Can individual common words be trademarked:

Most online business and offline quality Businesses today trademark their brand name or product name etc. But the common question asked can anyone trademark a single word generic word like seminar , training, class, college etc?

As per the rule of US trademark office you cannot trademark too common generic words. There are instances where people claim they have copyrighted a common single word. In most cases it will be fake you need to verify those claims I am sure you will see those are actually bogus claims.

In online Business there are lots of occasions where people get worried whether a keyword in their domain name if trademarked can be used in their domain names. First of all if you want to advertise for keywords like best or buy it’s a problem. Best and buy are just common words you can advertise them or use them in your domain names like you can buy a domain bestforbuy.com. But for Bestbuy is a trademarked brand you cannot use that in a domain or advertise for that word. For example you cannot have the domain name bestbuyproducts.com I would consider this trademark violation and if the trademark owner disputes you can be fined. Even you can’t advertise for best buy related keywords.

Rupert Murdochs News Corp wants Google to pay for news page ads.

Murdochs said in a recent article

“Murdoch also addressed concerns among newspaper publishers that search engines like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc help users to find stories by aggregating links to newspapers websites and blogs — but then wrest ad dollars from them that they think should be theirs.

“The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright… not steal, but take,” said Murdoch. “Not just them but Yahoo.”

“What Google News does, is give free publicity to the newspapers, by sending zillions of customers directly to the newspaper site.
It’s exactly the same as if a new TV channel were set up, which did nothing but broadcast nonstop advertisements for all the TV shows on OTHER channels. Any NON-MONOPOLISTIC TV station owner would love for someone to do that for him.

NON-MONOPOLISTIC. That’s the kicker. Murdoch obtains profits by pushing competitive views off the newsstands by his newspaper monopoly. Google restores the level playing field by letting people see all those NON-Murdoch news sources, as well as the Murdoch ones.

That’s why blocking Google from indexing Murdoch properties doesn’t serve Murdoch’s desires. What he WANTS is for Google to stop indexing NON-Murdoch properties, so he can return to the monopolistic power he enjoyed.

This attitude has driven most of the big-media attacks on Google: not only newspaper, but book publishers, Movie moguls, and Music Industries Goons feel extremely threatened — not by Google stealing content (it doesn’t), not by Google promoting their own content (it does WHICH IS GOOD FOR THEM) but by Google promoting content from other sources, thus allowing those other sources free access to promotion (thus allowing the “little guys” to evade the monopolistic lock in distribution channels owned by the pigopolists.

Publishing ANYTHING for the purpose of promoting something IS an advertisement. Snippets are the ideal advertisement, as book publishers know. (That’s why they publish multipage snippets of an author’s next book in the back of the current printing of his last book.)
Snippets are fair use (by U.S. law). They do not substitute for the original, they are intended to promote the original and they do have that effect.

And it is not the publishers who have “gathered at great cost” the snippets. The publishers gathered (at whatever cost) the original article entire. It is Google who gathers, at great expense, articles of interest to surfers based on specified criteria–and promotes those articles to those surfers. There is no conceivable harm in this. The harm, I repeat, is that Google gives people alternatives and therefore bypasses the monopolistic distribution channels.

On your theory, Murdoch could prevent damages by taking his content off Google. He hasn’t, and he won’t, because THAT’S NOT HOW GOOGLE IS DAMAGING HIM. Google is damaging Murdoch by opening up promotional opportunities to Non-Murdoch news.

And that is not only perfectly legal, but of great public benefit. May they continue to profit as they deserve!

SEO Copywriting – is it different?

SEO copywriting is copywriting for your website with search engines in mind. Copywriting and SEO copywriting does make a difference. Copywriting has just few criteria you need to clear on the topic you right and make sure the requirement is fulfilled. But SEO copywriting is done to make both search engine algorithms and humans happy. You need to maintain a delicate relationship both with search engines and humans.

When you’re doing SEO copywriting you need to make sure relevant keywords and phrases are used up appropriately in your copy. Keyword density and keyword distribution plays an important role when it comes to SEO copywriting. Only if you have proper keyword distribution search engine algorithms will understand your copy effectively.

For SEO copywriting its important to use keywords some may say otherwise but fact you need to use keywords. When i write copies for our website whether its web design service or search engine optimization service i will first research the keywords and later use them appropriately in my copy.

Quality or Quantity

We get lot of offers from clients and potential clients for bulk content. They are looking for cheap keyword content and they are not worried about the quality of the content. Some clients are looking for keyword rich contents though the content quality is bad. So is it a good strategy? Quantity or quality which one matters?

Quantity over quality

Quantity is always relative and mostly used in context of your website. If you run a large website with 1000s of products which you need to get it populated, write descriptions, write reviews yes quantity matters here. You need unique information for good search engine rankings and i am sure you would have in from less quality contents. These contents are not meant to be link worth. They are there just as a spider food and its not something you have that you can boost about.

Quality over quantity:

Quality matters much more than quantity especially for quality content sites made to impress users and to be made link worthy. You need quality contents when people read your content you need to make it look pleasant and attractive rather than making it sound junk and boring. Quality attracts natural back links and good quality repeated users to your website. This is the long term strategy for a successful online marketing campaign.

Overall quality and quantity depends completely on the context of your website. At times both work well together so if you are building a quality website you need to take care of both quality and quantity in a perfect threshold limit.

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.