The following guest post was written by Vicky Fraser. The author’s views are entirely her own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.
SEO: search engine optimisation. It strikes fear into the hearts of some; cynicism and distrust into the hearts of others. However, if your business has a website and you need to generate leads, you’ll ignore it at your peril.
Firstly: a warning. Anyone who tells you that they can shoot you to the top of Google overnight is either lying, not terribly bright or using dodgy techniques like ‘spamdexing’ (which will get your site blacklisted).
Tackling it yourself
For those who want to undertake SEO themselves, there are a few things to think about. If this is your first foray into SEO, it’s worth spending a little time learning about it.
A video is worth quite a lot of words on this subject, and this is a great little introduction to SEO from those clever guys at Search Engine Land:
When you’ve sussed out your meta descriptions, chosen your URLs, set your keywords and (this is important) written your image ‘alt’ tags, it’s time to think about the copy itself.
It’s not just the search engine spiders you’re writing for; it’s your customers, too. And the search engine spiders know that. New algorithms are popping up all the time and they are getting more and more intelligent. The spiders can recognise good, relevant, useful content and they are more likely to rank it highly.
However, it’s not just about algorithms: the more relevant, interesting and engaging your copy and content is, the more likely it is to be shared, and the more likely it is to be ranked highly in the search engines. Be honest: if you’re not a good writer, employ one. It’s an investment you won’t regret.
Use the tools available to you, as well. There are quite a few good freebies around. HubSpot has an excellent ‘marketing grader‘ tool that gives feedback on a variety of aspects of a website. The SEO snippet tool is a brilliant wee thing for writing your Google snippets and URLs. And SEOQuake is great – offering a suite of widgets to diagnose individual webpages.
Once your site is optimised – don’t leave it alone! SEO is not a ‘job done’, it’s an ongoing task. Start a blog, and update it often. Fill it with relevant, useful content that people want to share – the search engines love it.
Make social media work for you too – more and more, it is searched and indexed by those spiders. The search engines are recognising what valuable sharing and search tools social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are.
Employing someone to tackle SEO for you
The advice above is very brief, and is the tip of the iceberg. If it feels like more work than you can take on yourself, pay an expert to do it for you.
There are many SEO bods out there with a variety of skills, and you may not want or need someone to take care of the whole shebang. Take a good look at your site, using the free tools mentioned above, and decide which areas need your attention most. Then spend your budget on those areas, and tackle other areas yourself.
If you have a little experience with the back end of websites, and know how metadata works, this is a relatively simple (but fairly time-consuming) task, and one that you could tackle yourself. Don’t underestimate, though, the skill involved in boiling each page down to 156 characters for the meta-description (that’s the snippet that appears in Google’s listings. It’s not terribly important for rankings, but a well-written snippet will stand out from the rest on the page and is more likely to be clicked)…
Perhaps your website copy needs rewriting and optimising for search engines? It is not simply a case of stuffing keywords in there; in fact, doing so is likely to harm your rankings and it certainly won’t do your customers any favours. As mentioned above, and this cannot be overemphasised, your website copy needs to be interesting, useful, relevant and informative – as well as easy for the spiders to recognise and rank using keywords.
Maybe you’d like a regular blog, but you just don’t have the time? Or perhaps you’d like to embrace social media, but you don’t know where to start…
Getting the best from your freelancer and the most from your budget
You’ll be paying for the copywriter’s expertise, and a good one is worth their weight in cheese. However, you can keep costs down by doing some of the legwork yourself.
Do your research yourself. Ask your customers, your friends and family, your colleagues and even complete strangers what they would search for if they were looking for your product or service.
If you can pass on a decent list of keywords and keyword phrases to pass onto your freelancer, you will save them time. That is not to say that they won’t do their own research if necessary, but they will quote accordingly.
Compile a full list of your competitors – local and national – and pass it on to your freelancer. They can do some keyword research, investigate their blog and take a good look at their use of social media to see what works in your industry.
Trust your freelancer: they will be able to look at your business from the outside, and talk about what your customers (and potential customers) want to hear. This will probably not be the same thing you want to say! Your customers want to know what you can do for them, not how great you think you are. It may be painfully honest, but it will be honest and it will do your business good.
