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.

Our corporate blog has been populated by SEO topics recently. The posts are getting too long - so here we go with the small and easy one. (Sorry guys, no SEO science in this one).
I’m not really sure if you already seen a pretty girl Ms Dewey integrated with Live Search - if not it’s worth checking out!

The first thing I did as a marketer after playing with the web site - I checked it’s Alexa rankings (it’s now ranked as a 13k web site in terms of visitors) and yes - the traffic was exactly the same I had pictured in mind: the popularity of the web site skyrocketed in the first week when it was introduced (looks like it was in top 1k of the web sites) and then started decreasing gradually… I think the late posts like that and the users that haven’t seen it yet are keeping the web site on 13k position.

The important lesson that can be learned: the web site is amazing and fan, however it brings no real value or importance (why should someone wait for this girl smiling and thinking while when he needs). That’s the reason for super popularity which lasted a week (the number of visitors was really huge, however few of those returned).

In January 2005 there was a post in Official Google Blog that I would linke to qote here:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In a few weeks other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, agreed to take into consideration the nofollow attribute of the links their spiders find while crawling. Originally this attribute was introduced to prevent people spam other people’s blogs with comments that contain nothing but links to some sites. If you have a blog yourself, you of course saw such comments linking to sites promoting viagra and texas holdem poker. Later other techniques of link spam appeared, including mass-submission of links to social bookmarking sites. Thus, most social bookmarking sites also introduced nofollow attribute for all the links that are bookmarked by the people. Some sites, like blogmarks.net and netvouz.com have not yet done so, but one can expect them to join the rest pretty soon.

However, the top social bookmarking sites I listed in my previous post can influence search engine results and traffic to the sites you promote even while using the nofollow attribute on all of their pages.

1. The first site most of you have already heard about is del.icio.us. It is the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites and it’s popularity became it’s power. Some people would use del.icio.us instead of a common search engine if the amount of irrelevant data in SERPs for their query seems overwhelming. Lots of other sites all over the web like tagvy.com, travelicio.us, tagcentral.net and many, many others would syndicate data from del.icio.us for some of the tags people use to describe their links at del.icio.us. The sites I’ve listed publish links for many tags, but it’s not a rare practice that some blog writing, for example, about SEO, would contain somewhere in the blog sidebar several latest links that people tagged as relevant to SEO. And the features I like most about del.icio.us is their export and import. Because all the links you have added to del.icio.us can be exported together with all tags and descriptions in several various formats and del.icio.us seems to be the only place where you can collect bookmarks and then import them from there to loads of other sites and applications that work with bookmarks. Even browsers offer less functionality than del.icio.us.
2. Once you have added several sites to del.icio.us, you can export the links and add them to Yahoo MyWeb. The peculiarity of this service is that it’s integrated in Yahoo and once the page you submitted to this service appears on any SERP in Yahoo, it will stand out on the page and look different from all the other results in the SERP. Yahoo will indicate how many people have saved this very page into Yahoo MyWeb, and as so far very few pages are saved there, this really makes a difference.
3. The last service from this top 3 I want to talk about, is not just a site, the most important feature with Stumbleupon is their toolbar. Once the toolbar installed you can vote for or against any page on the web. Or, if you feel bored, click on Stumble! button on the toolbar and the service will forward you to a random site according to your interests and the chances you land on some particular site are as high as the number of positive votes from the toolbar users. Of course, this would not help you if you are promoting something dull and something that only a small audience would understand, but once your site sells or offers something interesting, you should try Stumbleupon. So far we had very nice results with it for several sites.

And I would not recommend you the following websites for your SEO efforts: lilisto.com, linkagogo.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, hyperlinkomatic.com, zurpy.com and looklater.com. I’m not saying that these sites a bad or useless, but for me they were not worth the time I spent trying to figure out how they work and testing them for the sites I’m promoting. However, you might have a different experience.

Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

At MoveYourWeb we pay a lot of attention to the communication process. A number of customers switched to us after using offshore development resources due to the communication problems they experienced in those relationships.

One of the important aspects of effective communication is stable and reliable internet connection (currently we have 8mb down and 1mb up stream). The sad fact is that even the biggest internet provider in the country has some downtime happening. So the last week we signed agreement with another alternative providing another back-end up and down links to our office. The administrators already performed the necessary updates of the routing server to handle the change of one ISP to another during the downtime. Stay tuned!

While reading some stuff on outsourcing, I came across a peculiar new title of a Chief Globalization Officer. This position was new to me, and I thought that it might be new to somebody else, too. So, I got down to my next article for the blog, which, as I decided, would be dedicated to this new C position.

