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Why and How to Proofread Content – Simple Yet Powerful Content Proofreading and Editing Techniques

content proofreading techniques

If you are an internet entrepreneur or more precisely, if you want to sell anything online, the most powerful weapon that you have, is your content. Content is so powerful that it alone can make or break a business.

Here in this article, I am going to tell you why content proofreading is an outright important aspect of content marketing, and how to proofread your content more effectively. I will also list down a few simple yet powerful content proofreading strategies that will help you edit your writing professionally.

I am sure; you have heard the term “content is the king.”

But have you ever thought why content is so very essential for a business, and how it helps grow the company from zero to a million-dollar business?

Yes, you can literally make a multimillion-dollar business just by creating content that will bring heaps of customers to your website and landing pages, convince them to convert into sales frequently, and thus will upswing your company’s bottom-line.

But the question is how to create such content that will entice your consumers and lure them into buying from you?

Well, the answer is simple yet not easy.

Create content that answers your customers’ questions, shows them the way to solve a particular problem, and engages them with you. Remember, it’s not about only creating content, but it is more about creating high-quality content that truly empowers your customers and adds significant value to their lives.

Okay, now, without any further ado, let’s get started.

Why Content is So Much Essential for an Internet Business, and How It Helps Continue and Accelerate Its Growth

Written content is by far the most influential asset that you can create for your business or website. Content not only gets you the customers, but it actually helps you attract customers forever.

Now, if you don’t understand this, let’s simplify it further.

Let’s assume that there are two companies, company A and company B. Company A is indulged in creating high-quality content and investing amount X for that every month, where company B is spending the same X amount monthly in paid advertising like Google and Facebook ads.

Initially, this will allow company B to make more profit than company A. But what if both of them continue this investment for the next one year? Gradually but surely, company A will surpass the profit of company B.

But this is not all. After a few years, if both of them cut down their budget for content creation and paid advertising, where company A will still continue reaping profits from its published contents, company B will experience a severe nosedive in sales conversion and thus in profit.

So, what made company A remain profitable, and company B see the major breakdown after retrenching the marketing expenditure?

The answer is content.

How Content Helps in Earning More Profits

Content has several benefits; however, the most lucrative prize that it offers is indeed making more sales.

But how does content help in increasing the sales and profits of a company?

Let’s see.

Content Improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Increases Traffic

New contents make search engines crawl your website more frequently and index its contents faster. Therefore, if you follow a content calendar and consistently create unique content for your site, Google search bots will be attracted to your website, and eventually, they will index your content regularly.

On top of that, if you stay relevant to your niche and continue creating content, you will be able to target more keywords that your customers are searching for. This will help you rank your content for those keywords and bring traffic to your website or landing pages.

Additionally, high-quality content of your website will influence other content creators to link to your articles from their website. This will substantially improve your contents’ ranking and increase organic as well as referral visitors to your site.

Content Builds Your Authority and Emerges the Brand as a One-Stop Information Hub

High-quality contents build authority, period.

There is nothing more powerful than written content that improves the authority of a brand or an individual.

Ask yourself, how do you search for an authoritative brand or a person? You have to check their social clout, media coverages, and customer ratings, etc. Besides these, another key parameter you have to take into consideration is what other authoritative brands and pros have to say about them.

Analyzing these will clearly validate the authority of a brand or an individual. And all of these get improved when you consistently create compelling, well-researched contents relevant to your industry.

Even if you are a relatively small brand, you can make the bigger brands talk about you through your painstakingly created content. And the more you do it, the higher will be your authority and brand value.

Content Develops Customers’ Trust

Why do we trust Google? We trust Google because it helps us discover what we are searching for.

This simply means that if you can provide your customers with what they need, it will grow their trust in your brand.

And apart from your products (or services), what else can you offer to your consumers, which will empower them to accomplish and achieve something significant in their daily life?

Obviously, the answer is information and knowledge.

So, if you can consistently create content that helps your audience stay two steps ahead in their profession, employment, education, or life, they will start trusting you and your brand.

Content Increases the Sales and Return on Investment (ROI)

Now that you have improved your website’s SEO, increased the traffic, built the authority of your brand, and grown the trust of your customers, you are bound to attain more sales and reap more profits. And undoubtedly, you can achieve all of these just by creating informative and insightful content consistently and serving them to your customers.

If you see this in deep, you will know, you have two-fold benefits of doing this.

How? Let’s see.

Assume that earlier, before you started creating content, you had an average X amount of traffic to your website, Y amount of sales, and Z amount of profit every month. Now after you start and continue creating content, you may see a 3 * X amount of visitors coming to your website every month, which will make a 3-Y amount of sales, and finally earn you a 3-Z amount of profit. So, your revenue has increased three times.

Now, this isn’t all. As you have built your authority and grown customers’ trust in your brand, you will experience a significant improvement in your sales conversion rate.

So, now considering that and redoing the above calculation, let’s see what we have achieved.