If you’d like to employ a copywriter to blog for you, you can save them time (and reduce the bill) by providing a list of topics, and writing an outline. Researching blogs takes time, so if you do the research for us and provide a skeleton article, the costs will come down.
SEO isn’t that scary. Honest. It does require skilled writers, and an investment in time. Either way, if your business relies on inbound leads from the internet, you can’t afford to ignore it. Dive in – and do it properly!
Vicky Fraser is a freelance copywriter and marketeer based in Warwickshire. Being a science nerd undertaking a physics degree, she specialises in simplifying and clarifying scientific and technical copy but writes about all manner of things for a wide variety of clients. She blogs about science, freelancing and writing – amongst other things.
Over the past few months, we’ve looked at different ways of using social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to market your business.
But how about Foursquare?
You’ve probably seen updates from other people through Twitter and Facebook checking in using Foursquare – so what is it?
Well, it’s a way of helping you and your friends make the most of where you are. You can share details about where you visit and leave recommendations for your followers.
But more than that, it can also help you manage your brand and attract new visitors. Plus, with over 1,000,000 businesses on Foursquare isn’t it about time you started using it to?
Foursquare marketing tips
To help you get the most out of this platform, socialmediaexaminer.com have compiled a list to 10 ways you can market your business using Foursquare.
So if this particular platform has left you scratching your head, now’s the time to pop over there and have a read.
Why on earth would you want to make your copywriting invisible? After all, as a professional sales writer, you’ve spent hours crafting your carefully chosen words – you want people to love them.
The problem is, if that is your motivation (wanting people to love your words) your copy is unlikely to perform as it should.
Why?
OK, let’s look at it this way. If you are a fiction writer you want your readers to marvel at your prose. You would expect them to tell their friends about your amazing writing ability and story telling prowess. But that’s ok, because you’re writing fiction: a story that must entertain and enthral.
However, as a copywriter you are not writing for yourself. As a copywriter your role is to take on the voice of your client and to sell their products or services. Your writing becomes secondary to the sales message it conveys. In short, your writing shouldn’t distract your readers; they should just be able to concentrate on its message.
Copywriting aims
Your copy should convey meaning and connect with your readers. It has to satisfy their needs, influence, empathise with them and persuade them into taking a specific action.
There’s no room for your style or views in your copy; to be successful, you must immerse yourself in the style and views of your client – nothing else matters.
Yes, you must bring your persuasive writing skills to the table, but you must remember that you’re not writing for yourself. Keep that for the unfinished novel that’s sitting under your desk.
Copywriting qualities
To succeed in your copywriting career there are a few qualities that you must possess:
Flexibility
Ability to work to strict deadlines
Excellent research skills
Ability and willingness to learn from your mistakes
Being able to think and write like someone else
Being able to empathise with and understand different markets
But above all you must have a very thick skin. Sales writing is difficult and often clients won’t ‘get it’ straightaway, so you must be able to explain why you’ve taken the approach you have and give examples how it has worked for other clients.
So remember, your writing skills are secondary when it comes to writing great copy. The most important thing is the message; it must connect with your readers and get them to take an action.
If they are left admiring your writing instead, it’s time to switch careers!
Ask any professional copywriter and they’ll tell you it’s much harder to write short copy than long.
It’s much more difficult to get your message across when you only have a few characters to play with. That’s why social media copywriting is so tough and why so many people get it wrong.
How many times have you seen a random Tweet that’s full of abbreviations that makes no sense whatsoever? What about Facebook updates that ramble on and on?
In this post, I want to look at how to write effective social media updates that have meaning.
Twitter
Twitter is probably one of the hardest platforms to write for, purely because you only have 140 characters to play with.
As I mentioned above, the temptation is to squeeze as many abbreviations in as possible to ‘cheat’ the character limit.
But that usually ends up in a bizarre tweet that few people will bother looking at.
Writing short copy is difficult, but also a great way of honing your writing skills. After all, with only 140 characters to play with it’s essential that every word you use counts.
You can tighten your message by cutting out unnecessary adjectives (something that will also help your general sales writing) and by getting to the point straightaway.
Keep your tweet to one topic and remember to add a link if you want to direct people to an article or web page that backs up your tweet.
Keeping your updates short like this will also help your followers. If they like what you say and want to retweet it, by keeping your character count down they should be able to do so without having to go in and edit it down.
