Things you need to know before writing a pitch letter:

Writing a pitch letter is not easy being a copywriter I have tried various methods in copywriting to get the best pitch letter but I failed numerous times. But after a lot of failed attempts I was able to bring about a perfect solution for writing pitch letters

Before writing a pitch letter make sure you identify the problem people hire copywriters not just to write contents but to highlight the problems they have. So when you write a pitch letter start with the problem your client might want you to solve. Then as you proceed find a solution for the problem. The solution should come from you, you can come up with good solutions in writing when you are well aware of the industry and the copy you are writing for that industry. For different industry you need to have different ideas.

Once you get a solution you need to prove that you are trust worthy for the solution people want credibility they are not ready to listen to anyone and everyone. Also when you write a pitch letter make it look professional don’t just write something like a resume you need to be formal obviously you are not applying for a job right?. Finally good pitch letters always have free stuff give away free stuff and I am sure you will get best benefit from you pitch letter. People are always obsessed of free stuff and I am sure free stuff always works.

What’s an article worth:

Articles are not just some contents written to impress search engines. Traditional articles especially for commercial websites were written by expert copywriters who have years of experience in writing sales letters. Articles are not valued based on size or money but its based on quality and appeal to end users. If a copy for your homepage impresses 100 users then you are sure to pay higher price for that copy than a copy that every user to your website hates reading.
Cheap articles are everywhere. There are forums like sitepoint where cheap copywriters advertise their writing for 0.01,0.02 cent per word. I have tried few of those copywriters and I never got the quality I was looking for most of them were just paraphrasing from other sites. None of them had any sort of creativity in their writing, good creativity is very important for good copywriting skills. There are sites where freelancers offer cheap copywriting if you are just looking for a filler then you can look out for articles from places like elance.com , getafreelancer.com, rentacoder.com , freelancer.com, odesk.com etc. Remember all these places are good places but the articles written by the freelancers here are always of low quality.
Most good professional SEO writers will be writing for themselves, and will inevitably make more money through consulting on SEO than they will writing articles for someone else so its not easy to find good article writers. If you get a good article writer I am sure they charge atleast 50$ per article. There are people who write for magazines charge 150$ per article, its difficult to give a price for an article. Article price is purely based on the type of article you are looking for and from the type of people you are looking for.

Website traffic tips from a copywriter point of view:

Well you know we are a popular Search engine optimization company we are aware of all the best methods when it comes to getting traffic (Quality traffic ) from search engines. But there are few things I like to share in copywriter point of view.

1. There are some quality blogs that offer a section for each post like recommended links. You can use it to your own advantage if they have recommended links section they will also have an area to submit links find the form and submit your links there in most cases if you have a good blog that blog owner will accept your links. Not all bloggers will provide recommended links section so if you find one use it to your own advantage.
2. If you are good copywriter you should also know how to comment on other’s writing especially in other copywriting blogs. So if you know a blog that Do-follow links ( no-follow links are not counted by search engines ) make sure you do a decent comment with your URL in signature or in your name. This link will count as a back-link to your website I am sure of this.
3. Linking to other blogger websites is an effective way to gain your reputation if someone clicks the link on your website and goes to the other blogger website it will show in their referrals or track backs and they will see that you are happy to link out and they will do the same in future. Also track backs in do-follow blogs provide additional backlinks so linking out always benefits your blog.
4. Participate In social media sites like twitter, digg etc. People are watching what you talk make friends there in twitter add as much friends as possible follow them if you click follow they are sure to follow you too. The more followers you know more people notice what you write and this inturn helps in marketing your writing and you can reach a lot of people this way.
I have more ideas in copywriter point of view which I will share in future.

Few Copywriting mistakes you can make:

This article might sound crazy but its true there are some copywriting mistakes you can afford to make but can get away with it.

