The best investment I made for my business in 2016 was hiring a copyeditor. This wasn’t something I was ready for when I first started blogging. When you’re starting out, you must take on many roles, so you can figure out exactly where you should invest your money. Since my first blog posts way back when were absolute shit, a copyeditor quickly topped my list of business investments. I didn’t proofread well, and the basic grammar check in Google Docs wasn’t adequate. After a while of going solo, it should become apparent what you need help with and where investing your money could benefit your business. For me, outsourcing my copyediting was a no-brainer. If you’re planning on making money with words on a screen, you need to make sure that those words jump off the screen and into the mind of your reader, so they don’t get hung up on your crappy grammar and consistent typos.

However, even before you can afford to hire a copyeditor, there are a few things to prevent your blog posts from being total shit like mine were. Long before I hired a copyeditor (shout out to Abbi at The Literary Scene!), I used the free version of a tool that helped a lot, and the premium version helped even more.

Stop Making Critical Mistakes

Grammarly is an amazing tool, and the free version can keep you from making some pretty crucial mistakes. It helped me correct a ton of mistakes that I would have never caught on my own. Since writing isn’t my strong point, only the obvious mistakes really jump out to me naturally.

In the beginning, this tool helped me find clarity and become a better writer. Considering it’s free, there’s no excuse not to take advantage of it. Don’t post social media updates with glaring typos when there’s a browser extension made just for that.

However, as helpful as Grammarly can be, it doesn’t replace an actual copy editor. A real person can never really be replaced by an algorithm. There’s nothing more powerful than a second set of eyes reading your words to catch mistakes. Grammarly can’t actually comprehend like a person can. But if that’s not an expense you’re ready for, Grammarly should be your go-to tool. It can be your stepping stone for becoming a better writer.

So, why invest in the premium version? I could sell you all day long on their features, but you need to know more. You should know how it’s going to positively impact your business, how it can help you become a better writer, and why you should use it even before passing off your drafts to an editor.

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Love of Language

The tool is built by linguists and that means that their love of language is available for you. You can select what type of writing you are doing, and it will analyze your work based on that because an academic paper shouldn’t read the same as a personal email. The different types of writing that you do need to be analyzed differently, and a basic grammar checker isn’t going to cut it. Sure, you can find common mistakes, but you might not always want your writing to be stiff. This brings us to the biggest feature that will make you a better writer.

Vocabulary Enhancement

Do you know how often you use the same damn words when writing? You probably don’t. But Grammarly does and it tells you to change it up a bit and even offers some great suggestions. If you are writing stellar blog posts, you don’t want to bore your readers to death by calling everything awesome. I know, I know. Everything is awesome. But change it up. Keep your voice the same, but throw in some different words. Expand your vocabulary.

It is the little features like this that will push you as a writer, and the more you write, the better you will become. But if you keep writing the exact same way with zero outside influence to help guide you, you will become a stagnant writer and no one will want to read your stuff. You will bore your readers to death and they will break up with you and find a more exciting source for the exact same information. Because you know there are at least a dozen others that are teaching the same thing as you, but their voice is a bit different and their audience connects with them. You need this. You need to be a unicorn. You need to find your people and write for them.

Don’t Get Sued

And the third major reason you need to invest in Grammarly is its plagiarism detection. Do you know how cool it is to get a cease and desist letter from someone’s attorney on a blog post that is your highest traffic generator? No? Good, let’s keep it that way. While you may not know that you stole someone else’s words, this will keep you in the free and clear by letting you know before you hit publish on that bad boy. Because getting sued for being unaware is not fun.  

Depending on the severity of your plagiarism and the attorney, you may not get off with a warning. They may go straight for the jugular and end up bankrupting you. This could be detrimental if you are just starting out and are still a sole proprietor. This means that you could lose your house for something you didn’t even realize you did wrong.  (I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, just a word of caution from one small business owner to another.)

So to quickly recap why you should invest in a premium grammar editor: you will become a better writer and probably not get sued. Sounds like a couple of pretty good reasons as to why you should invest in your business.

Should You Hire a Copyeditor?

Okay. Now that you know why you need to invest a real grammar checker, you may be wondering why even hire a copyeditor if this tool does it for you? I get it. I was there. I thought I was covered and I even thought I was publishing my best work. While it was loads better than what I was publishing back in 2013, it still was missing something. And this is where a bona fide copy editor comes into play.

If you do your research and find the perfect one for you, they will be like a magician for your words. No joke. A magical unicorn. They will be able to take your drafts and transform them into the most engaging piece of copy on your website. When peeps stumble across your blog posts from Pinterest, they will want to dive head-first into even more content you have because reading it is fun.

So pairing a premium grammar checker and a copyeditor will help you take your writing from mediocre to amaze-balls. I am a firm believer that both are necessary for a recipe for success when it comes running a blog-based business.