Content Magician, Freelance web content writers

Archive for the ‘Business Thoughts’ Category

Some people are just really sticky about posting links to other sites just because it’s a requirement when you use their articles, videos or images on their blogs or websites. They’re thinking, ‘Why should I? Who’s to know? Why should I share the traffic with this guy….he can do his own marketing, can’t he? I’ve worked hard for my readers!’

Be nice.

That’s one of the unwritten rules about internet marketing and one of the nicest thing a publisher can do is to provide a link back – you earn extra brownie points for pointing to a link without it being a requirement but a favor. There are many benefits!

One, readers love you for it if they find it useful or entertaining. In the online world, it’s about developing a love for someone who leads you to stuff….maybe bigger things and more entertaining materials. They’ll love you for it, so play nice and you’ll win the hearts over.

Two, Google loves it, most major search engines loves it. Enough said?

Three, it works both ways. If the owner of the said blog/website finds out that you’ve linked to him/her without even asking for credit or a linkback, you get a new friend!

The trouble with some website/blog owners is that they’re so insecure about their own standing in cyberworld that they’re afraid of helping others with a simple link (in a new window if you so wish).

That’s sooooo not it.

The friendlier, nicer, and kinder you are, the more you stand out. Being nasty helps some bloggers but if you’re a business owner, I’m not sure if you want to head down in that direction.

At this point in time, when you’ve just started your website, you’re probably thinking about a SEO content development strategy that could help you secure a good position in your favorite search engine (it’s probably Google but I am not going to say just ONE single search engine because of locality). In order to bring in the traffic from search engines, you’ll need to have a strong SEO content development strategy that will work in multiple search engines, not just one and the person or company that hire to do this for you would have to be well-versed with multiple engines.

For example, in your plans, you’ll need to get someone to develop content thaT ATTRACTS not only search engines but is appealing to the readers as well. There is really no point in developing web content that brings in the search engines but not readers because REMEMBER, you’re trying to make money. The SEO content development strategy would be completely different if you were trying to make some money off of advertisements placed on a shell web template. If that is the case, it’s perfectly fine for you to stick to a singular strategy built for a single search engine. If you’re not, then here’s what you’ve got to do.

Your web content has got to be news-worthy. This is a no-brainer but even the best people in the SEO content development strategy industry tend to forget this in their quest to attract the search engines. Very few ever commits to or purchase from a website or business the first time they chances upon it. The trust comes in a couple of visits later. So, keep this in mind when working on your SEO content development strategy….you want it to stick a little the first time round.

Either hire multiple content writers or writers who can diversify. The purpose? It’s simple! Different types of content appeals to different people and considering the fact that you’re aiming at different sectors worked on by different personalities, it’s best if you diversify your SEO content development strategy a little to give yourself a little buffer. You don’t keep selling beef to a vegetarian, do you? So, this works the same way.

Reveal your own personality and get close to your readers. In your SEO content development strategy, make sure you get someone to get close to your readers. A decade back, a website is a faceless entity whereby information is freely dispensed. In today’s cyberspce, if you don’t have a personality or a face, it’s hard to win the war. Your competitors have blogs, facebook accounts, twitter, delicious and what-have-you-nots and you’ve got to be the same way if you want to connect with your readers. There’s really no way to get your customers to buy from you unless you’re amazon.com or a popular name in your industry. So, work your SEO content development strategy around that thought.

SEO content development strategy for regular publication of articles. You don’t do it one time and then hope for a huge amount of traffic. You do it consistently and persistently over time, regularly updating and pulling in the people and buying their trust. This is how an SEO content development strategy works now. Gone are the days whereby you write a basic web page content and let it do its work because they don’t work beyond being piled on by the multitude of page content in cyberspace. If you know how to hire an SEO content development strategy team, so do they and in order to get ahead of them, you’ve got to be persistent and patient.

There are no two ways about this, sadly.

The economy is in a slump and people are turning to the internet to make some money. As a professional freelance writer, I sincerely feel that while it’s great that the internet is providing many people a rope to cling on during this troubling time, businesses trying to find professional freelance writers for their web content or online marketing methods should be cautious about it.

The internet has become a breeding ground for all sorts of aspiring professional freelance writer. I am not being jealous because I am, frankly, thankful that there is a whole pool of new talents out there for me to tap into. I love that part of the bargain. But based on my experience as a professional freelance writer, there are problems that we need to face. There are so many of them out there right now, how do we know who is a good professional freelance writer and who isn’t?

The line has been blurred once again. The only time I remember this happening was when blogs become popular. Everyone became a journalist! As fun as it was to read into the lives of all those people who write blogs, it’s hard to find one that really rocks.

