5 Ways a Content Editor Makes Your Life Easy

So you’ve written some content for publication.

It could be website copy, the script for a Facebook ad, or a blog post.

And to your eyes, it looks pretty good.

You’ve mentioned all the things you wanted to cover, it seems to flow reasonably well, and you even ran it through Grammarly to find all of the mistakes.

You don’t want to end up with poor-performing copy, low click-through rates, and high bounce rates despite your hard work and expertise.

At this point, there’s nothing left to do but upload your content and publish it, right?

And truth be told, that’s what most people do. But the results usually speak for themselves:

• Grammar and spelling errors that the computer’s checker missed
• Poor or entirely wrong word choice
• Misuse of hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks
• Phrases or sentences that don’t make sense to the reader

You end up with poor-performing copy, low click-through rates, and high bounce rates despite your hard work and expertise. This is surely not good for your business—or your professional reputation!

Take a Deep Breath…and Hire an Editor

Unless you are exceptionally good at writing, you might resonate with the above scenario. But thankfully, there’s a better way.

By hiring a freelance content editor, you can take your content to the next level while enjoying the benefits they bring to the table.

Even if you think you’ve dialed in your copy, hiring an editor to review it and correct any mistakes is essential if you want the best possible content. Here are five reasons why.

1. A Content Editor Will Polish Your Content

Writing is a specialized skill.

Not everyone has the ability to put their thoughts on paper in a way that is engaging and readable.

And even if you do have this ability, creating good content takes time.

This is one area where an experienced editor can help—by cleaning up your content to sound and look polished.

They can make suggestions about how to write a phrase using fewer words to tighten up your copy. They can also help you by finding a more precise term that flows better in the overall sentence (say, by substituting “top-quality” for the more general adjective “good” when referring to your company or service).

Think of hiring an editor as an investment: you are literally buying back your time.

If you have a way with words, you can certainly do this work yourself. But hiring it out saves you the time of doing it yourself. This allows you to concentrate on more value-added activities—like making another sale—as opposed to rifling through a thesaurus for just the right word.

Think of it as an investment: when you hire an editor, you are literally buying back your time.

2. A Content Editor Brings a Professional Touch

A quality editor can add a professional touch to your content.

Let’s say, for example, that you are writing a blog post about an interview you conducted with the CEO of a company.

• Are you 100 percent sure you spelled her name correctly?
• Did you verify that her degrees and honors are spelled out the right way?
• Should you capitalize “master’s degree” or leave it lowercase?

Not everyone has the ability to put their thoughts on paper in a way that is engaging and readable. And even if you can, creating good content takes time.

It’s often the little things that separate good copy from bad. Even if most readers don’t know that the “P” is capitalized in WordPress, it’s these kinds of details that subconsciously alert them that what they are reading is legitimate.

But few people outside of professional editors are going to have the skill, knowledge, and time to go through your content to find and fix these types of mistakes.

3. A Content Editor Roots Out ALL Mistakes, Typos, and Gaffes

No grammar- or spellchecker is perfect.

Grammarly can help you find a lot of mistakes, as can Google’s spelling and grammar checker, but no tool is foolproof.

You can run your text through multiple programs—even AI—and you will still find errors in the text.

(How do I know? Because as an editor myself, I see it every single day.)

On top of that, no computer or tool can know what you meant to write.

You can run your text through multiple programs—even AI—and you will still find errors in the text.

If you write “our product is complimentary” (i.e., it costs nothing to purchase) when you meant to write “our product is complementary” (i.e., it complements other product offerings), Grammarly can’t help you out—and you’ll be giving away your product to boot!

These kinds of mistakes require a human with strong vocabulary skills to sort out.

4. A Content Editor Ensures Consistency

English is weird.

For example, there are sometimes multiple “right” ways to spell a word.

Let’s say you are writing ad copy for your new business. Do you refer to your new venture as a “startup” or a “start-up?” Which is correct?

Even the best writers are too close to what they write to effectively edit their own work.

The answer is either choice is correct; they are both in the dictionary. But what’s not correct is to switch back and forth between the two terms. In these cases, you need to pick one way and stick to it.

A good editor will spot and address inconsistencies like this for you. A great editor will help you by establishing a style guide to ensure your content is consistent over time.

5. A Content Editor Provides a Sanity Check

Even the best writers are too close to what they write to effectively edit their own work.

(Every great author has an editor—do you really think you are the exception?)

When we try to edit our own copy, we almost always “see” what we think we wrote, rather than what we actually wrote. And to make matters worse, we often rely on unspoken assumptions to make our point—assumptions the reader may not share.

A quality editor will help you by identifying words, sentences, or even paragraphs that just don’t make sense to an outside reader.

They will also help your readers by defining acronyms, replacing insider jargon with more “normal” language, and generally keeping the end customer in mind.