1. It’s the mercurial M-dash Copywriters use it all the time in their words. There are copywriters who use it effectively and even abuse it. Most of the abuses are not visible because they hide it so well in their sentences. Copywriters use it most of the time- to emphasize their ideas well.
2. Quotation marks and parenthesis are not often used but it’s another very useful way if you know how to use it. Most of the time quotation marks occur when you want to quote something like a saying from a famous author. E.g.: Gandhi said “Non violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed” This place it’s good to use but it can also be used in other places even without quoting if you use quotation people want to know what you are trying to say in the quotes and its highly visible to users. Parenthesis works the same way (similar to quotation ) you can use it as often as possible and people always see words in parenthesis as a cross reference to the words you use in actual sentence. If done right parenthesis can be good for your sales copies.
3. Ellipsis: You know ellipses are that dots that come after a word where a missing word or a continuation of the missing word should be. It’s too good to know ellipsis as often as possible since it highlights the way people see or read your copy. Ellipsis are like hamburgers if you like it you will use it for your life and the more you use it I am sure you will learn to use it effectively.
4. Apostrophe: You know how to use this it comes in lot of places you want to use or even in places you don’t want to use. If you use it more on right contextual areas it looks your copy very natural and very much readable.
5. Using slangs are not wrong in sales letters or website contents. Internet is completely made up of contractions we use it every day in our life while chatting or sending emails to friends so why not use it in your copy. Words like biz instead of Business, info instead of information is never wrong in fact it sometimes makes your copy look even better. So don’t hesitate to be natural use your slang it makes you look unique and people are used to informal dialogues after all you sales copy is talking to people right.
Though some of them are termed as mistakes using them will help beat your competition and will make you an effective copywriter.

Word of the year

Have you ever heard of this before. I am not sure whether its ideal to discuss this topic here or not but this phrase catches me a lot. Every year Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary website decides the Words of the Year based on the popularity of that word for that year and how often it comes up for that year. The word of the year is chosen by voting system where people tend to chose the words and the word that gets most vote is decided the word of the year.

Here is the list of words that got featured for word of the year till year 2008:

1990: bushlips (similar to “bullshit” – stemming from President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 “Read my lips: no new taxes” broken promise)

1991: mother of all (as in Saddam Hussein’s foretold “Mother of all battles”)

1992: Not! (meaning “just kidding”)

1993: information superhighway

1994: cyber, morph (to change form)

1995: web and (to) newt (to act aggressively as a newcomer, like Speaker Newt Gingrich during the Contract with America)

1996: mom (as in “soccer mom”)

1997: millennium bug

1998: e- (as in “e-mail”)

1999: Y2K

2000: chad (from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida)

2001[1]: 9-11

2002[2]: weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)

2003[3]: metrosexual

2004[4]: red state, blue state, purple state (from the United States presidential election, 2004)

2005[5] : truthiness (popularized on The Colbert Report)

2006[6]: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)

2007[7]: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)

2008[8]: bailout (in the specific sense of the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.)

LOL both 2007 and 2008 say recession related words as the word of the year we know we are now facing unprecedented crisis due to subprime crisis which started in US and spread to the world. World is facing tough times now and I hope 2009 will have a similar word. There are also lists for words of 20th century words of last millennium, interesting right I hope you will have your own ideas which words should be highlighted. Please share in comments your word of the year suggestions for 2009.

Copywriting:

I read an interesting article on why people don’t link your well written quality content. It was a quality article from copyblogger.com. Most of the stuff discussed in that article were interesting to ready. I was able to get some valuable tips from it. As per his article making friends in blogging world is the primary way of building good trust and good trust.

I agree with his point its true that the more people you know in blogging world especially people in your same industry the more reach you will have, you will get more followers and they will start linking to you just because they like you.

Guest posts are a great way to gain attention. Especially on blogs that already have decent bit of visitors it will be good to write a guest post which will gain attention of that blog readers and if they like the post I am sure they will link to your blog or start reading your blog.

Trying to contact other bloggers with intention of making friendship or for some good questions or for interviews with them will make them look at your website / blog.

Participating in their blogs, commenting in their blogs, posting in their forums, message boards actively will help in building a good community.

Nowadays volunteering to vote helps in building up good reputation if you are willing to vote for their sites in social bookmarking sites I am sure they will do the same favor to you.

Volunteer linking to their post will definitely help this is what they say what you give comes back to you. The more you link to them more they link back.

Does long phrases cause problem for copywriting?

When you are writing copies especially for SEO purposes you will be asked to include long phrases as part of campaign to optimize those phrases. Sometimes copywriters find it difficult to include long complicated phrases in their content. This is mostly because some contents are very sensitive and cannot be flexible to accommodate long phrases. So how do we tackle it. If you are using long phrases like “car shipping company in Houston” you can make the sentence short which makes the job easier to include the long phrase. E.g.: We are the best car shipping company in Houston and surrounding areas is easier to write than writing a long sentence and trying to accommodate the long phrase. Why am I stressing to use long phrases its because most people use long phrases to search. Initially when they do a search they start from short phrases but when they are unable to find the pages they are looking for I am sure they will start using long and more targeted phrases. So its important to include long phrases in your contents. When you are writing copy for SEO purposes you need to make your contents keyword rich it should have both long and short phrases.

