Archive for web content
Hire Blog Writer: Attract Readers With Blog Content
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A Blog is the Bridge to Success
Many businesses appreciate the value of using a blog to market services and reach out to a wider audience, but many organizations simply don’t have the time to create regular blog content. If you want the best of both worlds, why not hire a blog writer to create your posts? If you are serious about finding professional bloggers, there are a few ways to go about it:
Syndicate Blog Content
Many online companies let you buy syndicated content to fill out your blog, quickly and easily. You can buy posts on a one off basis or sign up for subscription services that provide regular updates to your blog, refreshing it and keeping your readers entertained. The problem with this approach is that the same syndicated content can also be used by your competitors. The search engines punish duplicates and you will find it difficult to attract hits to your site. The other issue with using syndicated content is the lack of professionalism; if blog readers see the same content scattered around the internet, they know that you can’t be bothered to provide them with unique content. They will feel that you are wasting their time and insulting their intelligence.
Scour the Freelance Writing Sites
A search on the freelance writing sites, such as ODesk, Elance, and Freelancer, will throw up blog writers at a very low cost, helping you to populate your blog with posts without spending a fortune. The problem with this is that you can easily fall into the trap of getting exactly what you paid for: a non-native English speaker, poor grammar, plagiarised posts, and an obvious lack of expertise in the topic are just some of the potential problems with chasing the lowest common denominator.
Hire a Freelance Writer for Blogging
The best option, if you are serious about providing an informative, enticing blog is to hire a freelance writer. You can use them as ghost bloggers, writing in your voice and style, or under their own name if they enjoy a good reputation. A freelance writer will add high quality content to your site and help you to develop a good name. This will attract hits and also encourage people to share your blog posts on the social sites or press the Google +1 button, an extremely important part of achieving search engine success.
Hire Blog Writers for Success
A skilled writer knows how to adapt their voice to suit any audience and communicate your ideas and concepts, all the time adding rich, unique content your site. Hire a blog writer for maximum impact, and attract a large following.
Image: Darren Wyn Rees at Aberdare Blog
Freelance Copywriting: The Importance of Voice
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Many online businesses fail to see why they should pay for freelance copywriting, believing that it is an unnecessary cost. They try to write their own copy or scour the freelance writing sites in an attempt to find cheap labor. They don’t realize that this can actually harm business, potentially jeopardizing all the hard work they put into designing and promoting the site.
The problem is that too many organizations are prepared to spend a small fortune on web designers, SEO consultants, and photographers, yet don’t think too much about the content. Instead of treating content as the heart of the website, it somehow becomes relegated to a secondary function, a mere afterthought.
A well-laid out, easy-to-navigate website with good images will create an image of professionalism, like a well-maintained, tidy store. It can certainly catch the eye and entice people to explore further, but it will not encourage them to buy. The way to close the deal is with words, a tried and tested technique that has worked for a few millennia.
Incompetent Employees and the Empty Store
So, why do businesses forget this ancient technique as soon as they move online? Perhaps they become enamored with the whole multi-media/flash animations/Facebook thing: while these are great marketing methods, they cannot stand alone.
Think of it as populating a store with beautiful staff, complete with flashing white teeth, perfect tans, and designer shirts: this won’t work if they are completely devoid of personality. If a potential customer asks a question only to find that the employees aren’t particularly blessed with brains, they will go elsewhere. It is the same online: you need to use words to sell, ideally well-chosen words from somebody who is knowledgeable, engaging, and interesting.
Connecting With Words: The Gift of the Freelance Writer
This is one of the keys to good freelance copywriting, as an experienced professional writer knows how to connect with people. There are a few techniques for keeping readers interested, but the common thread uniting them all is the ‘writer’s voice.’ This is a fundamental principle that is very simple to understand yet very hard to practice.
Ideally, a writer’s language should resemble how they would sound if they were speaking to the person. Try reading this passage out aloud (as long as you are not in public), and it is pretty much how I sound in real life: a slightly pompous Englishman. In fact, many writers, when they read, actually hear a little voice in their head reciting the words aloud. That is why TYPING IN ALL CAPS is a bad thing, because it actually gives some of us a headache!
A good writer can not only write how they speak, but can adapt their voice; if they were writing to an audience of grizzled building contractors, they would use a completely different voice than if they were copywriting for a site frequented by gaming geeks. That is what a good copywriter can do – they can make your site a welcoming place, greeting customers with a little human warmth, explaining exactly what your business can do for them.
