general writing skills in as little as 15 minutes a day using quick writing quizzes from free sources like the Academic English Cafe

If you’re looking for less structure, pick a fun prompt you can use to write a short story for yourself. Set the clock and write as much as possible in 15 minutes, then stop. Plug your story into software like Grammarly to check for spelling and grammar and see how to improve your style.

No extra time on your hands? We’re here to help. Let’s talk about what you want out of copywriting for your business.

2. Diversify Writing Styles

Go back to choosing a fun prompt. This time, take only a few minutes to write using 3 different styles. You can alter anything you want to make it sound…

  • Extra professional
  • Positive and lighthearted
  • Extremely emotional
  • Sales focused
  • Exciting
  • Straight forward

When you’re done, take a look at all 3 and read them aloud to yourself to get a better idea of which styles you excel at and which could use a bit more work. Believe us when we say there’s a big difference between writing styles depending on your voice and tone.

3. Time Yourself

There are 2 solid ways you can practice timing your writing in 15 minutes or less:

  1. Answer an industry-based FAQ you definitely know everything about
  2. Discuss an industry-related hot topic you wish you knew more about

The first will allow you to see how much and how well you can get your point across in those 15 minutes. The second will give you a short chance to research and write what you know with the same previous goal in mind. 

Reread both finished prompts and try to pinpoint places where you could improve.

4. Select Your Favorite Passage Or Page To Copy

Have you ever read something that you truly admired? 

Whether you were looking at another company’s website or e-blast, you can emulate a similar style in your own writing without being a complete copycat. Here’s how to do just that using a landing page like this one:

  1. Find a landing page you admire
  2. Break down the page line by line into clear sections like…
    1. Headlines
    2. Subheadings
    3. Body copy
    4. Call-to-actions (CTA buttons)
    5. Final statement or header
  3. Write about your own business following a similar style

Once you feel like you’re going in a good direction, take a step back, and admire your hard work.

Thinking about adding engaging landing pages for your business but don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered!

5. Record Yourself, Then Transcribe

Let’s say you’ve been chosen to give a speech on a popular topic in your industry. Keep the speech under 5 minutes and simply speak on the topic while recording yourself. 

As soon as you’re done, start transcribing what you’ve said. Chances are, you’ll notice right away the number of times you say things you would NEVER write. This includes words like…um, err, uh, like, and anything else that isn’t truly a full thought (Hint: Don’t include those). From there, you can write down everything else you’ve said and edit it to make it more concise and digestible to read.

Psst! If you do this, you can create a blog or social media post for yourself. 

6. Edit Someone Else’s Writing

One of the best ways to hone your writing skills is to edit other people’s writing. This allows you to get used to various styles and personalities to see what fits where best. Don’t know where to look? Start with editing friends’ or family members’ social media posts or emails they’ve sent (just don’t be so quick to point out their errors ????). 

If you’re comfortable, ask someone to write something for you to edit it for them. You never know, it might spark up some pretty interesting conversations about writing choices and preferences. 

7. Let Someone Else Edit Your Writing

Whether you pick a friend, colleague, spouse, or whomever, this practice will require you to be open to criticism. Choose something you’ve written before or something you haven’t yet published. Pass it on and be patient. Allow your editor time to read, edit, and offer other feedback if necessary.

It’s important to be open here because making mistakes doesn’t need to feel like the end of the world. Try to see it as a learning experience so you don’t make the same mistakes moving forward.

8. Don’t Be Afraid To Travel Back To The Basics

Let’s talk about timing yourself to gauge your typing speed. Most people consider this the number of words you type per minute (WPM). You can use a free tool online like this one from LiveChat to see where you stand on the writing race track. This is a good tool to use every now and again to get a quick measure of your WPM and the number of errors made. Continue practicing until you reach a new higher WPM with zero errors.

9. Try Benefits > Features

Every business owner knows which cool, innovative, or unique features they offer. But knowing the difference between a feature and a benefit is even more important. 

