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Traditional routes into copywriting

There is no simple career path. In fact, it’s a jungle.
There are four well beaten paths:

Journalism – lots of ex-journalists move into freelance copywriting. They have the skills, understand the pressure to meet word-counts and have learned to deliver to tight deadlines. They tend to start off providing Press Releases and ghosted articles.

Ex Ad agency – advertising agencies do take on trainee copywriters. First job (just like the journalists) is making the coffee. They may have been taken on as trainees in some other discipline, but with opportunistic career juggling, end up writing ads, jingles and sales brochure copy. Breaking out as as a freelancer, they tend to start writing sales letters, direct mail and adverts.

Ex marketing managers – lots of people percolate up into marketing positions in large organisations, often having started in sales. They usually start freelancing by writing sales brochures, web copy and, possibly, corporate video scripts.

Ex ‘nothing-to-do-with-any-of-the-above-but-with-the-balls-to-have-a-go’.- Been around a bit, good with words and resiliant. Most hopefuls reading this article probably come under this heading. So that’s the area I am going to address.

1 Step Internet Copywriting Formula

1. You must provide valuable content for your visitors. How many web sites do you see that are just one big advertisement? (Answer: Way too many.) The solution is to provide helpful, useful information to your visitors.
2. You must capture the contact information of your visitors. When someone stops by your web site, that is NOT the end – it’s the beginning of a relationship. To make that relationship happen, you must capture information so you can begin a dialogue with your potential customer. One great way of accomplishing this is to offer a free report, or newsletter in exchange for filling out a brief survey.
3. You must present a complete and compelling case for buying your product or service. Most people make the mistake of trying to sell too many products on a web site. They often feature lots of big graphics but little information. It takes a lot of information to convince someone to order from you. Don’t be afraid of writing a sales letter that’s too long. Your letter can never be too long, only too boring.

Copywriting – Best marketing method!

Copywriting is basically marketing. Copywriting is persuasive and it promotes an overall idea about a company, product or service. It is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Copywriting can include anything from slogans to articles. Understanding copywriting is essential to being able to successful run a marketing campaign.

Basic copywriting has the single intention of selling. The reason for the copy is to sell a product or service. When it comes to website copywriting, though, there are two main intentions.

Website copywriting has the goal of selling and also a goal of boosting search engine rankings. For this reason, website copy is usually more in depth and wordy rather than the typical copy.

Copywriting is the aspect of choosing words and text. It does not usually include the look of the copy. However, when it comes to website copy, all aspects are considered.

Since the main idea of copywriting is to sell an idea, product or service, it is very important for a business owner to understand what makes up a good copy. It is all about quality content that gets to the point and captures the potential customer’s attention.

Copywriting is about knowing how to use words. You have to know how to manipulate them and put them together in a way that achieves your ultimate goal. A good copy will grab attention and make people excited.

The internet is a large place to try to run a business. Success in the internet market place is all about catching people’s attention. You have to be able to get people to come to your website if you ever want to sell a thing.

SEO Copywriting – Great Career

Many people select to pursue various jobs that are within the writing industry. Some of the most common jobs that a person can choose in the writing industry include writing as a freelancer, publishing, and even copywriting. Copywriting jobs are becoming more and more popular as time progresses. There are numerous things that make a copywriting job appealing to many people. Here, you will find many of those things.

One of the first things that make copywriting an appealing job is the amount of flexibility that the person who holds this career has. Seeing that copywriting is a job that entails paying special attention to detail and ensuring that a quality product is completed. Due to this fact, it is important for a copywriter to take their time in releasing their final product. This allows the person who chooses the copywriting career to set their own pace, and basically invest the hours that they see fit into the project. Many people thoroughly enjoy the freedom and the flexibility that the copywriting career has to offer.

There are many different areas that a person may work the copywriting career. One such place may be with an agency that specializes in advertising and marketing. Many people may work as a copywriter in the entertainment industry. Other people may work as a freelance copywriter in the comfort of their lovely home office. There are numerous opportunities when it comes to working as a copywriter. You can select to work for yourself, or a company. This is one of the many things that make the copywriting career very appealing.

