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.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogging services, copywriting, internet marketing, offshore blogging services, offshore copywriting services, web copywriting
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Having worked in SEO department for some time, I found out lots of interesting and extremely useful things about traditional SEO. However, I thought I could enrich my knowledge, and started looking for some other effective ways of getting traffic to sites, which together with traditional methods could contribute to my site’s promotion. What I discovered is a peculiar branch of Internet marketing, which is Social Marketing.

The idea of Social Marketing is in using a variety of Internet resources (weblogs, social networking sites and communities, social bookmarking sites) in order to increase popularity of your sites.

Many of us have heard of blogs. In fact, blogs can be found anywhere on the Web now. However, few people know exactly what a blog is and what it is used for, except for expressing thoughts… My personal vision of a blog is that this is a personal journal on the Web, and its main difference from the site is that it is updated frequently, displaying its content in chronological dated entries. Most blogs allow readers to post comments to posts, and link from their blog to your posts. Besides, readers can subscribe to your blog (with the help of an RSS feed), and automatically receive updates.

There are 5 most popular types of blogs: Wordpress, Blogger,Movable Type, TypePad and My Space. To create a blog you just need to sign up for a free account, set up the blog, customize it to improve your blog’s usability, and start posting. When setting up, make sure that you incorporate an XML feed which allows you to say that you can share an RSS feed with others. Besides, using an RSS feed will enable you to ping the blog each time you update your content. Pinging is another process unfamiliar to many. By pinging, you alert the various services that there is some new content on the blog, which needs to be crawled and indexed. If the content on the blog is updated regularly, the popularity of the blog is rising. If you want to profit from your blog, keep it alive!

I think that My Space is of special significance for internet marketers. It can be called a huge Internet community with millions of registered users. This is your unique Internet space, where you can write about yourself, promote your products, brands, or sites in your own blog, make thousands of friends, with whom you can share your product’s or site’s info, post bulletins announcing your product, or site, and thus increase your site’s traffic. Making My Space friends has become easier with availability of a number of friends’ adding tools (i.e. Adder Robot), which allow you to automatically send out more than a hundred friend requests a day! What’s more, My Space is crawled by Google all the time, meaning that your sites will be indexed faster.

Another step is to start your own interest group within My Space. If you do that, you can bring together a group of people interested in the same thing (i.e. in the topic of your website), recruit affiliates, network and promote you site. If your group counts over 20,000 members, you can easily create your social network and promote your site within the network.

Digging blogs, their life and functioning, I eventually had to deal with Technorati. In fact, creating a blog and simply posting it will lead to nothing unless you let other people know about it. For this purpose, you can use Technorati, which is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. Its main function is to make your blog easier to find when people search by technorati tags. Tag is a very important term in Internet Marketing. Simply put, this is a category, under which you publish your site on a social bookmarking site. As a rule, this is a keyword, or better say, a set of keywords, preferably 8-15. Your site will be stored in the site’s database under the categories you will point as tags, and people are most likely to find your site by tags.

Besides, Technorati is often called a large blog ranking engine. Your blog is ranked depending on the number of links to your blog from various websites. It is similar to a Page Rank for the site: the higher your blog ranks the easier your blog is to find among others. To create your own account, and find out more about Technorati, go to http://www.technorati.com.

Now, let’s shift away from Technorati, and talk about the largest social bookmarking service which I found quite useful - del.icio.us. By creating your account, and submitting your site to del.icio.us with correspondent one-word (!) tags, you allow millions of other users view your favorite sites, bookmark them, and comment on them. This service offers users a unique opportunity not only to store their links online, but also to share them with others.

By the way, you can submit your sites manually from the social bookmarking site, or if you have a blog, namely, WordPress, you can install an Auto Social Poster plugin, which would auto submit your post’s link to del.icio.us, furl, simpy, spurl, blinklist and several other bookmarking sites each time a new post appears on the blog. In your blog’s admin area (Plugin’s options) you can point the tags you want your post to be published for. Besides, the plugin automatically converts your tags to Technorati links.

Of course, Social Marketing is not limitted only to what I have just described. I will get back to this topic in my future posts, trying to focus on more specific things rather than talking in general.

Tags: blog, internet marketing, social bookmarking sites, social marketing, technorati
Posted in internet marketing | 3 Comments »