For example, if you run a dental clinic, described features usually look like:

  • Customer Parking Lot
  • Open Late On Tuesdays
  • Fast Service
  • Kids Dental

But here’s what they could look like when turned into true benefits to really entice your customers or potential customers:

  • No-Stress, Free Parking In Nearby Lot
  • No PTO Needed With Late Tuesday Appointments Available
  • Wait Time Is Always 10 Minutes Or Less
  • Quality Dental Services For Kids Ages 4+

So, what about your business? Write down your offered features and turn them into big benefits your audience can’t wait to learn more about.

10. Be Your Own Headline Hero

Take 10 minutes to jot down as many headline options you can think of for your business. Good, bad, and ugly – write them all down! Don’t overthink it or focus too hard on perfecting each one. This is a fantastic exercise to do when you feel uninspired, unfocused, or everything in between. Have fun with it! Use puns, wordplay (personal favorites), bold statements, and questions to spark your creativity.

11. Practice Punctuation.

We like to have fun here…But honestly, practice using the correct punctuation throughout your writing. You can use a simple spell-check tool to see if you got it right or to explore other options. For example, if you’ve never truly been strict about using the Oxford comma, give it a shot and see how it fits with your writing style. In addition to improving accuracy, practicing punctuation is also a good way to explore different writing styles.

12. Dear Diary Journal

You’re a working professional and entrepreneur, so we can go ahead and call it journaling now ????. 

Make journaling a short practice that you do every day or even once a week using an actual notebook (just smell those fresh pages) or your laptop, phone, or tablet. You don’t need a prompt to journal. You don’t even have to think about anything in particular to start writing! Simply write what you feel for a few minutes before you start work.

Do you have night owl energy? 

Journal late at night before going to bed and reread your thoughts in the morning!

13. Access A Writing Course

There are so many professional-quality writing courses for businesses available online. You just need to find the one that aligns with your goals. Courses like these don’t need to take up too much of your time and should be easy to follow. Courses like these also offer the most benefits as they allow you to chip away at their entirety on your own time. When you’re finished, you have a wealth of new knowledge you can use throughout all of your writing assets moving forward.

Join ours here: Launch Your Website Copy Academy

14. Explore Other Words

If you’ve done any of the above before, you can probably pick out words you might be overusing or repeating often. Put those words in a list and expand each one with 2 to 5 new words you can use in their place. Some commonly used words you should consider switching up include: 

  • Great
  • Amazing
  • Different
  • Utilize
  • New
  • Hard
  • Change
  • Important

Do you use these words too often in your writing? Add some flair when necessary to spice it up for your readers.

15. Sleep On It

Seriously! 

Once you’ve written something, taking a little break from it before hitting publish is okay. Give yourself the time to walk away from your writing and return to it with fresh eyes. You might find that you have a better way of saying what you’re trying to say when looking at it a second time.

No Time To Practice? Leave The Pen To The Pros!

Writing can feel overwhelming, and not everyone is comfortable writing for their business. But we are. 

Contact FocusCopy for a hearty cup of copy for your business goals.

Focus Your Copy On Conversation & Conversion

Let’s Grab A Virtual Coffee With Us To Discover How To Boost Your Words
how to improve your writing

How to Improve Your Writing Skills: A Guide By Professional Writers

For people who want to begin improving their writing, for personal or professional reasons, it can feel daunting sifting through all the different resources and “How-To” articles online. 

So, this guide aims to not only be useful for veteran writers who want to really hone their craft, but for entrepreneurs who want to write their business copy, and for anyone who’s just starting to put pen to paper.

10,000 Hours? There’s A Better Way to Become A Good Writer (Or How to Practice Deliberately) 

Have you ever heard that achieving mastery in a skill takes 10,000 hours? While putting 10,000 hours into anything will probably make you an expert, it isn’t exactly necessary for improving your writing skills. 

See, the quality of your practice techniques plays just as important of a role in your growth as the number of hours you dedicate to your skill. If you instead prioritize the skills that will help you see the biggest results from your efforts, you’ll become a better writer that much faster. 

Define Your Writing Goals: Get As Specific As Possible!

So, all this to say – define your goals! 

What kind of writing do you want to create? Are you just wanting to improve your email communication skills? Put together better blog articles? Rewrite your business’s website copy? Or simply learn how you’re feeling at the end of a long day? Of course, there are a lot of other writing goals you might have. But clearly defining these goals helps you create a plan of action. 