The Joy of Freelance Copywriting
Of course, that is only one part of the equation, because a good copywriter can also create content that attracts search engine bots as well as human readers. Your marketing department will love you if you hire a pro copywriter, because this will make their life much easier.
Anyway, that is the end of these musings – I hope that you didn’t get too lost in the rambling. As you are at the end of the page, I must have done something right, so here is the link to the main site where you are free to contact me for a no obligation discussion. Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you soon.
Image: “Raven Releasing the Sun”, by Todd Baker
Using a Professional Freelance Writer: The Article Bubble Bursts
Posted by: | CommentsAn increasing number of companies are starting to understand the importance of using high quality website content and articles. Instead of paying cheap freelance writers to churn out spun copy for their marketing, they want to use a professional freelance writer to produce meaningful, unique content.
This is nothing new, and many marketers and writers have known about this trend for a long time. However, I want to expand upon this point, because this move towards producing informative content ties in with what the search engines are doing to clean out the Adsense optimized content plaguing the internet.
I read a post by respected online guru, Grizzly, today and this supports what most marketers and writers have suspected for over a year; Google is going on the offensive and is looking to clean up the net. Google advertisers pay good money for prime adverts locations, and expect their adverts to be shown on useful, targeted content. Instead, their Adwords are often displayed on a content-thin blog with the sole intent of making customers click on adverts, just so that they can escape the empty content and keyword soup.
Great News for Professional Freelance Writers
As a professional freelance writer I am, naturally, very pleased about this news, although I am probably at odds with a few of the marketing-oriented people. From my point of view, anything that gets rid of the article mills paying mediocre freelance writers a couple of dollars to churn out content spun from Wikipedia or Ezine is a good thing. Simple supply and demand will now mean that experienced professionals receive a level of pay that matches their talent, without the disgraceful rates paid on many freelance sites becoming a stick to beat down rates and fuel a race to the bottom.
The interesting point in Grizz’s post is that most of the marketing experts are advocating building one or two informative, authoritative sites, instead of throwing up 20 blogs with minimal content, all set up with the purpose of funneling people towards Adsense traps. Foresighted companies are developing well laid out, content rich sites, and are cleverly using article marketing to attract direct referrals, rather than scatter tripe around the net in the vain hope of building a few backlinks.
Freelance Writing: Research and Increased Productivity
Less time spent wading through respun rubbish might mean that this freelance writer can actually have the occasional day off!
As an online writer, much of my work involves a lot of research, and being able to navigate search engines, without the same, automatically spun content dominating the search-engine rankings, is going to increase my productivity immensely.
There is still a need for good SEO practices and, as a writer, I still have to understand the basics of online marketing, such as keywords and backlinks. However, I am confident that this move towards quality will mean that I can spend more time writing and less time leaving comments on blogs that I have little interest in reading (Much like this one, I hear you say!)
As with many things, this move is nothing new and SEO is moving back towards old-school marketers, who are ethical and prefer to help online businesses grow organically, rather than follow the latest fad. The knowledgeable Peter Hoggan, at Escocian, is a great believer in Ethical SEO Services, and I have no problem giving his organization an organic link; I like what he has to say.
Hire a Freelance Writer – Get Ahead
As you can imagine, this news will take a long time to filter through the system, and many companies will continue to throw large volumes of mud at the wall in the vain hope that some sticks. Conversely, forward thinking companies can now concentrate on producing quality, using marketing techniques developed long before the internet appeared on the horizon. The article marketing bubble is about to collapse, and you have a chance to get ahead of the competition.
Web Copywriting – The Advantages of Using a Freelance Copywriter
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Article mills are the bane of the internet, fueling the low wage, low quality web copywriting culture
Search engines, the driving force behind internet habits, are moving towards promoting high quality web copywriting. Rather than reward businesses that flood the internet with sub-standard articles, the search engines are adapting their algorithms to promote high-quality content and rid the internet of the spammers and empty articles.
Because marketers became fixated upon generating backlinks, to the detriment of providing quality web content, businesses used cheap freelance writers to produce countless keyword dense articles, often written in barely passable English. Internet users are sick and tired of trying to find useful information online, only to be confronted by empty content sourced from the notorious article mills. They want to find what they need, quickly and efficiently, without navigating seas of thinly disguised sales copy and painfully poor articles.
