Cold calling for copywriting services worth it?

Cold calling to get business had been in existence for years together. People do cold calling to sell credit cards, loans, sell their crap services etc. But now cold calling have moved into copywriting industry too. In my personal opinion you should get Business by branding or by other effective methods. Cold calling is the worst way to get Business. No matter how good you are at marketing your service through cold calling still I feel you need to stay away from tactics like this.

When I get a cold call or out of the blue email offering copywriting services for my website I first tell them to hang up and if I am not in good mood I will go after them. People who cold call don’t have any guts to prove their service they are just thrown away people who never get Business through ethical means.

Most of the people who cold call would have first tried all possible ways to get Business but finally they end up disturbing people. Cold calling and out of the blue emails are biggest disturbance to anyone.

I agree cold calling sometimes work but it doesn’t come under standard ethical way of getting Business. Cold calling just scares people away most people prefer to stay away from people who cold call. Primary reason behind this is most people who cold call provides crap services and people are very much used to it. If you cold call you will also put under the spammer category which I feel is not worth for your Business. I recommend find ways to get Business by ethical means or by branding yourself. Stay away from cold calling or you will piss off people like me and we take cold calling very seriously.

Best CMS for adapted copywriting and search engine performance:

A content management system is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don’t have to.

Joomla: Joomla is currently the best and leading content management system that will help you to build great content rich websites with ease. Joomla is an open source software means you get it totally for free from www.joomla.com , It is currently the best and most easy to use software it have got various awards for best performing CMS.

Drupal: Drupal is an other quality CMS that helps to easily publish , manage and organize variety of contents including blogs, content sites etc. You can use Drupal to build :

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Umberco: If you use .net hosting you can go for Umberco a friendly CMS which again is easy to use and comes with a load of great features.

Pricing for content an other valuable idea.

If you see most of the sites do not need the best content available, because of ROI .

While it is true that great content will get you links and get you ranking, over time, that does not mean that is the route to success for most sites.

If you are looking for great, original writing, I’ve seen writers produce as little as 100 words per day on complex subjects, so that a 300-word article took 3 days and a 1000-word article took 10 days to produce. For a top-quality American writer you are going to be paying $5000 per month and higher. That means a top quality 1000-word article could cost you $2500, or $2.50 per word (or more), and that is reasonable. This is the high end of the scale.

On the other hand, a good writer from, say, The Philippines (3rd largest English speaking country in The World), can write 1800 words per day on travel guide type stuff at a cost of about $1000 per month. That would be about 40,000 words per month, or a cost of about $0.025 per word (which is the minimum you can expect to pay for simple but original content).

There is thus a range of cost per word of 100-to-1, between the best American made writings on complex subjects and that which can be obtained by offshore outsourcing on rather simple subjects.

If you have a legal site, the best source for content is likely to be an attorney, likewise, the best content for a health related site is probably going to be produced by a medical doctor.

But I can hire a law student in The Philippines to write my legal content for 1/100 of the price, and I can hire a med student to write my health content at the same savings ratio. So what if my content is judged to be only 80% of the quality that you got from hiring an attorney to do your content at 100 times the price. Your site cost you $100,000 and mine cost me $1000. For my $99,000 savings, I’m just going to allocate that to links for my site. Which site will rank higher? Which site will make more money?

Everything is a compromise. I want to build a race car, but how fast it will go depends largely on how much I can spend to make it go fast. Do I spend $5000 on an engine that will produce 600 horses or $25,000 on one that will produce 650 horses? You don’t have to be #1 to be in the money. It all comes down to ROI.

Optimal length of an article: a common question:

500 words, 300, 250 1000 so which is the right size for writing an article. Article writing is an art size of the article really doesn’t matter if you are a good writer and can make people keep reading your stuff. You can make an article longer by few changes and you can make it short by some modifications. It all depends on your writing skills and people’s interest towards your article.

To make an article longer you can: broaden your topic (sometimes).use examples. say the same thing multiple times in different ways, add quotes from other sources

To make an article shorter you can:-make your topic more specific (sometimes)-say things simply in a few words-cover the topic in less detail-forget the fluff, get straight to the point
When you write an article for a client it depends on their requirements some clients prefer long articles of 1000 words some prefer short around 250 words it depends on their requirements. But writing for your own blog or website its different story personally I recommend keeping the article around 250 to 400 words its ideal for all readers most internet readers like short articles than long ones. Shorter are sometimes worthless, longer can be boring unless you are expert in a field and keep proper grammar and punctuation.

