A blogger and copywriter myself, I tried to put myself in my employer’s shoes and create this list of recommendations: What would I be concerned about if I were a blog owner? What posts do I want to see on my blog? How often? What will be the style of my posts?… Below is the list of questions that you should specify before contracting a professional blogger.

1) Have the blogger ever written posts on my topic or on the topic similar to mine?

This is important because the web copywriter should understand the business, and should be able to use the language of your industry. If your industry is that rare, that a blogger with such knowledge can hardly be found, ask your future blogger to carry out a thorough research of the business before writing any posts.

2) Will the posts be optimized for my prime keywords?

Search engine optimization is important for your blog, because being an Internet marketing tool, your blog will help you promote the website of your business. Therefore, ask your blogger to optimize your posts and provide them with up to 7 prime key words or phrases you would like to be searched by.

3) What is the minimum word count per post?

The information you get from different bloggers may vary. Most bloggers write posts no shorter than 250 words. Overall, the optimal text length, which will ensure that your text is informative, well structured, and unobtrusive, is 350-500 words.

4) What type of posts will these be?

Normally, you can distinguish between personal posts, adjunct posts and ghost posts. Personal posts are posts that you write yourself. Adjunct posts are posts that are authored by someone else, and the name of the author will appear under the post. However, your name will be attached to the post. Having such posts on your blog will show the reader that you are getting somebody else’s help in keeping the content fresh. And, finally, the last type of posts is ghost posts. When dealing with ghost posts, you pay somebody to write for you but still have your name under the post. This is the most preferable type of posts from the point of view of a blog owner. You don’t have to write anything, or ask anybody authoritative to place a post on your blog – you just pay the money and get the high-quality post which is to the point and makes sense, and has your name under it showing you as an expert in your field. We are not deepening into moral issues here, it is not our aim now to discuss what is honest and what is not. We are here to make our blog a powerful marketing tool and we are looking at this issue from the point of view of our business. In the business world such type of writing is quite acceptable.

5) Can I review the posts before you post them? And, if I dislike something, will you revise?

This is a very important question to specify with your offshore copywriting company. To make your cooperation solid and effective, you need to discuss such issues in advance. As a rule, companies offering copywriting and blogging services welcome you to make comments and give ideas. You won’t have time to read the posts all the time of course. However, please, draw special attention to the first five posts written for you. You need to adjust the style, to choose the right “voice” of the post, to let the blogger feel what you need. Once you are comfortable with the quality of the posts, you don’t have to review their writing as closely or as frequently.

Besides, you can also provide the blogger with specific links, interesting posts or articles that you may come across on the net and might want your blogger to use for your blog.

6) How often should new posts appear on my blog?

My experience shows that the ideal number of posts per week is five. You have 5 working days in a week – and each day you must say something new. Though you may stop on 3 posts per week. It will be quite okay, too. Keep in mind that you don’t need more than 5 posts per week.

7) Will the professional blogger also take care of comments coming to my blog and handle technical things when necessary?

Very important question. As a rule, blogging companies include this in their blogging services. However, it is always better to clarify.

Above I tried to summarize the main recommendations to a blog owner who has never dealt with bloggers and blogs and who might need some education in this new and exciting sphere. As a blogger myself I know what questions I can expect from the clients and can help the people who are unaware of blogging but who want to get involved in it.

I doubt that there is any professional copywriter who has never heard yet about such a service as Copyscape.com The matter is here about plagiarizm and defending your rights online. In two words this service helps to identify the duplicate content in the Internet - pages, that already have the “same content”.

How does it work?
You insert the definite web-address (it can be the root URL or a concrete page) and push the “Go!” button. The system start global scanning and can provide you with the number of urls that have the same content or that have quoted you. Great, isn’t it?!

In reality everything is much more commonplace as you might think: the system just uses the command that is called “exact match” when you type something in Google, like, for example, “web development company in Europe” - you will get results exactly for this very phrase. No wonder, this is invaluable for copywriters.

