Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

How do you become an expert?

Aug 22, 2008 13 Comments »

Being an expert helps you in a big way whether you seek a job opportunity, aspire to climb up the corporate ladder or simply want to be a successful solo entrepreneur. When you become an expert people refer to you, listen to you intently and take your word seriously. Even if they haven’t personally consumed your services they are prone to recommending you to their friends and colleagues if they are convinced that you are an expert in your field.

But how do you become an “expert”? There is no short way; being an expert actually means becoming an expert and you can only become an expert by gleaning valuable knowledge and experience and then using that experience and knowledge for the benefit of the others; it is not necessary whether you charge for your expertise or not. Take for instance writing professional content for the websites and blogs.

There must be hundreds of thousands of “writers” offering their excellent content writing and online copywriting services; and I am sure many of them do provide excellent services. But why do some writers get plenty of work and some just survive on the fringes? There are two factors, in fact three factors if you count the ability to write well too: your ability to portray yourself as an expert and the effort you put in promoting yourself.

The act of promotion requires a separate discussion but here we will focus on the process of becoming an expert. Personally I believe you are always on your way to becoming an expert – nobody can claim to be a through and through expert, but I am being rhetorical here. Here are a few points that can help you become an expert in a field like content writing and online copywriting:

Learn constantly

Well, this is a given; in order to become an expert you need to carry on learning no matter how much you think you know. There are always new things happening; perceptions are always changing; technologies are perpetually evolving and social and demographic transformations are always in the process of taking place. You need to learn how different people react to different types of writings. There are different words that elicit different responses under different contexts.

Recently I had to refund an advance because the writer to whom I had outsourced the writing gig kept extending the deadline and eventually the client, understandably, got fed up. After sending the refund I sent an SMS to the writer informing her to stop all further work on the project. Her SMS response was, “Wow! Do what you think is the best.” I’m not going to talk about the way she didn’t deem it fit to apologize even once, but just notice how she has used the expression “Wow!”. Do you say wow! when something bad happens? So you need to be very careful how to use appropriate expressions when writing.

Be socially active on the Internet

You will notice that most experts are also expert in the art of networking and communicating. They don’t shrug away from discussions, debates and even controversies; they are always more than ready to talk, even to total strangers. The more you interact with people the more you highlight your expertise and knowledge. Use various social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with people. Interact on blogs and online forums and leave useful and productive comments there so that people are encouraged to reach out to you for further exchange of ideas and information. Without being a bug network with the existing experts and reputed people.

Give your best

When you’re taking up projects and working on them give your best to them because giving your best forces you to stretch your limits and go beyond the usual. Think how you can deliver more than what is expected. Give your special touch to the project. Don’t hold back your knowledge; use it if it can benefit your client. In fact delivering more than what is expected of you shows that you have great knowledge and you are not scared of using it for the benefit of your clients even if you’re not directly being paid for it. Most experts have this tendency to share their knowledge without expecting immediate returns.

Maintain a blog

Share your ideas and wisdom through your blog; your blog is a great platform to express yourself and establish yourself as an expert. Sharing knowledge does not mean you are losing money; if there are thousand people who will use your advice for free to further their business gains there will be 50 or 100 people who would like to hire you as an expert, that otherwise wouldn’t have known about you or your ability. The biggest advantage of maintaining a blog is that you can showcase your expertise openly and at the same time build highly targeted traffic for your business website. In fact there are many people who don’t have a business website and solely run their businesses and consulting services through their blogs.

Being an expert surely takes an extra effort. Projecting yourself as an expert is a lot different from actually being an expert. There might be short-term gains in projecting yourself as an expert but a long-term job security can only be ensured when you truly become an expert of your field.

What about the Opera browser?

Jul 01, 2008 6 Comments »

With so much hype surrounding the release of Firefox 3 I was wondering how many people are using the Opera browser. I find the interface quite cool.  My only problem is I’m using so many add-ons with Firefox that it won’t be worth the effort switching to Opera; although it does seem inviting. Are you using Opera instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox?

Checking out ScribeFire

May 23, 2008 3 Comments »

Update again: Well, it is not THAT good. As each time I’m editing a post and republishing it, it is publishing a new post. In Windows Live Writer whenever I want to modify an existing blog post it downloads the post from the server, lets me modify it, and then republishes the existing post, altered. I guess I’ll have to go back to WLW.