The big search engines are aware of this, and they know that consumer power can make or break their market position; they must adapt or die. The same applies to any business with an online marketing strategy; they must start to produce quality content or be left behind in the sandbox as the competition forges ahead.
Instead of going for the cheapest option, now is the time to use a professional freelance copywriter, who will be able to guide you through the transition. In hard economic times, as the advertisers focus on quality rather than saturation, the businesses producing quality will be the survivors when the internet content bubble finally bursts.
Investing in a Freelance Copywriter for Web Copywriting
Many business owners are happy to pay professional marketers and web designers good rates to promote their business, but are strangely reluctant to pay fees for a professional writer. They shop in the bargain basement and try to find freelance writers for a few dollars an hour, yet expect high-quality content. In the vast majority of cases, this approach fails. Content is king, and racing to the bottom reflects badly on your business.
The fast moving nature of the online world means that you only have a few seconds to impress potential clients and, if you confront them with poorly written content, written in poor English and with no direction to the writing, consumers will click the back button on their browser. The high rates that you paid for a marketing consultant have been wasted, all because you tried to save a few dollars. A freelance copywriter knows how to use subtle language to close the deal and entice consumers to spend time browsing your site and seeing what you have to offer.
A professional freelance copywriter will work alongside your marketers and is fully aware of the SEO techniques required to reach out to clients. A pro writer can take keywords and blend them seamlessly into flowing paragraphs and elegant prose. Search engines love high quality web copywriting and, by using a freelance writer as part of your marketing team, you can outperform other businesses still stuck in the old mentality of quantity over quality.
Your highly paid SEO marketing consultant love talented web copywriters, because it makes their life much easier. High quality, natural web content is much easier to promote than keyword soup and, if they are paid by the hour, this will also impact on your bottom line, saving you money. A marketing consultant given good content can concentrate on what they do best; helping your site climb the search engine rankings, rewarding your policy of hiring the best writer that you can find.
A Freelance Writer is a Deal Closer
Internet users are becoming very sophisticated and wary of the many fraudulent websites and products plaguing the internet. Amongst other things, they look at the quality of your website as a benchmark of quality, using it to gauge your product, professionalism, and customer service.
Marketers go out and find potential clients; a talented web designer uses eye-catching, slick designs to convince then to stay; and high quality content, written by a professional freelance copywriter, closes the deal. Using this trirumvate is the key to success, built upon the tried and tested sales techniques that existed long before the dawn of internet shopping.
As an example, I recently browsed the internet to look for some new door fittings, and was disgusted by the sheer amount of poor quality articles online, thinly disguised sales pitches that consisted of a couple of paragraphs written in poor, broken English.
Do these businesses seriously think that I am going to visit their site if they cannot be bothered to act professionally? By trying to save money, they lost a sale, all because they tried to write their own content or hired an enthusiastic amateur.
Web Copywriting – The Flexibility and Professionalism of a Freelance Copywriter
An experienced, skilled web copywriter is a professional with years of training and experience, so you are not going to find one for a few dollars an hour. In the same way, you will not find an accountant, marketer, lawyer, or mechanic for that rate. These professionals are fully aware of their value and set their prices accordingly.
So, why do businesses begrudge paying freelance writers a decent rate? They have been swayed by the article mills and content submission sites, and believe that you really can find a writer for cents. Sadly, in most cases, they end up with poorly written content, with little power, passion, or authority behind the copy or, in the worst cases, plagiarized content copied from other sites.
Freelance copywriters are hired guns, able to refresh marketing campaigns and imbuing them with life and honesty. Professional; freelance writers understand the world of internet marketing and can integrate seamlessly into your team, providing valuable insights and ideas on how to reach a wider audience. Most of all, they make sure that your web copywriting compels and projects your core values and integrity.
The question isn’t about whether you can afford to hire a freelance copywriter for your web copywriting. The question is can you afford not to?
Hire a Copywriter – Write Quality Website Content
Posted by: | CommentsThe False Economy of Cheap Website Content
Many businesses, keen to establish an internet presence, spend a lot of money on Search Engine Optimisation and marketing. Quite rightly, they assume that this will increase awareness and boost their site up the rankings. However, after spending large sums on marketing experts, they shop around in the bargain basement when it comes to generating web content. Rather than pay a professional freelance writer editor, they throw a couple of dollars to one of the freelance writing article mills, which churn out reams of regurgitated content.