Once you have a goal in mind, try to go even deeper. For example, if you feel like you’re always looking for the right word, get familiar with a thesaurus. Or maybe you want to write stronger titles and subject lines. 

Whatever your goal may be, honing in on what you want out of your writing will not only motivate you to keep practicing, but it gives you a sense of direction. This means you can avoid the experience of overwhelm when you start Googling around. 

Are you a solopreneur looking for support in growing your business? Partner with FocusCopy! Together, we’ll explore your goals, eliminate your marketing roadblocks, and help you at each stage of your journey. Arrange to meet for a discovery call today

Adopt A Growth Mindset 

Before we go any further, let’s get the hard truth out of the way: there’s no magic bullet to becoming a master writer in a short amount of time. 

Spanx didn’t just become a $1.6 billion company overnight. It took 21 years to accomplish that. 

Like building a recognizable and valuable brand, becoming a better writer takes practice, time, and effort.

This isn’t to deter you from writing but instead is a gentle reminder that whatever you put into your writing is what you’ll receive out of it. 

So with that being said, embrace the journey! 

Try to accept that improving your writing won’t exactly happen overnight, but remind yourself that you WILL become a stronger writer as long as you keep showing up. By doing this, you’re equipping yourself with a powerful mindset – one that is invaluable for accomplishing your writing goals. 

Even though it’s discouraging at times to not progress as quickly as you’d like, that isn’t a reason to give up completely! A growth mindset acknowledges the reality that everyone grows at their own pace; and that any progress is far better than no progress at all. 

[Related: Tackle The Lies Imposter Syndrome Tells You]

It’s Better To Go Slow Than Fast 

When we want to learn a new hobby or skill, it’s tempting to dive headfirst into as many resources, learning materials, or books as we can. Eventually, your bookmark folders are so full of links and pages you don’t even know where to start. 

You load up on so much information that now it seems like there are too many paths open for you to take and it’s hard to nail the right one down. 

Well, this has a term: it’s called analysis paralysis. When you don’t know what option is best because there seems to be a plethora, your progress in the skill you’re working on slows down dramatically. 

But here’s the thing: you do want to go slow, but not because you’re spending all of your time trying to decipher what you should learn first. 

Consistent, daily efforts are the real goal here. So, try to start with a few strategies instead of many. 

How To Be Consistent

If you’re wanting to write the copy on your website, follow our how-to guide, and write thirty minutes to an hour each day for a week. 

The same goes for any form of writing, though. You’ll improve your writing much faster and more meaningfully if you choose just one thing to focus on each day rather than trying something new every time you sit down to write. While you do want to try new strategies, (more on this a little later), you need a solid foundation first. Practice specific skills every day, and you’ll see measurable results from your work as time goes on. This is another area where having clearly defined goals is also so important. 

When you try to do too much, it can feel overwhelming and impossible to get to the result you’re reaching for. Think about when you were in the high school band, played sports, or any other activity that required you to practice. 

If you were presented with a challenging piece of music, you might have initially been turned off from it completely or felt like you would never be able to learn it. But breaking the score down into smaller parts allowed you to slowly learn how to hit all the notes, tempo changes, and eventually, play the whole piece. 

Improving your writing skills is no different. 

Break it down, go slow, and you’ll be surprised how much your writing develops!  

Find A Writing Mentor 

Even if your mentor of choice is from the last century, studying the work of a writer you admire can have a profound effect on your growth. When you find a writer whose style you’re particularly drawn to, take a step back and think about what it is about their work that you find so enthralling. 

Do they make every word count? 

Can they seem to breathe life into the smallest of details? 

Does their writing light a fire inside of you? 

Whatever reason it may be, something is pulling you to their work. Try to uncover what it is, because once you figure it out, the reason speaks to what kind of writer you want to become. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing poetry, short stories, or putting together an email campaign for your eCommerce business – collecting samples of writing you love and that inspires you is key for not only your development as a writer, but for your motivation to keep showing up and putting words on a blank page. 

Understand Your Audience 

If your audience is just for you and you alone, then that’s okay! But if you’re writing for your own business, it’s helpful to understand who your audience is. Because once you know the language your audience speaks, you can write directly to them!