Update: and now I’m checking whether it updates the existing blog posts or not.

For a long time I’ve been using Windows Live Writer; I don’t know why it is very slow on my laptop, and it really bothers me to wait for 10-15 seconds just to post a few lines. So I’m checking out ScribeFire after installing the plugin. It doesn’t have as many features, but at least it is faster.

Just wondering

May 09, 2008 1 Comment »

How come people selling you ideas and secrets that are earning them 500000 to 1000000 dollars yearly have such lousy websites? Even their copywriting sucks most of the time.

Use Your Content For SEO

Oct 17, 2007 3 Comments »

The content of your website or your blog can be a great SEO tool because the search engines index and rank blogs and websites on the basis of content they have and nothing else. So whether you have text, videos, or images make sure they can attract maximum traffic from the search engines.

Using your text content for SEO

When you’re writing content for your website or your blog the point is not having lots of content (although having lots of content does make a significant difference); your content needs to be organized in a search engine friendly manner. Take care that your most important keywords or the expressions appear in the first or second paragraph. Actually the keywords are not there merely to increase your web page’s SEO value; having the keywords in your first or second paragraph helps you come to your main point immediately. For instance if you are a content writer and if you write about your content writing services and if you mention the fact in the very beginning then of course you will have to mention the phrase “content writing services” at least once or multiple times depending on the need. Just make sure you don’t use your keywords and key phrases needlessly resulting in a gobbledygook sort of message.

Another thing that can help you a lot in your SEO efforts is the use of headings and subheadings. Try to highlight the main points of your web page or your blog post with the help of headings and subheadings. Your headings and subheadings help your human visitors as well as the search engine crawlers scan your page or the blog post. So make sure that you include your keywords and key expressions in your headings and subheadings.

Also organize your main points at least once in bullets. Bullets help you create a list of the main ideas and in the bullets use your keywords and key expressions as much as possible, but without sounding spammy. The search engines take the words appearing in bullets seriously. You should also highlight the main portions of your content to put more emphasis and convey to the readers, and of course, the search engines that these portions are really relevant to what you’re trying to say.

Interlink to other web pages and blog posts under your domain. Use your keywords and key expressions as text of the links. This increases the so-called link juice of your web pages.

Using your images for SEO

Images these days are an integral part of your web pages and blog posts. They enhance your message and make it more attractive. With most of the major search engines incorporating image search capability you should definitely leverage this advantage in case you use images frequently. Lots of people are experiencing great surges in their traffic because people come searching for the images.

A good way of using your images as an SEO tool is adding your website to Google’s webmaster tools. When you add your website or your blog here Google submits your images to people or rather volunteers who attach different tags to your images. For instance the more people attach the tag “content writer” to a particular image from your website the more this image gets found for the expression “content writer”.

When you put images on your web pages or in your blog posts never leave the ALT attribute of your image tag blank and preferably put your keywords or the key expressions over there. Make sure that your image is relevant to the topic of your web page. When you put an image surround the image with text that describes the image appropriately, and use your keywords and key expressions around your image.

Try to use unique images as much as possible because unique images stand a greater chance of being ranked higher. It also helps if you re-upload your images to keep them fresh. Store all your images in the images folder. When you are naming your image files try to give them meaningful names. For instance if you have an image depicting the content writing process it is better to name your image as “content-writing.jpg”. When you are using an image as a link then put the appropriate text in the title attribute of the <a tag.

These small things can significantly help you SEO your images.

Using your videos for SEO

Well you cannot directly search engine optimize a video because videos are either embedded into your web page or your blog post or they are simply linked to. I think the best way of using your videos for SEO is creating great videos so that hundreds or maybe thousands of people link to them. If your video becomes popular it generates lots of incoming links and this increases your search engine value. That’s kind of overwhelming, so what you can do is, optimize the textual content surrounding the video. You can also create smaller versions of your videos and submit them to various video hosting websites like YouTube and Google video. Naming your video files using your keywords also helps a lot. I have also seen people embedding their website links into their videos so people who are watching the videos on the video-sharing websites constantly see the URL. If they really like your video some of them also visit your profile and through there they come to your website.

When it comes to search engine optimization it is all about your content. so make sure whatever content you have on your website or your blog you derive maximum traffic for it from the search engines.

Technorati Tags: website SEO, content SEO, image SEO, video SEO