Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Working amidst disturbances

Mar 27, 2005 No Comments »

Sometimes it is very difficult to work from home (sometimes, not always); especially when your parents, siblings or cousins are visiting you, and that too, according to their schedule, not yours. Despite the fact that I earn more than almost all the people around me, they think since I work from home, my schedule is of least importance.
In the evening I was writing for some client to whom I needed to send website content within two hours. My mother came into the room, settled down on the couch, and switched on the TV in full blast. She didn’t even pause for a few seconds just to ask me if I would be disturbed. The same goes for my cousins and other relatives.
A very puzzling aspect is, they don’t expect me to have much money because they don’t really know what I do and how I earn money. It isn’t that they never ask; they do ask and I do explain. But when I explain, they have this strange look of “Ok, let’s change the topic.” To an extent I understand their point of view. First, writing, to most of the people around me, is something very vague unless you’re writing stories or news. Optimized content or web content or for that matter getting work from the Internet is totally alien to them. On top of that, I’m not a great spender. I don’t believe in buying things if I don’t need them. Instead of purchasing myself an expensive gadget, I’d rather give my money to someone who needs it. I don’t buy expensive clothes because I’m comfortable with the ones I already have. I don’t eat expensive food because Alka and I mostly eat food that is healthy. Fortunately, Alka too shares my habits. Since they don’t see me spending, they think I don’t have money. And since they think I don’t have money, they draw the conclusion that I don’t do much work.
I have no problem with what they think. They can think I’m a pauper for all that matters. The problem is, they don’t think twice before disturbing me or dropping by at their own convenience. This causes severe distraction and consequently harms my work. Sooner or later I’ll have to drive in my point of view I guess :-).

Writing Optimized Articles

Mar 14, 2005 No Comments »

I’ve been writing lots of stuff about how to write optimized content (visit www.amrithallan.com/optimized-content.asp to see what’s optimized content) for web pages. But what about all these articles that we keep writing to generate content and promote our websites? Whenever we write promotional articles, we put these articles on our websites too, and not only that, they show up during various searches if the articles have the relevant keywords.
It is often not possible to incorporate all the keywords and key phrases into the main page or the sub pages, and you cannot just randomly have pages. In order to have lots of pages that contain the relevant keywords, you can have a section where you can keep on adding articles having those keywords. For instance, if you sell pickles, you can keep on writing articles on pickles (what makes them taste awesome, what preserves them longer, with what they can be had, how can they be made into perfect gifts, what vegetables, fruits and meats you can use to make pickles, etc.).
Follow these points to make sure your articles are keywords-optimized:
Read the whole article…

Keywords or not

Mar 09, 2005 No Comments »

Recently a client wrote me the following thoughts (my reply follows):
> A Google question.
> Since google doesn’t give much for keywords (counts title and description)
> the important is incoming quality links to the site.
> Do you have any advise or have a proven method for that?
> Thanks and looking forward working with you and maybe develop a long
> business relationship.
On the contrary Google attaches lots of importance to keywords and in fact most of the search engines do and that’s why more and more people want optimized, keywords-rich content on their pages. Think it this way: if you search for a particular keyword or key phrase, the search engine has to display you the page that talks about that keyword and key phrases without resorting to keyword-spamming. So to tell Google that your page is significant for a particular keyword, you need to have relevant content centered around that keyword.
Incoming quality links are good, but you can only get them if you have the relevant content on your website. I get quality links to my website by writing useful articles. When people put these articles on their websites, they link back to my website. Another method is, maintain a blog. If it becomes a high-traffic blog and if your website gets a link from their, this too improves your ranking.
Link exchange campaigns help but they don’t do much good because one, they are randomly exchanged to improve ranking (the annoys the search engines), and two: some webamsters put your links in a database and then dynamically display them, which, what I know, renders them useless.

Optimized content

Mar 02, 2005 No Comments »

Optimized content is subject-specific. We call a particular textual content “optimized” if it makes people as well as the search engines happy. To the search engines, what matters is the keywords and key phrases being used. To the human reader, what matters is the relevancy of the content and how it is written. So we write optimized content in a manner such as it not only has the required keywords-density, it also makes a good read.

Sales copy

Mar 02, 2005 No Comments »

Sales copy is written to make people buy from your website. It’s also called the sales pitch. It has a special style to incite the “buying” feeling. The sales pitch is direct as well as indirect. In the direct sales pitch, you simply tell the customer (the visitor) that your product is great so buy it. In the indirect sales pitch, you mention the qualities subtly. You don’t tell the customer to buy; you just mention enough benefits to make the visitor realize that it would be beneficial to buy.