So, dedicating more time to studying your target audience’s problems, wants, and needs will give you a stronger foundation for writing copy that resonates.  

The Art of Self-Editing

While you could consider self-editing less important to improving your writing than, well, writing itself, self-editing is a fundamental skill every writer should hone. 

Editing your own work can be challenging. Mostly because as writers, we can be invisible to our blind spots. There might be areas where our writing falls short of our goals and expectations, or there are parts where we just aren’t as clear as we should be.

Learning how to self-edit is about teaching yourself where your weaknesses might be or showing you the places where you can improve and become a better writer that much more quickly. Because if we don’t know where we might be struggling, we could continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. So understanding where you are and where you can improve is like equipping yourself with a personalized manual on how to reach your writing success. It’s also helpful to remember that a first draft will almost always need refining. But you have to have a draft to start with first! 

How do you become a better self-editor? 

Read Your Writing Out Loud! 

Reading your writing aloud is perhaps the single best editing strategy a writer can practice. When you read your writing out loud, you catch punctuation or spelling errors much more easily, and of course, you can hear how your writing sounds. 

This is especially helpful because when you read something out loud, it’s almost as if you’re reading it as the reader and not the writer. It allows you to experience your writing with a fresh perspective. You’ll be able to catch where the writing sounds awkward or gets jumbled up or where sentences carry on far too long.

Print Out Your Writing 

If you mostly write using your computer and keyboard, try printing out your work. In the same way that reading aloud can give you another perspective on your writing, so can holding a physical copy of a document. 

Printing your work out allows you to make marks on the page, which engages your editing skills. It’s also an incredible tool for organizing your writing. Instead of scrolling up and down a page, cutting and pasting sections until they’re organized logically, being able to refer to each paragraph instantly can help you put the pieces together. 

Done Is MUCH Better Than Perfect 

Though self-editing is a great skill to pick up on as a writer of any level, try not to get too carried away with the revising process. It can be surprisingly easy to keep editing your work and rewriting sections, hoping to get everything just right – until you’ve spent much more time on the piece than you intended. 

So, all this to say, try to put in a hard deadline to finish the piece. 

That way, you’ll actually hit “Publish”! 

Write In A Different Genre Or Format

Challenging yourself to write something completely different is a great way to spark new inspiration and creativity. By branching out to different writing styles or content pieces, you could end up finding new ways to express yourself.

When you experiment with new genres, you’re actively broadening your writing knowledge. This allows you to pull from a variety of different styles to create unique pieces. And, this helps you refine your own style as well.

Need to produce a wide variety of content for your audience? From well-researched blogs to engaging email campaigns, FocusCopy can produce content that will build your community, and help scale your business. Contact us to learn more about our services

Read: The Real Secret to Improving Your Writing 

Reading is the number one habit any writer can practice to see their writing grow. No matter what kind of writing you want to improve in, there is content available to read! 

From movie scripts, literary novels, Social Media ads, promotional emails, and more, when you read the content you want to create, you’ll start to pick up on how different writers approach the writing process. You’ll also learn new words, refine your punctuation and grammar, and get a sense of how to create a writing voice. 

So, pick up a few books or start collecting pieces of writing that you like and save them for your reference! 

Hand-Copy To Learn Copywriting

When you were first learning how to draw, did you ever trace pictures? It can be a helpful tool for learning how to draw because you can get a sense of how to form shapes or lines. 

Well, hand-copying writing is very similar. When you hand-copy a piece of writing, the goal is to slow down and consider each word that the writer is using. 

This exercise is best done by hand with a pen and paper because writing by hand helps you remember the information you’re copying down. Think of hand-copying writing as a way of taking notes like you would in class.

Ready To Craft An Authentic Digital Storefront With FocusCopy?

Whether you’re building your business from the ground up or transitioning away from traditional brick and mortar to the online space, having a professional website is crucial to your success. With our website writing course, you’ll learn how to outline, brainstorm, and write copy for your website that connects with your target audience. Explore our resources here.

Focus Your Copy On Conversation & Conversion

Let’s Grab A Virtual Coffee With Us To Discover How To Boost Your Words