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.
Importance of Keyword in SEO writing
Note that there are about 80 million websites that people who go online to shop will not really find your site unless it is ranked among the top ten search results. In most cases, people who are reaching for something will not really go to the next page of the search result so there is a slim chance for you to be noticed if you do not make it to the first page of the search result.
Use Powerful Triggers
People who search for something online use keywords and key phrases to find what they want. In most cases, the keywords and key phrases used in the search are those words that are closely related to their field of interest. To drive traffic to your website, you should put SEO articles in your website using powerful triggers that could put your website on the top search results.
To be able to write good SEO articles, you should learn the language of your trade well. When writing your article, use keywords and key phrases that would most likely be used by people who are looking for products and services in your area of expertise. The placement of the keywords and the key phrases in your article is very important.
It is not enough that you put in the keywords and key phrases; you should also make sure that everything make sense so that the search engine will pick up your article and rank you higher than the others.
When placing keywords or key phrases in your article, use these words on the title of your article and then use the same keywords a few more times on the body of the article.
Professional SEO Copywriter
Are you looking to hire a professional copywriter? Before you hire someone, please read the article below which talks about the 2 things you need to know before you hire a copywriter! If you’re considering hiring copywriting help for your next brochure, Web site, or marketing project. 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 2 tips on how to choose and work with a copywriter:
1. Understand your mission beforehand.
A crucial factor in streamlining the writing process is determining the principal points you need to communicate – “before” you bring in a writer. Who is your target audience? What is your message” What is unique about your company? In what type of tone do you want to speak to your reader? What type of response do you ideally want the reader to make? Having this information agreed upon before you get a writer involved will save you unnecessary copy revisions and keep your costs down.
2. Develop a realistic schedule.
Yes, you’ve heard this all your life, but haste makes waste. Avoid hastily hiring a copywriter and dumping a rush job on her. Not only will you not have time to thoroughly check her experience and references, but, no matter how wonderfully talented she is, her first draft will not be ‘fully cooked.’ Most copywriters need time to let words and ideas simmer.
Most writers will request a few weeks to develop your copy, so set a realistic schedule to give the creative process ample time. Count on going through one or two revisions as your writer refines the piece’s angle and conveys the key benefits of what you’re promoting.
Use Phrases and Be Specific when writing SEO copy
Make use of phrases
This advice goes especially for web writers, because there is much of competition for single keywords. If you are a product seller for “Mobiles” don’t just target “Mobiles” as your fundamental keyword. Go to major search engines and search for Mobiles, you will see that people are becoming more search-savvy and are search for specific strings. Today people know that by becoming more specific about what they are looking for can actually get them what they want. Know what is unique about your product, may be you are expert in selling second hand mobile phones then make “second hand mobile phones” as your primary keyword.
Don’t simply say “our mobiles”. Wherever you could usually say “our mobiles”, ask yourself if you could escape with saying “our cheap second hand mobiles” or “our cheap second hand cell phones”. If it would not affect your readability too poorly, may be it’s worth going for. It’s a great balance though. Keep in mind, your website imitates the excellence of your own service. If your website is unreadable, people would deduce a lot about your offered service.
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.
5 Easy steps towards writing an SEO Article
- Any expert Copy writer would know that writing is a process and not a short burst of uptight activity. The common steps involved in writing are planning, researching, writing a rough draft, editing and coming up with a final draft.
- Writing a good article involves discussing, why it is significant and what is that you need to include. If you pre-decide the scope and focus on it then you would save lot of time and effort later.
- The most excellent articles help readers answer problems, save time, shun mishaps and do their jobs successfully. You cannot really assume that the reader shares your insight of a problem; you might have to sell them the difficulty before you sell them a solution.
- In the web, people are more interested reading real stories, so use real stories and your experience while writing. Readers enjoy reading about happened stuffs do not take pleasure in reading platitudes, lectures or any crapy slogans. So believe in reality, not on theory.
- “Why” is more attractive than “what.” Defining a problem or an exposure is only the starting point.
Happy Writing