copywriting
Copywriting Skills to Maximize Results with Resumes
Copywriting is essentially the art of persuasion, and it’s vital to your business success. Although copywriting is usually though of in terms of advertising, it can be used successfully in any form of communication, from speeches to classified ads. In this article, let’s look at how you can use your copywriting skills to maximize your results with resumes and bios.
The resume and biography is a perennial business tool, used by everyone from the lowliest intern to CEOs with million-dollar paychecks. Using copywriters’ skills on your bios ensures that they get attention.
Copywriting Creates Out-standing Resumes and Bios
“Who are you?” – this is the question you’re asked, directly or indirectly, by everyone with whom you want to do business. That question is answered with a resume and bio.
Resumes are primarily used for job hunting, but bios are used everywhere, from your Web site to your press releases and email signatures.
Although resumes are standardized, meaning they cover the information in a specific format, bios are free form. You can also target bios narrowly to a specific audience, so that you get exactly the response you want.
Big tip: a bio is not your autobiography. A bio is always short, and it’s written in the third person singular, like this: “Outstanding athlete John Smith… “; not in the first person singular “I’m an outstanding athlete…”
Tips For Becoming A Great Writer
1. Never Be Boring Your reader will forgive almost anything except you being boring. Your reader doesn’t have to agree with you, but he or she should at least be intrigued. Make the reader care. Don’t be afraid to be “edgy.” Look at every sentence and ask yourself, “Why will the reader care about this?”
2. Write in Short Sentences The reader shouldn’t have to work hard to understand what you’re saying. If he or she has to go back over a sentence because of poor structure it’s not his or her fault, it’s yours. Read what you’ve written aloud or have someone else read it aloud to look for sentences that are too long or convoluted.
3. Write to the Reader Use “you” often. Look for ways to eliminate or reduce “I” and “me.” Present tense, second person is always best. It feels more to readers like you’re talking to them.
4. Go Active Use active verbs as much as possible. They’re more engaging. They move the reader along and take fewer words to get your message across. “John loves Mary” is much more powerful than “Mary is loved by John.”
5. Keep it Simple The front page of The Wall Street Journal and all of USA Today is written for the eighth grade reading level. Why should we be any different? People aren’t interested in things they don’t understand. Make your points quickly and succinctly. Make your words work and use as few of them as possible. Use the right word, not just to show off your vocabulary (or your new thesaurus), but to convey your message clearly.
Top Ten Copywriting Books
If you are copywriter then the best you can educated yourself by reading some of the great books written on copywriting. The best copywriting books around are not written specially for online, as you could tell from this list. But you should have at least one, and it’s a close call. Based on that, I have listed the top 10 copywriting books written with best intension:
1. On Writing – Stephen King
2. Net Words – Nick Usborne
3. Movies in the Mind – Colleen Mariah Rae
4. Triggers – Joe Sugarman
5. Influence – Robert Cialdini
6. Tested Advertising Methods – John Caples
7. The Copywriter’s Handbook – Bob Bly
8. The Robert Collier Letter Book – Robert Collier
9. Advertising Secrets of the Written Word – Joe Sugarman
10. Wizard of Ads (Trilogy) – Roy H. Williams
Idea Keyword Density for Each 300-word Article
Put your important keyword in the title of the article. While it is not specific whether spiders begin scanning a page from top to end or vice versa, it is the title, which states what your piece of writing is all about. It is simply natural to put your chief keyword there.
If you arrange your article into three parts (introduction, body, end), put your keyword formerly in the first part, twice or thrice if likely in the body, and once in the last section.
Sometimes if you pursue the main keyword density percentage, your content might also look like a spam or sound too abnormal. Although a good SEO copywriter could efficiently incorporate such a number of keywords into the copy, there would forever be a boundary to the amount of originality that he could use.
Know your main keywords and make your article around it. Do not forget to generate a balance between the number of keywords and the wide-ranging readability (by humans) of your article.
5 Smart Article Writing Tips
Article marketing is the latest buzzword for marketers looking to promote their sites and products online. But how do you measure the success of your article marketing campaign?
It probably depends on what you expect your article to achieve for you – better branding, more sales, or more publicity. One way to measure article performance is to check how many times your article has been picked up and reproduced on various sites. As you can see, this makes article marketing a very powerful way of building quality links.
So how do you ensure that your article gets picked up and reprinted by as many publishers as possible?
1. Pick A Topic That’s Hot Or Always Fresh
The problem with hot topics is that they also tend to cool off quickly. So while they may get a lot of reprints over a short time, they may get very few reprints once the craze is over. These are the ones that will give you reprints over a longer period of time. I think in the long run, these are more valuable.
2. Target A Large Audience
Another way to get a lot of coverage is write an article for a large target audience or one that is very active online – like bloggers. But again, it’s the quality of links back that matters – not the quantity.