I would say basic rule of thumb is just to say what needs to be said in a way people can understand it. Repeating the same thing or over simplifying is something that can lengthen a post without really giving it any value.

Protecting your Ebook from Duplication:

Protecting your hard written ebook from duplication and illegal distribution is a major problem. There is near to nothing you can do to stop this but there are steps you can take to slow down this process.

Based on my experience with this I can list out some ideas ( It may or may not work ) :

1. Whether its in html of PDF format disable right click when you setup up the ebook. This prevents a huge bunch of non-web savvy crowd from copying your content.

2. If it’s a PDF file you can set it up to make sure printing or selecting and copying is disabled ( remember this might be a nuisance for genuine users ) .

3. Make sure your Ebook is copyrighted most countries have tough copyright laws and you can use it against them if any citizens of those countries copy.

4. You can make all PDF pages watermarked another effective way to prevent reproduction or copying of your e-book.

5. Make sure you add a disclaimer on the footer of the PDF e-book that unauthorized reproduction of this e-book will be prosecuted

6. Make sure you identify whom your buyers are, just by filtering out bad buyers and catering to genuine buyers you can prevent a lot of theft.

7. Add some extra benefits for genuine buyers like free life time updates, free goodies if they buy from your site etc.

8. Make sure you brand your e-book even after illegal distribution still your name or website name will be highlighted.

9. Give the buyer a username and password to a secure are that allows them to download the book and get to the bonus area. You can also create a tracking to track number of logins and downloads per user.

10. You can use products that will restrict one license per system or per website or per user. If they try to install in a different system it wont work there.
Just my 2 cents.

Passive income ideas for copywriters:

Apart for writing for a living or freelancing for websites there are many other ways to make money by writing:

1. If you are aware of SEO, you can start a website write article for your own website optimize and promote them.

2. You can run a shopping cart on your website write unique description of the product and write quality reviews I am sure making product pages unique will help you get quality rankings and traffic.

3. You can write a review about a product or just basic information and make money through affiliate programs. There are some quality SEOs/copywriters who many a lot of money through affiliate programs. Ebay, Amazon and other big sites are genuine and provide good affiliate programs with high earning potential.

4. Write an E-book if you are good in writing an e-book on the topic you are good at I am sure selling it will get you some nice and easy income. But putting together an ebook is not easy and it takes a lot of effort on your part.

5. Writing blogs is one of the best income ideas in recent days you can write a blog and build a community and once you have decent traffic you can put up some contextual ads like Google adsense or something similar and I am sure this has good income potential. There are bloggers who make 1000s of dollars a month from Adsense alone.

6. Software you outsource to others to create, but toss up your sales content, auto responder content, articles, seo stuffs, etc yourself can bring passive income too. For some people it becomes million dollar enterprises.

Potential client like scammers on elance and other freelance copywriting sites are trying to scam people and try acquiring their article for free:

Heres the scam………….

1. Client advertising for writer to write articles and will not pay until completion. (this is normal on Elance)

2. Writer delivers the articles

3 Client refuses to pay saying they have been copied and proves it by showing the article directories they are on.

4. Writer says sorry but does not know how, but accepts that there is a copy of them on the net

5. Client shows how annoyed he is and gets abusive.

6. End of story – Writer does not get paid and gives it up as a bad loss. The writer cannot use them again as they are on the web already.

Ok here is what has actually happened……..

1. In the first place, the client want these articles for the directories in particular Ezine.

2. As soon as they get the articles from the writer (within minutes) they have them posted on Ezine by a made up named author. The linkback in the article is to a website that they are probably being paid for to do it.

So as you can see they get all the articles they want for free. I have noticed particularly here on DP that the clients are asking more and more to see the articles before payment.

Suggested solutions………….

NEVER give out your articles before payment unless you know the client.

I would also suggest that all writers should not be working for less than 1 cent word which is already too low. Again clients are taking advantage and expecting work for as low as 500 words for $1 – I think we should all work together to stop this nonsense. I know there are countries which have a 3rd world economy but this is still exploitation by anyone’s standard.