The necessity of creating this new position was conditioned by the fact that many companies that work on an international level are very often puzzled when it comes to the real issues of targeted or online marketing with a local flavor. In fact, “website globalization puts this issue front and center as firms market their brand and wares through their corporate URLs”. Companies often lack a high profile specialist to control the messaging, budget, technology infrastructure, and other key elements for the channel of global communication and commerce.

It happens that this is exactly a CGO who should take upon all these duties. The CGO is often compared to that second steady hand: the catalyst for global thinking, and responsiveness.

The CGO’s main functions include:

1) to form a corporate global mindset to help the organization enter new markets, and maintain competitiveness in those markets for many years to come;

2) to pursue the best global leadership talent to be able to respond to local conditions;

3) to continuously improve organizational structures to meet local conditions;

4) to conduct the management of knowledge and information, and utilize it through the best use of technology.

The first company to appoint a Chief Globalization Officer outside the US is American Cisco Systems, Inc. With that, one more C level position has been created in corporate America. Wim Elfink, the first professional Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer will go to Bangalore and work from there, thus creating the first CGO job in Corporate America outside its borders; i.e offshore.

According to Mr Elfink, as a Chief Globalization Officer, he will be in charge of “executing the growth strategy for the company globally, including collaborating with Cisco’s worldwide functional leaders to innovatively globalize and scale all functions by leveraging their work in India as a platform”.

Besides, he will take up elaborating disruptive business models for Cisco to create new markets, go-to-market channels, and technologies. Additionally, he is planning to carry out an analysis of possible implementation of Cisco’s $1.1billion investment in India. He emphasizes that developing and strengthening existing partnerships with Indian IT partners on a global scale is of vital importance to Cisco. The reason is not only that India’s market is growing for Cisco products and services. In fact, India was chosen due to many other factors. First, India is an open culture, unlike, say, China. It is well known for its strong sense of partnership, which is beneficial for implementing Cisco’s globalization strategy. Secondly, it has educated workforce, innovative customers, and skilled partners that have global capabilities. Finally, India’s government pays much attention to economic development across all levels of society.

Overall, time will show if the position of a Chief Globalization Officer justifies itself. However, already now it is clear that with the development of the modern global economy, and growing availability of the offshoring services, this new C position can become irreplaceable for implementing modern globalization strategy.

At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data - there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

Everything started from outsourcing. Companies began to shift some part of their workload (everything but core business activities, like human resources, catering and security) to outside companies within national boundaries. Some time later businesses realized that because of great imbalance in global economy, they could cut down their costs by sending their outsourced work abroad, i.e. to a row of developing countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than in post-industrial countries. That is how the idea of offshoring was born. First, low-skilled service jobs like telephone call centres, component assembly were shifted abroad; then businesses began to handle more complicated intellectual tasks over to other countries.

The arrival of the digital age has contributed to another notion in a business sphere - Offshoring 2.0. Since, digital communications have become more affordable, many partner offshoring companies have become able to do much more for their clients than before. “In the very near future, for small and medium size businesses, having partners in the Pacific Basin will no longer seem exotic, but the norm”, Research Director of the Economic Research Council Dan Lewis says.

If later, outsourcing companies were involved in all kinds of outsourcing, and used to take up any task that was offered to them, now they have become selective, or better say, they have become more specialized. So what differs Offshoring 2.0 from offshoring is narrow specialization. Today there is a number of offshoring companies, which handle only one particular type of tasks, i.e. bookkeeping, software development, web development, engineering, financial analysis etc. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of currently outsourced jobs, could be next in a row to be sent offshore. Such professional classes as lawyers, accountants, medical practitioners, computer programmers and even financial analysts – can soon lose their jobs for the reason that their work will be outsourced to outside countries! There is something to think about…

Offshoring 2.0 is typical not only for the countries of the Pacific basin, as mentioned by Dan Lewis, but also for CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). Many of the firms in Belarus, Ukraine, and Bulgaria started creating companies that even though smaller than the end-to-end offshore companies, but are becoming quite large as specialized companies. Let’s take Moveyourweb Web Development IT Outsourcing Company as a vivid example of a modern, rapidly growing and professional Offshoring 2.0 company. We deal with only one IT branch, which is web development, including a variety of related services:

- web design;

- web development;

- search engine optimization;

- logo design and corporate identity design;

- Offshore Dedicated Center.

But no more than that. Being focused on only one branch of Information Technologies, the company gets a splendid opportunity to master certain IT skills and, thus, perform their job on a highly professional level. Rather than taking up everything without having profound knowledge and enough experience, having narrow specialization, we believe, is more advantageous to us and our clients.

Offshoring 2.0 is just starting to open up huge opportunities. This method of optimization of many foreign business processes keeps gaining popularity, and promises to become the greatest business paradigm of the XXI century.