3. Craft A Catchy, Relevant Title
A catchy title ensures that your article gets the attention of publishers – the first step to getting your article published. Follow the basic rules of copywriting to make your article interesting and readable. Use your main keywords in your title, preferable in the first half.
4. Write An Article Series
Break up a long article or report into a series of articles so that it becomes interesting to read.
5. Distribute Your Article Widely
Ensure that your article is distributed to the best and most appropriate article directories and announcement lists online.
Know why good headline is important
You would often find a web copy is written by copywriters who are not really trained in writing for the web—and much of the other is writing is done by people who are not trained writers either. First and foremost thing an SEO copy writer must understand is the importance of writing a good headline:
Know why good headline is important:
Headlines offer busy visitors with an instant measure of your site’s significance and could further help designers unite a website’s appearance with its voice.
A good headline would beyond doubt seduce site visitors, meaning attract the visitor. It should clutch their attention and induce them the information on the particular page is value investigating.
Website visitors are mainly hunting for fast information. The most excellent headlines for the web straight away communicate facts related. If you are capable of feeding the site visitors’ hunger for information, then you would be satisfied with more hits.
Consider going with quick and easy guidance. Mostly titles like how to, 5 reasons, why, know how, top 50 tips etc promises the visitor a valuable tip and in turn they would help you to highlight the key advantages.
Shorter Sentences, Better Content
When it comes to SEO copywriting, there is no magical recipe or formula for writing a perfect content for your website and there is no special number of words that you can insert. But however most SEO experts recommend word count of 250 to 500 per page, with two to four targeted keywords/search terms strategically placed within the content. More number of keywords you try to stuff in a page, the more you risk your page making it sound unnatural and awkward. Therefore this has to be avoided at all costs.When building your webpage it is very important that you keep the visitors or readers’ needs in mind. Most netizens will just browse and scan pages looking for keywords. They will halt to read the contents only if there is something which attractive. Keep your sentences direct and short, but don’t skimp on the content, the more content the better! Instead of writing endless columns of texts, write short paragraphs and make use of white space. Remember to use italicized and bold texts when emphasizing and bullet points wherever necessary, doing these things will make it easier for readers to spot key points.
5 SEO Secrets for Copywriters!
They make every title of an article rock! Yes, articles which have great titles get linked to a lot more than articles which have titles that are boring. Getting your writing linked to is more important than any other factor of SEO copywriting.
SEO copywriters must make every post scannable! Your readers must be able to scan all the articles and posts you write, don’t expect them to read each and every line of the article to be read. They must be able to easily find the headings which explain to them what the next section is about. They should also find numbered and unordered lists. This leads to increased links from other websites.
Advanced SEO copywriters must target a set of keywords with each and every post. You must have noticed that the word ‘SEO copywriters’ has already appeared nearly three times on this page, this is because I’m trying to target that keyword with this post! It is generally recommend to insert at least 3 to 4 keywords on a single page.
Writers must get the keyword into a few heading tags on the page or post. If you’re a Blogger this means to make sure your keyword(s) is in the title of your post. You can also add your keyword(s) into headings within your post. Bloggers of WordPress can take advantage of this: Secret ‘Blogging Traffic Booster’ In WordPress.
SEO Copywriters know must that there are many variations of the target keywords which could be searched for. If a post targets ‘SEO Copywriter’, it should probably also target terms like ‘SEO Copywriting’ and ‘SEO Copywriters’.
Hire Excellent Freelance Copywriter
The freelance copywriter establishes firm date to submit the articles written. The freelance copywriting service is highly linked, rated in the search engines which are chosen to be best. The copywriter has to work on multiple projects and provides excellent content to the clients.
It is considered that good freelance writer will be little bit strange. Most of the freelance copywriter does not have an interest of working in a corporate office. Incase if he works in a corporate office, the freelance copywriter will have to stay and he does not shows interest over.
Tips to Develop You’re Writing Skills (Part II)
- Once you have decided where to submit your work; write to publishers’ for the submission guidelines. Some prefer to see a letter about your work before they look at your actual work. Some prefer to see a partial manuscript or a synopsis and few of the sample chapters. Others prefer complete manuscripts! In general, all publishers prefer your work to be submitted in typewritten form, double-spaced and printed on one side of plain white bond paper. See that you enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope, if you want your work to be returned.
- Check that your work is as technically correct as possible. Ensure that the grammar, punctuations and spelling are right, as they are the important part of writing.
- If you’re successful in impressing the editor with your work, be ready to edit and revise, as nobody’s work makes it to printing press/online journals without going through repeated readings. Sometimes these changes might need structural work, including adding, cutting and re-arranging large chunks of materials.
- Never be afraid of rejections or getting rejected, if you are receiving rejection letters, it shows that you are submitting your work for publication and it is the only way to have your work published. It might take time and history is always full of stories about masterpieces which were repeatedly rejected before they were published!
- Read! Read! Read!