Long phrases never cause problems if used in the right way. A good copywriter will be able to figure out how to effectively use a long phrase on your content regardless of how complicated the

What blog to write?

One of the most difficult decision to make in is to know what blog to start to get the best results especially through copywriting skills. Well this question has been asked from the day blogging revolution started. 90% of the decision made went wrong, its because people start a blog just because they like a topic I am sure its not love towards a topic alone brings a good blog. There are lot of other factors involved. I would like to list out some ideas which I feel is important before starting a blog.

1. The most prioritized reason is passion towards the topic you want to write. You need to first create a set of topics which suits your best/you love and write down in a set of paper. Later go through them as much as possible. Write a possible 25 topics atleast.
2. You need to make sure you take the right decision to select best topic for you. Few things that will do best before narrowing down is by separating the topics based on the time you are willing to spend, your knowledge and skill in that particular topic, do you have good experience in the industry you want to write, do you know people who share the same ideas as you in the the topic you want to write, do you get a chance to get ideas from them are they willing to share with you? , how many people do you know in the topic you want to write? If you can get the answers for the above suggestions you will be easily able to narrow down to the best topic to write.
3. If you are planning to monetize heavily from your blog you need to do a lot of research too. Without effective research your topic will never monetize. Best way to find monetizing is by using online keyword research tools especially Google adwords keyword suggestion tool which shows the competition of keywords for a particular topic. Similarly more the number of advertisers better your results are. Check Google sponsored links to see how competitive your industry is.
4. Final decision to make before you start blogging is to list down the topic based on interest, traffic, monetizing value, like minded people etc. Then its just your instinct that will finalize your decision. Go through the list and select the best for you. I am sure after all those research you will find the best topic
Happy blogging.

Effect ways to detect plagiarism on the web:

Biggest problem today website owners face is the problem with plagiarism of their quality contents. There are enough lazy people coming online or already on the web who never want to write anything but just steal contents from other sites and create pages or websites as if it were their own. There are lot of good and effective ways to protect content online.

Bloggers are the major group affected by online plagiarism. Especially with the rise of RSS, atom and other feeds ways to plagiarize are becoming increasingly easier. Rss scraping a new way of stealing where they just take your rss feeds and scrap content from it. There are some effective ways to stop this. Easiest way is to add a digital footprint something similar to what they use in images. You can create some random characters and add them to feeds. You can actually hide those random characters and if someone steals your content its easy to identify them by using Google search or other effective online search methods. Feedburner is a good tool to detect online plagiarism. According to feedburner website ” FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

FeedBurner also offers the largest feed and blog advertising network that brings together an unprecedented caliber of content aggregated from the world’s most recognized media companies”

You can see everyone who subscribed to your blog and other useful tools inside feed burner will help you detect rss scraping. You can use Google alerts an online tool from Google that will automate your plagiarism checks. You can subscribe for Google alerts here: http://www.google.com/alerts

A simple Google search can help detect online plagiarism. Just take a phrase anywhere from content enclose it in double quotes and search it in Google. You will be able to detect copies that Google has indexed. This is the traditional and most effective way. Sites like copyscape.com uses this technology so if you are ready to spend some bucks to detect duplicates then you can try copyscape.com. Remember you can do what copyscape is doing for totally free.

There are more methods to detect which i will discuss later in a different blog post.

Updating content on homepage good or bad strategy:

Most of the experts believe constant updating of contents to a site is good for search engines. I believe the same too. But what about homepage of a site? Home is the gateway for a site for many search engines. Mostly people tend to link to homepage and if you are in SEO you will get maximum links to homepage. For search engines homepage is very important so what’s the expert opinion on updating contents on homepage. Well in my point of view I have seen sites doing very well with a static homepage and there are sites doing very well with a dynamic homepage. I feel its mostly relative to the Business you are in and they type of site you project to Search engines.

Search engines like pages where contents are updated constantly so its better to have a page where contents are updated regularly. I know one famous site which turned to a blog started ranking well than it was before. It was a completely static site especially homepage but now that it’s a blog the guy constantly adds contents and I feel search engines started liking his site because of this. My recommendation have a section atleast on your homepage that changes dynamically something like an Rss feed will do. But most RSS feeds are duplicated better to have unique information.

Have dynamic homepage search engines will like it better than a static homepage.