Many people who find the copywriting career interesting enjoy the fact that the work, while it remains mostly the same, is constantly changing and offering challenges on a daily basis. Many people enjoy the fact that they are able to be constantly challenged by new tasks and that the pace of their work is ever changing. This makes a great career choice for people who love to be pushed and pushed to offer their best work. It is also a wonderful career for people who place a high quality on detail and ensuring that items are completed as they should be.

11 must things to do before hiring a copywriter!

If you’re considering hiring copywriting help for your next brochure, Web site, or marketing project. Congratulations! You should get great results if you hire a pro to do it right.
Many business owners and marketing professionals have valid concerns about letting an outsider develop their content. After all – it’s your business, you know it best, and your image is critical. However, you’re wrapped up in your business every day. A good copywriter can see your business in a new light, draw out the key benefits of your products and services, and communicate that excitement to your clients and prospects.
Working with a writer isn’t a complicated ordeal, however it will benefit you tremendously to become familiar with how the relationship typically works and ways to help the process move along smoothly.
So, here are my top 11 tips on how to choose and work with a copywriter:
Understand your mission beforehand.
Develop a realistic schedule.
Make sure the writer you hire has written for the medium you want.
Experience within your industry isn’t always necessary.
Ask for references, and contact them.
Keep in mind that you get what you pay for.
Work on more than a handshake.
Give your writer background info at the start.
Appoint one person as your project captain.
Give constructive criticism.
Don’t discount chemistry.

SEO Copywriting Strategy for Business Website

Your web site content helps you get in search engines, speak to visitors, and ultimately get visitors to buy, contact you, or follow a link. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. To be successful, you need to have a web content strategy. Web Content Strategy: Sources of Content There are four basic ways you can get content for your site:
Licensed content that you can publish on your site for a one-time or recurring subscription fee, or in exchange for putting a link to the author’s site under the article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly. The drawback is that hundreds if not thousands of other sites will be publishing the same content, which means you will get little search engine traffic from it. Also, within a few years, the subscription fees or the value of visitors who leave via the required link to the author’s site will amount to more than you would have paid to have original content professionally written.
Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are (usually) low quality and the constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.
Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Distributing content is an essential component of getting links to your site.
Original, well-written content that’s exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines the idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, “about us” pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.

Measure Your Copywriting Skills

1. Conversion rates. Some would suggest that a copywriter should be measured by the conversion rate of the sales letters he or she writes. The only problem here is that I’ve seen some high conversion rates achieved by sloppy sales letters all because of the market these letters targeted.
2. Writing for famous clients. Many copywriters present as proof for their superior skills the fact that they have written for famous gurus. While I cannot blame them for flying these flags, many times these letters are used as a first draft and even chosen because of the low fees. That’s right. Top gurus often go the low fee route and then adjust the copy themselves. So copywriting clientele is no proof either.
3. Top Trainer or Coach. If a copywriter was taught by a famous coach then it could be assumed that this would recommend them to be gifted by association. Who wouldn’t want to be taught golf by Tiger Woods? But again having an excellent teacher doesn’t make you an excellent student.
4. Length of time STUDYING copywriting. In this business of writing if you simply study about writing without actually practicing, then you’ll remain a novice. You have to be in the trenches fighting the battle with many scars to prove your involvement and results to show for it. I’ll prefer a gauge of the number of pages of copy written than the total length of time studying copywriting.
5. Amount of money earned. “Million dollar Producer”, “My Copy Sold Billions”-these are the usual advertising blurbs we see advertising copywriting services. Now I don’t personally have anything against making a lot of money, but this is often a gauge of one’s business skills and the market you write for rather than your raw abilities. In other words, if you are ‘lucky’ enough to write for a big company with huge mailings, then it’s highly probable the profit will reflect the company rather than the writer.