By and large, what we’ve got?
The tool that queries Google (and Google only!) to find the pages that have the same or practically the same content. Is it perfect? Absolutely not! I will write down a list of disadvantages of Copyscape (sorry, if I criticize it sharp - I would like to see the more powerful tool in the nearest future):

1) Limited free queries per IP address (20 at the moment);

2) Google indexed pages scanning only (this means that Yahoo! Live.com and other search engines are ignored and this is really in vain as it has been long ago noticed that other Search Engines index pages more often and faster);

3) The system is often mistaken (for duplicate content it can take absolutely different information though some connectors, parenthesis or other cohesive elements that can be used absolutely everywhere on different web-sites);

4) It scans only those pages that are in the main index in Google (the pages that are in Supplemental Index - a very common practice nowadays - are excluded from scanning. Why? No idea!).

Once again, I’m not paying tribute to this Tool just for the disadvantages mentioned above. They are enough to ruin (100% the right word) a copywriter’s job! Even the following picture won’t save you 100% from stealing your content.

P.S. Ready for a big discussion! Please, leave comments.

It is not a secret to anyone today what copywriting is. Before, World Wide Web had been developed on a larger scale and had been brought to almost every home, copywriting was inseparable from advertising being part of any effective advertising campaign. However, with time, marketing experts started talking about copywriting for the web, and later, about seo copywriting. What is the difference between the latter two?

The difference is in the “ultimate reader” of the content. The copy can be written for people to read, get useful information, and eventually get motivated to do something, for example, to purchase some thing or service (web copywriting); and for the search engines’ spiders to crawl the site and evaluate several distinct elements of a web page (i.e. keywords, meta-tags etc), and then rank the web page based on the analysis of the produced results (seo copywriting).

A copywriter who wants to write a SE-friendly copy should stick to certain rules, though informal, but rather useful for producing an effective piece of content to help his/her colleagues seo managers get better and faster results in SEO:

1) Keeping the main points at the top of the article.

2) Using keywords in the content (the keywords’ density compiles 7% of all the content).
Practically, keywords may be found in two places on a web page; either in alt- and meta tags (title and description are extremely important) or in the body of the content. Good SEO copywriting is by no means simply stuffing the content with the keywords. This is a creative process, which requires much patience, good knowledge, and feeling of the language. Over-using your keywords may bring a number of negative consequences to the site you are writing for. First, your human readers will feel that the content is too formal and boring and will not read your copy carefully. Secondly, search engines may ban your site as SPAM, and you will have to take time rewriting your content as well as restoring your rankings.

3) Remembering your target audience.
It is crucial to consider the target audience of the site for the structure of the webpage content. Say, if the page is informational, it has to be correctly organized and easy to read. For example, having headlines and headers is a must. On the contrary, if the page aims at selling or promoting something, try to use call to action statements to provoke the customers’ motivation.

4) Staying away from Corporate Style Language.
One of the main slogans of writing for the web is “the shorter – the better”. Avoid writing long and complex sentences. Excessive use of neologisms, phraseological units, jargon, abbreviated word combinations, as well as metaphors, hyperboles and other stylistic devices is unacceptable for seo copywriting, and will decrease your chances for fast SE indexing and ranking.

Overall, an effective search engine-friendly copy reflects a balance between keyword density and positioning, number of words, relevant, interesting text, and the uniqueness of the content. Be careful and attentive when writing for seo purposes. Determine the number of words your content will consist of. Then, estimate how many keywords (7%) you are going to use, and where you will position them not to sound obtrusive. If the information you have on the topic is not enough, start scanning various Internet resources for additional information. Remember that there is no way for a “copy and paste” method when writing for seo. If you use somebody else’s information, paraphrase it! When you are done with the creative process of writing and paraphrasing, devote some time to technical things, i.e. have a look at the way the information is organized; add headlines and headers, highlight some keywords, structure the information. Finally, proofread your copy to avoid misprints, spelling and grammar mistakes, count the number of primary and supplementary keywords you used in your copy, see if it reads fine and interesting. If in your content you refer to some other site, check that the link you have placed works fine, and that the site, you are referring to, is not abandoned, or banned.

