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
Posted in copywriting, internet marketing, outsourcing | No 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.

Tags: copywriting, copywriting services, offshore copywriting services, seo copywriting, web copywriting
Posted in copywriting | 1 Comment »