Six Copywriting Success Strategies

While the technical issues and design of your site are clearly important, I’d suggest that you also be sure to devote copywriting resources as follows:

Sell Don’t Tell: Customers are not interested in your point of view on your product. They don’t care about all the fascinating features that your team worked so hard to include. What they are interested in is how the product can help improve their lives. This means that your copy should focus on the benefits to them, not on the features which you or your team might be most impressed with yourselves for creating.

Appeal to Emotion!: The most successful copy touches the potential customer personally or emotionally. You want to catch their attention by appealing to their own self-interest and in as dramatic a fashion as is appropriate for the context. In other words, people are self-interested — so your copy needs to answer how your product or service will make them feel better about themselves. How does this product make my life easier, help me make more money, look better, lose weight, etc.

Headlines are Important: Spend extra time boiling your message down to its key components. Eye-catching headlines are your best chance to catch the eyes of passersby. While colors, font size and placement can all help attract the eye, too, it is the few critical words contained in the headline that ultimately attract clicks. (This is especially true in the plain text “subject” lines of email marketing pieces.)

Call to Action: Even the best writing will fail to help you reach your conversion goals if it does not include a call to action. Determine what action you want the visitor to take before you even start writing. Then be sure to finish your copy by posting a link or offering another specific next step for them to pursue the goal you have driven them toward.

Add Testimonials: Nobody likes to be alone. Especially in the anonymous online world customers appreciate companionship and validation. Collect and post testimonials from other customers to help provide them with the reassurance that they crave. This simple tool will help them to help you reach your conversion goals quicker.

Key Words In Searches

One of the things we don’t seem to have much of these days is time. Everyone rushes everywhere and communication is compressed into new shorter forms like all of the text messages I receive, I still don’t get all of the abbreviations. There is a danger that this short, fast communication is carried over into web sites we develop. All short, bulleted points lacking any grammar or sentence construction, and as I have said before search engines seem to like well-constructed grammatical sentences.
However, there is another knock-on effect of shortening text and that is the effect it has on key words. I am not really talking about the meta tag keywords here, but the words in the text that the search engines find multiple times. This is often known as key word density i.e. what percentage of the text is taken up by a single word or multi-word phrase. Have you ever considered this in writing your own code? Have you thought yourself very clever, by managing to get 100 instances of your key word in one A4 page?
Having your keywords and phrases sprinkled throughout the text is obviously good, but how can you ensure you don’t overdo it. Well, one way is to spend time creating a more lengthy piece of well-written text. This will mean that although you still have lots of key words and phrases in there, their relative density is reduced because of the greater overall volume of text.
Finally, just a word on meta tag keywords. The importance attached by search engines to keywords specified in the meta tag has greatly reduced due to the overuse of this feature. Many sites I have seen have tried to use the same keywords over and over again. Our advice is to choose these words carefully and use maybe 4 or 5, but don’t go over board. Then try and use them throughout the actual page text, but without forcing the density. After all, if they really are your key words, then using them in the text should come naturally.

Keyword Density and Keyword Positioning

Keyword density
Keyword density is a measure of how many times your targeted keyword or keyphrase is being used in the content of your web page.
By repeating your important keyword, your increase the prominence of those words to the search engines. This will help the search engines to identify your target keyword and rank the web page accordingly.
However, there is a penalty if you keyword stuff or use the same keyword too many times in an unnatural way.
Repeating identical keywords or phrases for more than 3 times in the body of the the page may actually damage than good as far as the search engine algorithm is concerned.
Instead, use words with similar meaning – just like when you write naturally. Search engines are smart enough to recognise words with similar meaning and variations such as man, men, male, boy, boys, masculine and etc.
In each page, focus on one or two keywords but not more than three keywords so that it is apparent to the search engine what your page is about.
Keyword Positioning
As much as possible, use the keyword or keyphrase in the heading of the page, in the first sentence of the first paragraph and near the bottom of the page.
As a rule of thumb, your most important keywords – the exact phrase should not be repeated for more than 2% of the total word count. If you have a 500 words page, keep the keywords count to less than 10 times.

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