This race to the bottom guarantees that all of their expenditure on marketing will be wasted, because Google algorithms are too smart to be fooled by article spinning and keyword stuffing. As their site sinks into the depths of the internet, they give up, or decide that generating business online is a waste of time. If they had invested a little money in hiring a professional writer for their websites, they could have avoided this fate.
A Professional Writer Underpins Marketing Success
If these businesses had spent a little time trying to understand the science of internet marketing, they would have finished the job, by using a professional writer to lay the foundations of their marketing drive. A website is no different from a ‘bricks and mortar’ business, and aggressive marketing is no substitute for core values, built upon developing customer service and marketing the business as quality, not cheap.
Imagine a store where the staff spend their time ignoring queues, insulting customers, and know nothing about the products. This sounds simple, but so many website owners do exactly this, when they insult their customers by using poorly written, rambling web content, instead of professionally written articles and blogs .
A Freelance Writer Editor Writes Web Content that Informs and Engages
Hiring an amateur and inexperienced writer to create poorly worded content, riddled with basic errors, is guaranteed to drive customers away. The words on your website are your only interface with your customers and you only have a few seconds to project a professional image. By assuming that your customers are stupid, you lose the sale and they will never return. The basic concept of marketing is no different on the internet than when merchants plied their trade along the Silk Route:
“Identify a Problem: Provide a Solution.”
This is a simple idea, but it is so easily forgotten amongst the jargon of SEO and the plethora of spun articles and sea of pointless words. Customers want to find information, without wasting time reading irrelevance and tired sales copy, containing the mandatory red fonts, endless exclamation marks and absolutely nothing of substance. They want carefully crafted web copy, drafted by a professional writer, which informs and gently entices.
A Professional Writer – A Sculptor of Words
Hiring a professional writer creates an interface built upon mutual respect, building trust between a business and its clients. A freelance writer editor sees words as more than blunt tools for communication and, instead, shapes them into emotive sentences and flowing language. To a professional writer, words are raw clay, to be shaped into objects of beauty.
A freelance writer editor will write concisely and clearly, using subtle layers of language to appeal to the emotions. A writer will guide the customer, rather than using blunt language and including countless ‘Buy it Now’ buttons. The days of hard sell are long gone, and internet savvy consumers hit the back button when confronted with aggressive copy, mentally associating it with spam.
Experiment Resources – A Case Study in Professional Writing
One example of quality winning over quantity is the scientific resource site, Experiment Resources, a highly regarded authority site, with a Google Page Rank of 5. This leading site is regularly cited in journals, texts, lecture halls and classrooms around the world. The owner of the site decided that he was tired of the poor quality online articles on the internet, and set about developing a high quality scientific resource site.
He employed a professional writer, with a background in science, to develop informative content around strong keywords. With this alliance of sound Search Engine Optimisation and high quality web content, Experiment Resources slugs it out at the top of the search engine rankings, taking on websites with huge budgets. The visionary entrepreneur now receives a steady stream of e-mails asking for permission to cite the work in course notes and academic papers.
The site owner is working with his writer to develop a series of books, and the Experiment Resources brand continues to grow, an example of how employing a professional writer attracts success.
A Professional Writer is an Investment, not an Overhead
Scraping around in the basement and looking for cheap, rather than good value, is why many internet businesses fail. Businesses are increasingly seeing professional writers as an investment, not an overhead, and are waking up to the new paradigm of quality. Consumers want the type of rich content that only a freelance writer editor can provide, rather than the meaningless drivel available on the various article directories. A professional writer will save you money and attract success and give you the opportunity to gain an advantage over the competition.
Instead of presenting customers with poorly constructed web content, guaranteed to drive them away, you can use a professional writer to draw them in and entice them to buy.
Professional Writer Links
My personal website can be found at: Freelance Writer Editor
An example of my work at Experiment Resources: Islamic Scholars and Biology
In my spare time, I write at Dropout Nation: Conviviality – Starving the Ravenous Beast
Experiment Resources Cited on Wikipedia: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Citation at the University of Jyväskylä: Case Study Research Design
Citation at The San Ramon Valley High School: www.grochbiology.org/Statistics.ppt
Citation at the University of Hawaii: www.hawaii.edu/lis/content/syllabi/684_harada_f09.pdf
Story in the RSPCA Newsletter: RSPCA