Earlier, you got monthly X amount of traffic in an average, Y amount sales, and Z amount of profit. But now, after diving deep into content creation, you get 3 * X amount of traffic. You may also be able to double up your sales conversion rate that will make the sales to a whopping 3 * 2 * Y amount, and finally, this makes the 6-Z amount of profit for the business.

Yes, these numbers are hypothetical and may not match in every case, but what I tried to convey here is, you will see a hefty percentage of increase in your profit after you start and continue creating content.

Why Do You Need to Proofread Content?

While you are creating content consistently, you must also focus on its proofreading. Content proofreading is equally crucial, and if not done correctly, it may cost you a lot.

Now, before you understand how you can improve your proofreading skills, you should know the things that you should proofread in your content.

  • You need to proofread the sentences.
  • You should proofread the Proper Nouns.
  • Proofread the punctuation.
  • Proofread your sentence cases and formatting.
  • Proofread any redundancy and repetition that isn’t required.

Proofread Sentences

While proofreading your content, make sure to go for one sentence at a time. This will make the entire proofreading process easier and effective.

In some cases, you may also proofread one portion of a sentence before going to its next part. You should also try to break a complex sentence into multiple simple sentences, and even convert passive voice to active voice.

Proofread the Proper Nouns

Proper nouns identify a single or a group of entities. Proper nouns can be a location name, product’s name, or a company’s name. E.g., India, Flipkart, WordPress, etc. A Proper noun will always begin with a capital letter no matter where it is used in a sentence.

Additionally, if it is a company’s name, you should also check how the company writes the name, and you always need to use the name in that case. Like in the case of WordPress, you cannot write it like “wordpress” or “Wordpress,” you should always write it “WordPress.”

Proofread the Punctuation

Punctuation seems less important, but in reality, wrong use of punctuation can completely break the sentence and its meaning. Therefore, proofread the content to spot the improper use of punctuation and correct them quickly.

Proofread the Sentence Cases and Formatting

Double-check your sentence cases. You might have missed while writing the content, and used lower case letters at the beginning of sentences. Correcting those takes not more than a few minutes but makes your content look more professional.

Also, keep your eyes on your sentence formatting especially, on your paragraph headings. Paragraph headings should be identical throughout the content and across the website.

Proofread and Remove Content Redundancy and Unnecessary Repetition

Repeating the same point multiple times to lengthen the content is not advisable. Long-form contents perform better, period. But repeating points to make the content looks longer doesn’t make any sense, as this will no way help you in SEO and ranking.

Now that you know the things you need to proofread in your content, let’s now see how to correct content effectively and quickly.

Manual Proofreading

The first thing that you should remember is don’t proofread the content while you are writing it. This will break the flow of your writing, and eventually, you may miss something important to mention.

You should do the first proofreading right after you finish writing the content. Things are still fresh in your brain, and proofreading the content at this stage may point out a lot of small mistakes that you have committed while writing.

As I said earlier, go for one sentence at a time, or you may even break a long sentence in multiple parts and proofread them one after one.

Take a break. The second level of proofreading should be done after a few hours of a gap in between. This time, read it loudly (if you can), and use your mouse cursor to follow alongside the sentence while you are proofreading. This may highlight a few mistakes that were not identified and corrected during the time of the first proofreading.

Additionally, you may take the help of your team members to do the second level of content proofreading. This increases the chances of finding out a couple of tiny mistakes that you couldn’t spot previously.

If you have a budget to allocate for proofreading, you can hire a more professional proofreader who will not only eradicate the mistakes but will also polish your content to make it more professional and mellifluent.

Proofread Using Proofreading Tools

After you finish the two levels of manual proofreading, you should now use the proofreading tools that will make the content even more perfect and refined.

Manually proofreading your content may leave a few mistakes unnoticed and unchanged, which you can correct using proofreading tools like Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, etc. Both of these tools can spot and correct multiple grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.

The Hemingway Editor is a free content editing and proofreading tool that points out the inappropriate uses of adverbs, overuse of the passive voice, phrases with simpler alternatives, hard and very hard to read sentences with too many words, etc.

content proofreading tool hemingway

Passing your content through the Hemingway Editor will remove all the content issues and make it ready to be pitched for guest-posting or published on your website.

Other than Hemingway Editor, you may also use the Grammarly tool. This is a freemium tool that offers a free version with basic writing corrections, and a Premium and Business versions with more powerful proofreading features.

content proofreading tool grammarly

Similar to Hemingway Editor, Grammarly also points out the advanced writing issues like unclear antecedents, punctuation errors, sentence clarity issues, etc.

Summing Up

Content is an essential and integral part of internet marketing, and proofreading content is an indispensable job that you must carry on each time you create content.

So next time, when you create a content, keep all the discussed points in your mind. Write high-quality content that answers readers’ questions, empowers the customers, ranks high on search engines, brings more organic traffic to the site, improves your authority, and builds customers’ trust.

Finally, when you are done writing the content, manually proofread the content at least two times following the tips as mentioned earlier. Make use of the content editing and proofreading tools to get rid of all the small and big writing mistakes.

Please let us know how do you proofread contents and if you follow a unique process or technique to make it easier. Also, feel free to mention the proofreading tools that you have used and received outstanding results.

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