I’m curious: what does a non-dysfunctional family look like? My dad was an alcoholic. He died from this damned sickness. His parents did, too. Both of them. My mom has the same addiction, plus a whole bunch of other issues. Wait—we’ll get to me and my own quirks later. But I grew up in a broken home that felt like hell. My cousins’ dad drank, too. My classmates either didn’t have fathers, or their dads had the same “talent” as mine, or they were abusers. One boy’s mom left him with a grandmother for the sake of a new husband. Another friend of mine abandoned her daughter with the father to go find a new love. And now, I’m standing guard by the bathroom so my son doesn’t waste water. I heard somewhere that this kind of control is a sign of a dysfunctional family. So, I guess I follow the same pattern now. Not because I’m stingy with the water, though. I’m here because our power grid is being shelled, electricity is hit-or-miss, and we have one 50-liter water heater for everyone. There a...
In my web writing work, I’ve developed one simple rule. My hack has proven its effectiveness time and time again. Subscribe to my blog while you’re here, and in the meantime, I’ll tell you about my unobvious writing hack. Let me start with a bit of backstory.
The Backstory Behind My Web Writing Hack Discovery
I once had a client who was a fan of what I call “rigid SEO.” It is my category for a certain type of creative brief I receive. “Rigid SEO” is when a client demands you use keywords exactly as they are written for direct, exact-match placement, even if it’s grammatically incorrect, sounds unnatural, or feels bizarre. But a task is a task, so I got down to web content writing.
After receiving a brief like this, I started gathering information. I always do so because my intuitive approach to web writing has never failed me. Once I’ve collected enough material, the core idea for the article comes to me on its own. So, I read and delved deep into the topic and opened a Google Doc to start dropping links with my comments. The article began to take shape—I had a solid skeleton. I thought it was time to mold the skeleton to fit the brief’s requirements. I opened the brief, and that’s when I realized I had missed the mark. And no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to fit the keywords into the content.
Yes, I wanted to freak out, do a Ctrl+A, and delete it all. However, I held back. I just put aside the content skeleton for the article.
Not much time passed. A new brief from the same client landed in my inbox. This one was a blog post with almost no restrictions—a new type of web writing assignment from them. It had only one requirement: the text must be relevant to the platform’s content and include one backlink. I took a look at the content on their target platform and suddenly understood why I had done all that previous work.
The Takeaway I Promised You: Holding the Unobvious Web Writing Hack
From this experience, I derived my rule, which now serves as my working writing hack: always save the web links you find during your research. I highly recommend you do it in a structured way—in a Word or Google Doc—with a comment about what exactly caught your eye in the content. Oh, and adding the date is a great idea, so you know how current the information is.
So, here’s an unobvious but powerful writing hack from me to you:
Save web links you find interesting, even if they seem entirely irrelevant to your current writing project.
Organize them into folders by topic if you save them as bookmarks in your browser. This simple step will make it much easier to find the right link later.
Even better, start a dedicated Google Doc, Excel sheet, or Word file—whatever works for you. Save the web links there with a description of the content that caught your attention and the idea you wanted to take from it.
If you enjoy my writing style and want your business to sound with my words, feel free to order web content from me. We can always work out a price that fits! After all, words exist to help us understand one another.
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