Writing The Same Thing Multiple Times

If you’re a freelance writer, you’re going to get loads of weird projects that you’ve never even thought about before.

You’re going to have a great time with a lot of projects, because you’re going to research things that nobody knows about and learn a lot about businesses that are pretty niche. Hopefully, you’ll be taking notes so that you can put these things to use in the future.

However, there’s one thing that is challenging: Writing about things you already know about.

Why is Writing About The Same Subject Challenging?

You might think I’ve gone a little crazy. After all, it must be really difficult to write about things you don’t know about, and surely writing about things you already know must be easy?

Well, yes and no.

When you write about something you know it’s easier. Facts come to mind and you don’t have to spend so much time researching. Whereas, it is harder to write a two-thousand word article about something you’ve never even heard of, let alone know about.

But when you’re freelancing, you might have to write about something twenty times. Or fifty times. After a while, it gets really tricky to motivate yourself to write more words. Especially if you’re working on a really dry subject.

For instance, I had a Russian client a few months back. I was writing about the oil industry and about oil farms. This was interesting for the first thousand words. I wrote about twenty-times that in one month on the same subject.

Similarly, if you’re working on Freelance sites, you’re going to have to write mind-numbing articles for viral websites (Like BoredPanda) and a lot of work will be for fly-by-night internet marketers chasing the next big thing.

It’s fun to write about cute animals doing funny things for the first ten times you do it. After that, it’s a chore.

It’s fun to write about the next fitness fad until you’ve seen a few fitness fads come and go. (However, writing about fly-by-night internet marketers and what they do wrong will give me enough daily writing articles to write if I live for a thousand years.)

With that in mind, here are some strategies for dealing with having to write the same article over and over again. (Without resorting to shady stuff.)

Writing The Same Article Over and Over Again: Content Based  Approaches

It’s Monday morning and you’ve got an order for fifty articles on various aspects of Product X. What do you do?

1. Look At The Same Product In Different Ways

I can almost guarantee you’ve never thought about half the design choices on any given product. I certainly haven’t. The potential person you’re writing to as a potential customer won’t have either. After all, none of us as customers devote the same amount of thought to a product we use as a design team who spent the past six years building the product do.

Try and think of all the different facets to a product that people don’t think of. For instance, you’ll probably work out immediately why Product X makes life easier for people. Have you thought about how it makes life easier for people first thing on a Monday morning?

A good example of this is the famous ad about the Rolls Royce motor being quieter than its electric clock.

2. Highlight A Different Benefit

Again, look at the advert above. We tend to think of a product having one use or benefit. In reality, there’s a reason we choose one product over the other. Even if you’re not writing about a product, this applies to any articles you might write.

For instance, an article about how to design an oil farm might have the focus benefit of safety. Another article might have the economic benefit of saving time on deliveries.

3. Highlight A Different Audience

Whatever product or theory you’re selling (or “informing” your readers about) will in reality be targeted at multiple audiences. Sure, you’re going to sell more perfume to women. But there are different sub-audiences, and if you’re a copywriter, you’ll probably be asked to target those sub-audiences for A/B testing at some point.

Making the focus of your articles different audiences will show you how slight differences can make an article read completely differently.

4. Highlight A Different Use

This is kind of a mix of all the above. It works really well if you’re writing longer pieces with a story involved.

For instance, if Product X were a vacuum cleaner, we could tie some different benefits with a different audience and find different uses for our vacuum cleaner. Here’s a couple of examples:

• Cleaner is better than competitors for small places. Guy has his first ever date and has to clean his car, which is dirty enough for it to be a game changer at this moment. Vaccuum is perfect for cleaning cars.
• Vaccuum gets rid of cat hairs better than competitors. Mid-40’s woman is having her mother stay for the weekend, and she’s allergic to cats. Vaccuum cleaner saves the day.

Both of those articles are about why you should get the Product X vacuum cleaner. Both will look completely different.

Writing The Same Article Multiple Times: The Structural Approach

Here is where I talk about your swipe file, and how you should build more than one writing template.

When I started doing this, I thought to myself, “No problem! I can just write the first article and then rewrite it word-by-word until I’m done!”

That gets boring really, really quickly. Instead, I should have (and do now) instead looked at articles I’d written and – more importantly – added to my swipe file. Different writers will use different templates for their writing.

In the same way that Jane Austen and E.L. James both write romance stories in completely different ways, there’s as much variation between different content writers in terms of pretty much everything.

Something you could do right now is go to your favourite sites and grab ten reviews, ten how-to articles, ten sales pages and put them all in a new swipe folder called “templates.”

Then, if you ever have to write ten articles on the same subject, you can write an article in each of the ten styles you’ve just put into your file.

This will keep your writing fresh, it will keep it a challenge/interesting, and it’ll also have the added benefit that over time you’ll internalise the styles without having to consult them.