These lance sites are producing this kind of practice and in my opinion should be accountable. I know some people will say if it does not suit then don’t go there, but that is not a long term answer. What a lot of clients think is that they are getting cheap articles when in fact their articles are useless for the purpose they were purchased, seo! – If not written correctly, Google will actually penalize the content.

Ok a lot thrown out there – what are your thoughts?

Tools are essential for good online copywriting.

In today’s vast internet there are 100s of tools that you can choose from for use in your copywriting.

Here is a decent list that you can use for your copywriting purposes:

WordPress

Microsoft Accounting Express

Serif WebPlus SE

Stock.xchng

Cute PDF (to make your own ebooks and stuff)
Open Office (so you don’t have to pay for word processing software and other things, like spreadsheet software, even has a PDF maker)

Google Docs (can share with people on a team if you’re working on a project together)

StorYBook – Open Source novel-writing tool.

FreeMind – free mind mapping software

PingMe – online reminder tool

eFax – receive faxes by email

The Free Dictionary – online dictionary

Freelance Switch – freelance hourly rate calculator

txt2tags

PDFCreator

www.audacity.sourceforge.net – for recording audio to my pc (skype interviews, audio to insert into products, etc)

www.aminstitute.com/headline – nice way to ‘score’ short headline ideas

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

He also has several other writer’s tools.

To jumpstart creativity I sometimes use Dreamlines, just type in a few keywords related to the scene you’re developing and watch the show.

http://solaas.com.ar/dreamlines/f

Ideas to make people review your website:

There are various ways people will voluntarily review your website and there are ways you can make people review your products or tools or contents of your website:

1. You can offer some gifts or freebies or even run a simple contests to make people review your website. Remember though this is a good tactic some search engines consider this paid reviews and might not give full recognition.

2. You can give a small product for a major product sale if a customer takes some additional time to review the products they buy from your website. It has worked for us before.

3. You can hire your own copywriter and review your own products looks a bit shady but it works of course its your site no one will notice it.

4. Some people will naturally review the product if they don’t have to login and submit their review avoid login for people who wants to review. non-registered people have to have their reviews approved before they go live its safe can avoid negative reviews and in fact stop a lot of spam.

5. You can even send our requests or call your customers and tell them to write a review on what they feel about the products they purchased from your site this is very much ethical but remember to get neutral or even bad reviews.

Starting a Business Blog – tips and suggestions

Is there a limit on the number of words used especially on new articles created for blogs, I recommend don’t limit your posts except to eliminate unnecessary words. This is important whether you write 100 words or 1000 words. Remove words or phrases that won’t change the meaning of the sentence. Instead of “I didn’t eat anything at all” you can say “I didn’t eat anything,”

There is a problem where people think even posts with 500 words don’t have quality. Theyre meaningless when you take other factors in. Steve Pavlina’s blog has very long posts with some terrible titles (‘motivation’) but he’s generating 10k/day+ – there are people with fully optimized sites that generate a few pennies a day at best. Like every other reply said: Focus on content or hire somebody that will.

What is the approximate keyword density I must maintain for each of my posts?
I’ve always heard 3- but I personally can’t reach that without making the article almost unreadable and spammy. At least 1 is ok.

Are the keywords in my domain name hugely important? (Can’t find any good domain names on my niche)
Technically it has a big impact on your rank but is it important? probably not as much as a brandable/easy to type and remember domain.

Do you think I must post less attractive topic at first and then after building some readership go on to write some solid articles?

Write 10 articles and proofread them, but don’t publish. Then just have 1 publish everyday.
Most of the articles I plan to write are already covered by websites like entrepreneur.com and related. So do I stand a chance for ranking for them?

It depends how much time, money and effort you’re willing to invest… most people would say ‘never’ but it’s feasible.

Do you think I have a chance of success, now that there are already many, many, many established business news websites?

I think your chance of success is slim just because you’re focusing on SEO instead of content. The many successful blogs right now began with a bored dude writing about his hobbies. You also have no leverage (or do you?), i.e., other sites/communities you own or are a part of.

If you want to win start writing than debating here I am sure you will have good success,