RSS FeedsPersuasive writing
Jan 31, 2006 No Comments »
A few days back a prospective client (I’m writing for his home page now) asked me, “Can you write persuasive copy?”
This was not the first time I’ve been asked this question. To be frank, this is a perfectly legitimate question because you want content on your website that makes people do business with you.
But my reply is never a straightforward “yes”. I mean, why do I have to persuade someone? You either want to buy an insurance policy or you don’t. You either want to purchase that e-book or you don’t. Is it good that I persuade you to buy something that you don’t want or don’t need? Then you may ask: why the heck do I want to write the sales copy for you if I don’t want to persuade people to buy from you? Good question.
The person who has come to your website is already looking for something you are selling (assuming your website is attracting the right kind of traffic). If he or she is there by mistake, he or she is going to leave in a hurry anyway. If you plan to sell your stuff to unsuspecting people who just happen to be there, then you are too desperate to make a sale, and hence, you don’t have long-terms plans regarding your business. If you take your business seriously, you attract customers, not entrap them.
Coming back to the assumption that you are attracting the right kind of traffic: people on your website know what they want, they just don’t know whether you can give them that or not. Here’s when you need a good copy, a text that convinces them that yes, this is the right place. How do I convince them?
- By highlighting all the hidden and obvious benefits of your product or service.
- By elucidating what exactly separates you from your competitors and why they should prefer you over your competitors.
- By showing, not telling.
- By telling them they can trust you.
- By talking to them in a language they can understand and relate too.
- By caring for them.
People are looking for sincerity. They are not looking for big, pyrotechnic words. They are looking for sincerity and some genuine action. Talk to them in plain language, tell them what they need to make an educated decision, be honest with them and your sales copy becomes persuasive naturally.
Content strategist
Jan 27, 2006 No Comments »
I stumbled across a link where a person has promoted herself as a content strategist. Cool term, hmmm…This is the link I’m talking about. Another interesting thing: there seems to be just one page on the website. The only active link is the email link. This again is something quite different. I’m not saying there is anything wrong in it because the copy on the page is nice and persuasive and it gets the message across and yes, you need to read nothing more. Why should there be more pages if one page is enough to put your point across?
Two things: One, the website is not about you, it is about your work. Again, the website is not for you, it is for your clients — prospective clients, I mean. Assuming I’m your prospective client, how do I know you’ve really been writing stuff for Fortune 500 companies? Either I do some research, or write to you for a few samples. As a busy business person, doing research takes up lots of my time, so I can just write to you and ask for links and samples. For some it works and for some it doesn’t. For a majority it doesn’t work because now since I’m at your website, I might as well click through a few pages and go through other stuff you’ve written.
Two, the search engines. On this website, there is just an image that holds the text. Maybe they are not targeting the search engines. And they are definitely not targeting clients that want them to write for search engines. Almost everybody who works on the Web knows how important it is to have relevant content in order to get quality traffic from the search engines. There is a logical reason too — the more pages you have, the more you expose yourself. For instance on my content writing website I have lots and lots of content. Even to explain a small thing such as “optimized content” I have created a separate page. If I have more content on the topic specific to my field, the search engines know I know my stuff.
But anyway, they must have there own reason. What caught my fancy was the term “content strategist”. I like this expression.
The new layout implemented
Jan 26, 2006 No Comments »
I have transferred my web content writing website to GoDaddy but it is taking very long to show up at the new place. I don’t know if it is Godaddy that is being so slow or something happening at some remote globe domains database.
Anyway, I’ve implemented the new layout – as you can see it on this blog too – that is completely CSS based and hopefully appears decent in all major browsers. For a long time I had been planning to give the same look to my content writing website and my content writing blog.
The power of perseverance
Jan 24, 2006 No Comments »
The power of perseverance is amazing and it solves many seemingly unsolvable problems. I need to re-launch my content writing website with a totally revamped layout to make it more SEO-friendly and standards compliant, to make it more CSS-based, and to give it a more neat look. Now, the Internet Explorer has its own quirks while dealing with CSS layouts. Since a majority of my visitors still use the IE to browse the Internet, no matter how much I want to create designs just for FireFox I have to make sure that the layouts look decent in both the browsers.