Facebook
Although Facebook gives you far more room for your updates, it is still good practice to keep them punchy and to the point.
If you post rambling updates no one is going to want to read them, so keep them short, relevant and interesting.
Also, if you want to raise your reach on Facebook ask for comments and reactions. The more reactions your post gets, the more newsworthy it becomes, which will increase its appearance in news feeds.
By adding video, polls and images you can increase your level of engagement, but what’s also important is to remember to post when your followers are likely to be online. The scheduling tool is perfect for this.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is more about business and less about personal interaction. It is a platform from which you can show your expert status within your field. That means comments about needing a coffee, what you had for lunch etc., are not really going to be all that effective.
For LinkedIn look at posting news stories that are relevant to your industry and add your comments and opinions. This will encourage others to do the same and get a conversation started.
It’s also a great place to share news about your company, whether you’re hiring new people, starting a new exciting project or diversifying.
This social media platform opens up the opportunity for longer updates, but again they must be relevant and interesting.
As you can see, social media copywriting can be a complex animal, but it is also a great way to practice your short copy skills.
That is something I am asked regularly by people who have been bitten by the writing bug and want to embark on a career as a professional copywriter.
There’s lots of advice out there and a few urban myths too, so here’s my story of how I got started.
You need an agency background
This is a common myth banded about.
Agency experience is useful and it may mean you have a few useful contacts tucked away up your sleeve, but it’s not a necessity.
Before starting my copywriting business, I had no previous experience in an agency or in a role as a copywriter. But what I did have was the ability to write clearly, powerfully and in a way that connected with my readers.
Going right back to the beginning, I started out life in the banking industry and spent a lot of time writing to customers on behalf of the branch manager (skill #1 learning to take on the voice of someone else).
After a career break to start my family, I began working for an international Leprosy charity. During that time I produced fundraising material for local campaigns (skill #2 writing persuasively with emotion to get people to take a specific action).
Then I decided to go back to school and embarked on a BA (Hons) degree in English Language and Literature with the Open University (skill #3 self-discipline and the ability to write with clarity).
After I graduated in 2007, a local businessman and friend asked for my help on a project he was working on. He knew I could write and needed some copy producing for one of his clients. I did the work, the project was a huge success and I was bitten by the copywriting bug.
Within a month, I’d set up my business, launched my first website and started learning about Internet marketing and social media.
As a result, about 70% of my new clients find me through my website with the remainder being word of mouth recommendations.
Networking and cold calling will get you clients
I’m sure for many, these options do bring in clients, but in the early days I did neither.
Cold calling is one of my pet hates; it really bugs me when people call me up trying to sell me stuff, so I refuse to do it to others.
As for networking, my initial decision to grow my business online via social media (‘virtual’ networking) came about because I am not a natural networker. Being of a shy disposition, walking into a room of strangers and striking up a conversation is my worst nightmare.
Of course, not everyone is like me and networking will get you in front of the people you need to speak with. So make sure you present yourself correctly. Don’t just way “hello, I’m a copywriter”, sell yourself by telling them “I help companies communicate more effectively with their customers through writing”.
Today, I do some networking, but I’ll never cold call.
You can only write for an industry you know about
Another myth.
Copywriting is about finding the right words to convey the right message to the right people.
Your client is the person who should know everything there is to know about their industry, not you.
As a copywriter, your role is to:
Study the company and its brand
Get a good knowledge of the service/product you’re writing about
Understand their target customers
Discover what it is that their customers want to know
Identify the main benefits that will make the customers buy
The client is coming to you because you are an expert in your field not theirs.
You have to charge by the hour
No, no, no, no, no.
Clients aren’t paying for your time; they are paying for your experience and expertise.
You wouldn’t pay a plastic surgeon for the time it takes him to perform your tummy tuck – would you?
You are not just a writer – you are an expert in creating marketing communications that resonate with customers, compelling them to take a specific action.
Anyone can string a sentence together; not everyone can create copy that is powerful, persuasive and that gets results.
Useful links
That’s a whistle-stop look at how I got started as a copywriter, but there are numerous ways you can break into the industry.
A while ago, I was asked to participate in a couple of The Guardian Online’s forums about being a copywriter. The links to these are below so you can also read about how other copywriters started out.
