Engineering Approach Toward Content Writing

The engineering aspect refers to an approach where you break a complex process or entity into bite-sized chunks and work on each unit to improve the overall process or entity.

Think of a racecar. An engineer segments the vehicle into different components, such as powertrain, chassis, and suspension, to discover areas of improvement. Then, each subsystem or individual component is worked upon to make the car go faster.

Similarly, in the world of content writing, the engineering approach is to break the whole workflow down to nuts and bolts, and then focus on elevating each of them.

It also involves defining success in terms of measurable metrics, such as time taken to write a draft and the engagement earned by a content piece, to validate the efforts.

In this chapter, let’s look at how you can apply the fundamental engineering philosophies to become a better content writer to take your career further.

The four aspects of content writing

The entire writing process can be broken down into four mega steps. 

1. Ideation

Ideation is the first step toward publishing an article. It begins with a brand objective, such as increasing awareness or gaining customers. The objective helps identify different angles in which you can tell your story and helps formulate your core message for each content piece.

For example, if you are selling ghostwriting services, the brand objective can be to demonstrate your skill set to build authority. There can be many angles here. 

You can write about how your services are superior to others by providing proof, such as client testimonials. Another angle is to produce educational content to help your potential customers learn more about the art of persuasive writing.

Then, these angles can be drilled further to generate topics and titles.

Overall, this phase plans your campaign. When you ‘ideate,’ your goal is to come up with blog post title suggestions that serve your brand. Start with what your brand needs at the moment, conduct research (competitors and trend analysis), and begin writing titles.

You can use by custom Title Suggestions GPT to expedite this process.

2. Outlining

Outlining is the phase where the article is actually written. This is where you learn about the subject matter, determine the flow, and visualize the piece.

There are several tasks within this phase as well. 

The first step is to write your core message in one line, and then expand it as you go. It could be as simple as “hire me for ghostwriting.” Then, expand it by asking investigative questions that validate your core message.

The investigative questions could be, “What’s so good about you that we should hire you?” or “What results have you delivered to your past clients?”

Each of these investigative questions can be added as a subheading. 

Apart from the investigative questions, you can add more facts, stats, and logical reasoning to make your points stronger. For instance, in the above example, you can include a section, “Why hiring a ghostwriter is better than building an in-house team?”

I’ve built a custom Article Outline GPT to streamline this process.

3. Drafting

This is the manifesting phase, where whatever you visualize comes to reality. Unless you have terrible writing skills, it’s difficult to make mistakes in this phase, provided you’ve done your due diligence in the above two.

To write faster, you can use my custom Article Writer GPT to generate the draft, section by section, and use it as a reference to produce your content.

4. Editing

Reread your draft to fix any technical issues, such as semantic slips, mistypes, and grammatical mistakes. You can use a free tool like Grammarly or ChatGPT to help spot these errors quickly.

Then, read your article again from your reader’s perspective to describe your feelings. Do you feel that someone’s just wasted your time? Is the information useful? Can it be written in fewer words? Does it require more explanation?

All these qualitative questions give you direction for the future. Again, if you are starting out, don’t sweat these issues. It takes time to produce cohesive blog articles that just hit the mark from the get-go and build you a fanbase effortlessly.

The broader objective of the engineering approach is to discover areas of improvement and iteratively work toward them.

Evaluating each aspect of content writing

• Ideation: Did you meet the campaign objectives that bring value to your brand?

• Outlining: Did the final draft make sense?

• Draft: Did you write the post quickly without much rewriting?

• Editing: Is the published article error-free?

The above questions appear as simple “yes/no” questions, but that’s not how you should treat them.

For instance, when evaluating your ideation efficacy, look at the metrics. If your goal was to increase brand awareness by doubling your newsletter subscribers, how close or far are you from it? How long did it take for you to execute the campaign completely?

Similarly, when evaluating your drafting phase, how long did you take to churn out 1000 words?

How many grammatical and semantic issues were in the first draft?

These numbers will help you determine whether you are in the right direction. Additionally, regardless of how proficient you are at content writing for whatever purpose, you can always improve these metrics to level up.

Moreover, you must be patient while looking for a comprehensive overview. It takes time for a completed campaign to give results. Only then can you tangibly determine how much you need to evolve in this game.

The most important thing to remember is that there’s no finish line.

Whether it is the quality of research or the pace of typing words on the screen, there’s always room for improvement. And that’s what the engineering mindset is all about. Getting 1% better every day.

Next steps: Focus on each task

By definition of the engineering approach, you can just focus on a single element, a minuscule task, within your entire content writing process, rather than getting overwhelmed by all of it. 

I’d recommend focusing on your articles’ overall flow. This is primarily qualitative and will only impact how you create outlines. In my experience, that’s the most crucial element of the entire workflow.

While evaluating your progress, be brutal like Gordon Ramsey reviewing dishes and restaurants. Any kind of complacency or softness will result in stunted progress in the long term.

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Next Chapter: Content Writing Career: Everything You Need to Know

Previous Chapter: Ideal Workstation of a Content Writer

Index (Prologue): What is Content Writing