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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: SEO copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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?

Labels: 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

Labels: SEO copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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,

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

“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?”

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: 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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting

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.

Labels: copywriting