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A Day in the Life of a Content Specialist

December 7, 2016

Morning

My day usually starts with me checking my (currently) 5-week-old son, nature’s alarm clock. This can be pretty much any hour before 7am. Once he’s been verified, it’s onto more important things like reading all the internet. Then checking in on every social network you care to imagine (Instagram is my favourite by a country mile – 22% of my iPhone battery goes on it). I also use breakfast (scrambled eggs if you must know) as an opportunity to do a bit of personal blogging.

Two pints of Yorkshire Gold later and I’m in the car. It’s a quick commute of ten short minutes to the office. Load up with coffee, read my emails (I’m pretty new here, so thankfully most of it concerns updates from sites like Econsultancy or Content Marketing Institute) and I’m good to go.

I suspect most jobs require being organised and partitioning off time, but when writing content it’s especially true. For example, if you’re writing a blog post on a subject you might not naturally know much about, you have to do plenty of research into the topic. Then you have to put yourself in the perspective reader’s shoes and wonder, what would they want to know? A good blog post is often based on what readers want, and helping the find that as quickly as possible, so getting under the skin of this needs proper immersion.

I mentioned that (at the time of writing) I’m new to Fifteen, so I’m also using the odd half hour here and there to understand different systems that we use to help plan time or to organise and record workload. From Float to Trello, there are some really useful tools out there.

Lunchtime

After staring at the screen all morning, getting some fresh air is massively important. When that combines with an M&S salad (balanced out by the office biscuits, then dealing with the ensuing guilt) then that’s even better.

Afternoon

Back into the content – though this time it’s optimising a webpage, which is a completely different style of content creation. For example, a page could need tailoring specifically to deal with a PPC campaign. The page needs to have relevant content displayed in an accurate and clear manner.

If you’re dealing with a technical company that hasn’t had the opportunity to update content for a while, then it can be quite a challenge unpicking it. It’s more than just editing a page, but tweaking the language to reflect what people are searching for (based on keywords of course). And also designing the content so that helps them do what they want to do as quickly as possible.

Once that’s done, it’s time to help out with an onsite optimisation of a soon-to-be-launched website. This is a bit simpler, and is a case of helping out by checking things as simple as images using alt-tags, pages have the most suitable headings, meta description or focus keywords, or that redirected URLs will point to the right place.

Evening

Another quick drive back home, at which point I’m super hungry. I greet even hungrier (and grumpier) cats then eat dinner with my family in front of a roaring woodburner, which I have been known to light in August.

Bath the baby, talk in stupid voices to him, and then pray he sleeps whilst I’m on duty so that I can finish off reading the internet, and then – because I’m sad like this – do even more writing.

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