So anyway, something was screwing up the layout completely in IE. I don’t use the “IE hacks” prevalent in the designer community due to two reasons: (1) I don’t know how to use them; (2) If someday Microsoft decides to sort out the issue, all those hacks will have to be removed. Instead, I programmatically check what browser the visitor is using, and then load the browser-specific CSS file. Sounds tedious? Believe me, it is much, much better than writing those cryptic hacks. No matter what I did, the DIVs would either run helter-skelter or wouldn’t align. I started working on the problem at 1:30 AM in the morning, gave up at 6:40 AM, and then again resumed at 2:00 PM. Finally I was able to do what I wanted to do by 5:00 PM.
There is a reason why I talk about perseverance here. I’m completely comfortable with the conventional form of creating HTML layouts using nested tables. All my old websites have been fairing well in the search engines too. But this time I had decided that I won’t launch the new design unless it is totally CSS-based. My forthcoming business direction depends on this launch so I’m in a hurry. I want to finish the website and upload it on to a new server while making sure that old links are not found missing (another long story) because they rank well on Google and Yahoo. In the 8 hours while I spent time trying to find how to write those 4 extra lines to make the layout behave I could have finished the layout part and started porting the content to the new server. Add to that the client deadlines. Also add to that the freezing cold that was hurting the knuckles while I typed-tested-deleted-typed-tested while the neighborhood cat gave out the mating calls — they were the indeed the mating calls. It became like a pressure-cooker and there was an overwhelming desire to chuck all this and revert back to something I was totally comfortable with. But I kept trying. And eventually I solved the problem.
I’ve many times tested the power of perseverance and it has always worked for me.
What exactly is web content writing?
Jan 19, 2006 No Comments »
A few people in the writing group I’m a member of have been asking what web content writing is and what exactly a website content writer does. Instead of sending them different replies I’ve decided to post this blog explaining what website content writing is.
It all started with Google attaching an unprecedented importance to the textual content of web pages. It was a simple logic: if your website (or web pages) deals with a particular topic, then you should have lots of content regarding that topic. I’m talking about “optimized website content” here. The content is specifically written to convince Google and other search engines that this website contains lots of information that deals with the expression being searched for. So if someone looks for “wooden furniture” and your website contains lots of information on “wooden furniture” then there is a great probability that your website will get a higher ranking and will show among the top 5 or top 10 results. Take for instance my website: http://www.amrithallan.com. If you search for “content writer” on Google, my website comes up among the top 5 results – it has been there for the past 6 months and if it has vanished or moved down it means I’m not taking care of my own website.
Considering that there are thousands of websites that come up for this term, I can say that my website is optimized better than thousands of other websites. A lot of webmasters want to achieve similar results for their websites because this can significantly enhance their business prospects. A website content writer writes such content. This is one aspect.
Getting traffic to your website is not enough. If you write website content just to entice search engines and not much action happens on the business side you are just digging the mud out of a hole. There are three things that separate you from normal, run-of-the-mill content writers: [1] you have to get traffic to the website; [2] that traffic should be relevant to your website; and [3] the traffic should eventually culminate into business. If you can deliver these three things, there is no dearth of work for you as a website content writer.
Actually getting traffic is easy because no matter how smartly the search engine algorithms work, some smart-ass so-called SEO experts manage to generate traffic and hoodwink webmasters. They are only bothered about their fee and not at all bothered about whether the webmaster successfully does business from his or her website or not. These types of people don’t get repeat work and they continuously have to scrounge the Internet for gullible clients.
So you not only have to be a content writer who can get relevant traffic, you also have to be a copywriter who can convince the visitors to do business with your client. That’s where your real power lies as a website content writer. It all boils down to how much money your writing makes.
With the same stroke you have to write for search engines and also for the visitors and only those content writers can achieve this who have some good writing skills. The keywords shouldn’t sound nonsensically repetitive and still they should appear enough times to satisfy the calculations of the search engine robots. The visitor doesn’t even realize that the keyword is being repeated again and again and you have to do all this while selling the business idea to the visitor.
Gradually the website owners are realizing this and hence are getting their content professionally written. It’s not about knowing the language – majority of my work comes from the US and the UK where English is their native language – and sometimes I do make mistakes that my clients and visitors point out. So sometimes when a client writes:
I just want to let you know that you are amazing. Ever since I hired you to rewrite my index page I am getting sales on my candle site. I upped the google adwords daily budget so I hope to get more sales as days go by.or
This is just a quick note to tell you that the articles you wrote are excellent and you’ve captured the exact essence of the topic. I’ve been in this field for two years but just in a week you researched the topic in such manner that I got to learn so many things more.I know that I’m moving in the right direction even while fumbling here and there sometimes. And it is just a beginning.
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