Following the above mentioned tips will help you write a bunch of search engine- and human-friendly copies of the highest quality.

All the sources enumerated below are not a kind of advertisement for them; this list was compiled in order to help our copywriters and everyone who wants to publish his/her original ideas on any topic. I ask my colleagues to expand this list if the information above is not complete.

1.) http://www.ezinearticles.com

The leader in collecting articles and ezines from anyone in the Internet. The biggest articles-share system that has a number of opportunities for professional copywriters and for the beginners and SEO-specialists as well. You can try your skills in copywriting by becoming a member of this community and you have 10 articles submissions for free but that is not all! If your articles appear to be an outstanding source for the people – you have a chance to win a Platinum status that allows you to publish an unlimited number of articles. You are allowed to use external links from your article to other resources and even the site you want to promote. The use of special html-tags is restricted. After you publish an article, the site-editor has to check it whether it complies with the rules. Usually it takes 3 or 4 days. Recently approved articles are seen on the index page with a PR of 6 but do not delude yourself as your article won’t be there for a long time, though the categories where your articles will appear also have a high PR. You can then always upgrade your membership by paying a fixed price. The interesting feature is that you can always be aware of the visitors activity and their transfer to your web-site from all of your articles.

2.) http://www.articlehub.net

An interesting resource that allows publishers submit their articles for free that will appear in a special related category. Moreover, there are 5 last submitted articles + 5 most viewed articles on the index page that has a PR of 4. One link from an article is permissible. Worth considering if the article is a unique source of information. Then you can purchase permanent links under the articles. The example can be viewed here: http://www.articlehub.net/article9890.html

The last issue is not very interesting as you are to pay 50$ for this step and at the same time your links won’t be probably counted as there can be unlimited number of the links and you won’t get any PR after the update.

3.) http://www.prweb.com/

The most “serious” resource on the Web that is targeted mostly at press-releases rather than articles and ezines. The main page has PR7 and if you apply for a paid membership most likely your press-release will appear on the fist page and will stay there for a long time – pretty enough to get indexed for the web search engines crawlers. Easy and intuitively clear registration. RSS feeds are supported and ease the life of the clients in searching of a particular press-release. This is what this service gives you:

“We will show you how to get the most out of what has become the most advanced and robust system for distributing news releases to reporters, search engines and thousands of web sites that download news via our daily XML/RSS feeds.”

There is also such option as PRWeb Direct™:

WHY USE PRWEB DIRECT™?

• Same Day Distribution
• Streamlined Submission Process
• Personalized Service
• Advanced Distribution Options
• Increased Search Engine Visibility
• PRNewswire Distribution Options
• Press Release Writing and Editing Service

This is not a complete number of services provided to you by this extremely popular company!

4.) http://www.submityourarticle.com

An interesting source that allows you to submit your articles to thousands of publishers and web sites with just one click! Your articles will be definitely and instantly published on multiple major web sites that increase your link popularity. Personal RSS feed for your articles - add to your own site to keep your site automatically updated. The service will help you to boost traffic to your web-site that results in increasing sales. You can even make money from copywriting here: you are to sign up for a free course that will show you how to write articles better and more concise. A huge number of topics to choose from.

5.) http://www.articlegeek.com/

Another reputable source to submit your articles and ezines. There is a huge number of benefits that you can acquire from them:

“We, the editors, will be aggressively marketing and building the ArticleGeek.com brand. We will optimize all of our pages and build links to our website as much as possible. For you, this means that you will get increased exposure and the increased chance of getting picked up by more websites or publications. This, in turn, will lead to the all important one way links and traffic to your website.”

They just require a one simple link to their resource to keep it alive – that is their only requirement and a way of donation. Yes, it is fair just one link from you and 10 links from them from 10 of your articles. Only useful and unique content is allowed.