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,
Guardian Launches open platform tool:
Guardian a leading news paper in UK is planning to bring its contents open source due to the vast capabilities of internet.
The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it “into the fabric of the internet”.
Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising.
A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.
Emily Bell, the Guardian News & Media director of digital content, described Open Platform as a “new chapter in our history and a new foundation for the future of our journalism”.
She said that Open Platform would allow Guardian content “to be woven into the fabric of the internet” as people outside the organization saw the value of adding Guardian content to their projects.
Text to voice feature opposed – Kindle’s face lawsuit from Book Publishers.
“Was your mother a lawbreaker when she read you The Little Prince or Green Eggs and Ham?
That’s the question raised Tuesday by the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers. Paul Aitken, the group’s executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon’s Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
Wow. If a computer can’t lawfully read a book out loud, do human beings have the right? Amazon and Aitken could not be reached for comment.
Well, mothers of America, never fear. You most certainly do have the right to privately perform copyright work, says Ben Sheffner, a copyright attorney. Sheffner, a well-known copyright advocate, says the issue of whether Amazon’s Kindle infringes on intellectual property is not as cut and dry.
Amazon’s technology enables a computer voice to read text aloud to owners of the Kindle 2, the next-gen version of reader.
Sheffner said it’s unclear whether the text-to-speech feature could be considered a public performance. Under copyright law, if someone profits from, say, a public reading of a copyright work without authorization, they are breaking the law. Someone could argue, said Sheffner, that the Kindle’s speech feature is a public performance because it enables scores of people to receive audio of a book. Sheffner added that the counter argument would be that the feature is only enabling lots of different private–and therefore legal–performances.
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he doesn’t see how the speech feature violates copyright law if no recorded copy of the book is created. Book publishers often license audio books separately than the text versions.
“The only right really that might be implicated is the so-called public performance,” Zittrain said. “But what I want the thing to do is to read to me in the car. I don’t see a copy being made so I don’t see how this can be Amazon’s problem.”
The debate could be academic. If the book publishers don’t like the feature, they can refuse to renew their licenses with Amazon in the future. And my colleague Ina Fried raised another point. Why would Kindle owners choose a computer voice when they can hear a recording of the author or a professional actor reading the book?”
How to find copyright free contents?
Writing online copies is not always easy. Also its difficult to find references for contents. When you find references most of them are copyrighted. So how do we find copyright free contents.
1. All contents on government sites copyright free so you can use them , rewrite , distribute them without any problems. Freedom of information act gives all users rights to use copyrighted information without any offence.
2. Find sites / blogs that offer creative commons license, creative commons gives you rights to use the content / modify / distribute with proper attribution.
3. Getting information from old book and brochures is an effective way. I’d suggest reading up on copyright law, finding some obscure texts that appear to be well beyond their copyright expiration date, and scanning them. Realistically, old tourist brochures and the like are unlikely to result in someone chasing after you. Be careful, of course, and do a bit of online research to be sure that an old book hasn’t been reissued with an updated copyright. By evaluating the materials you find, you can assess the probability of a copyright issue down the road. You could probably find a very inexpensive student to scan, OCR, and proof for you. I’d also choose texts with clear, easily scan able text that are unlikely to cause OCR errors. If you buy some cheap old books, you could even cut the pages out for sheet-fed scanning.
Web’s Influence on offline copywriting:
I am sure writing offline is completely different from writing for internet. For internet we need to consider both users as well as the search engine crawlers. Writing for search engines need to be a bit aggressive we need to make sure relevant keywords and phrases are included in our copy. Users don’t look for keywords or phrases in contents they are just looking for quality information.
Compared to online readers’ offline reader are much higher. So it’s important to make sure our writing style for offline world is not changed. Personally I have found that my writing style in the offline word has changed somewhat. As the result of constantly thinking about succinct, keyword-driven content – as opposed to padding out articles when I used to write off-line in the ‘old days’ – I have to be constantly aware when I switch mediums. In many ways, writing offline has helped me to focus on sticking to the subject at hand. Now I am using more sub headings and sub titles even if I write for offline media. I got this habit mostly from writing for websites I feel this is a significant change.
There are areas I have improved writing for the web. When writing for web I need to be more aware of the keywords that need to be included in my copy, this help me to include relevant concepts when writing offline.
Quality copywriting suggestions:
People dealing with the web world often come across the statement, “Content is king”. A good content has immense important in the web world. People browse through Internet to extract information. And information on a site is the content it offers. The more useful and informative content a site has, the more popular the site will be. A website with keyword-rich content and concrete information can certainly drive targeted traffic. And the more the traffic in your site, the more is your publicity and sales.
Some of the secrets of quality content writing are:
1.Make sure that your website content is compact and understandable. Avoid writing superfluous content as it irritates the website visitors and drive them away from your site.
2.See that your content is original. Originality matters in web writing.
3.Browsers prefer glancing over an article rather than reading it thoroughly. So, it’s better to break up your content into heads and subheads, and summarize the basic content in through them.
4.Interactive language makes your content more interesting. It also helps you to reach your website audience more easily.
5.Proofreading is essential to make your website content flawless. It helps you to get rid of typo errors.
I hope that helps.
How fast can you write a sales letter?
A delicate question that needs a lot of thinking before one can answer it. I feel the speed depends on various factors. How long is a piece of string? What’s the product, what’s the price point, how competitive is the industry, how effective are the competitors at selling their product, what are the unique selling points of the product, are these reflected in the site, does the product have clearly defined and understandable features and benefits, is the benefit tangible, are the audience likely to be in the early or late stages of the buying cycle?
Writing for products is an other major challenge. Depends on how much information I have on the product. If I know the product by heart I could write a good sales letter in 15 minutes. If I don’t know anything about the product at all, nothing of its use, purpose, USP, brand etc. I could not write it in two years.
If all of the stars were in alignment, and the wind blowing in the right direction and the tides out, it could be done in 30 minutes, if the stars aren’t in alignment etc, it could take a weeks work to get the right text. I write copy all the time and the time it takes to complete really varies. Some days I am right on the mark and can crank out awesome sales copy in a couple of hours. Other days I have major writer’s block and couldn’t do it in 2 days.