I hire one or two professional freelance writers to help me out with my work sometimes when I am bogged down with work or when there’s an emergency. I value the availability of my professional freelance writer…but I’ve had my fair share of bad experiences in the past. Hiring a professional freelance writer who does not write well and writes for SEO purposes ONLY gives me a blinding headache! Thankfully, over the years, I’ve found some professional freelance writer who are, indeed, very professional about their work, puts their heart into every single word that they write.

SEO writing is fabulous, I know, but it’s hard to find someone who can write SEO stuff without compromising on the quality of the articles. The professional freelance writer has to be experienced in balancing out the SEO part of the writing process and also the connectivity of the article. There’s really no point in writing SEO articles without trying to make SOME sense.

So, before you hire a professional freelance writer, check into the writer’s background and ask for some samples. Don’t make the mistake of hiring the first SEO writer that promises you a low price because you may regret it, at the end of the day.

It’s been a long but enjoyable day. But before I pull the plug on this tremendously relaxing Saturday, I would to share something with you and it’s got to do with how people are going about this whole online marketing thing wrong.

It’s my personal opinion that there’s one way to turn people off online. The only surefire way to lose the fight in this very tiny battlefield is to stick to a formula that you know works. The old method used to work well, I know, but with the economy down in the gutter, everyone’s using the same formula. PLUS, the same formula is costing us too much money.

So, the traditional way of marketing is to knock down every single door you see and shove your products and services into their faces and refuse to leave until they succumb to your harassment. You could advertise in the newspaper but it’s getting expensive. You could hire a new marketing guy but it takes time to train someone new and you can’t exactly afford to hire anyone new at this point in time. You could revamp your brand but every single idea you’re going to have involves spending money.

The logical thing to do is to jump into the internet marketing bandwagon, right?

That’s the right thing to do, I am not saying you’re wrong, but don’t do it blindly and don’t just hand THE FIRST PERSON you know to do the job. You can’t because whatever they do online (and they can do this without waiting for a memo to be passed during a Board of Directors’ meeting) will affect your image! Hire the wrong person and you’re screwed.

In online social media, or the Web 2.0 as some people prefer to call it, it’s imperative that you sell yourself correctly. But you’re not selling your products and services, you’re selling a brand. You’re promoting loyalty. You’re encouraging people to get to know you better. You want to create a personality….a sort of stickiness on the internet that helps people remember you and come back for more.

With more and more people with the same social media marketing modus operandi, you can only create awareness by selling YOURSELF as a brand. You connect with people. You make yourself heard. You make friends and help people understand what kind of person YOU ARE before you get them to understand what you do for a living.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a business or a freelancer! You’ve got to make that CONNECTION with others in order to get online social media marketing to work for you. Shall I say it again for good measure? OK. CONNECTION!

For a business, you can hire someone (or use someone who is currently on your payroll) to create an online persona for your business. And this personality is to connect with people, share his or her experience (on a personal or professional level) with people he or she knows.

It’s plain and simple.

The old method of PUSHING no longer works. Writing notes or blog posts about how WONDERFUL YOU ARE and how amazing your products and services are, shoving your potential clients’ faces into the brochures, flyers, profiles….they don’t work anymore. Blow your own trumpet and watch flocks of potential customers run off in the opposite direction!

It’s now time for some PULLING instead. And friends….the only way to pull is to attract. The only way to attract is to get personal.

Seriously, if another person comes up to me asking me how the terrible, terrible economy is hitting me, I am seriously going to consider running away. Or merely turning my computer off and never ‘chat’ with another soul again. Sure, we’re all hit by the ailing economy…and as writers, we are hit harder because not only do we have to contend with really good writers, we now have to contest for the same job with mediocre but really cheap writers too.

This can’t be good for a writer like me…and here I am, telling it as it is (again) that, yes, we’re hit. Writers are hit….just like the man who sells soya bean paste, and the guy who sells noodles, just like Nike, just like the manufacturer of baby products.

But here’s where the freelance writing market is different. With the economy in such a state, more and more people are out of work…and not all of them are cut out for work as a writer (phew!), so they explore options like online businesses, network marketing or start selling scrapbooking materials, etc.

When there’s a new business…what do we have? YES! Online marketing and promotions! Well, not all of them are going to market themselves online or sell a single damn thing online but at the very least, they’re going to need some web content work done, right? Absolutely.

From my point of view, even if they don’t intend to have a website or a blog, they are going to need someone to write their brochures, newsletters or…say…their proposals?

If you’re a budding writer, here’s where you fit in (cue: title track from Indiana Jones) and you’ve already got your freelance business all set-up and ready to rock and roll, you’re going to be the first few in line for these new projects.

Bloomberg is correct. So’s CNN. We’re nose-diving financially but this does not AUTOMATICALLY mean that there are no freelance jobs out there for freelance writers. There are plenty. All you have to do is to look in the right place and be patient.

And oh…remember to promote yourself too. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there right now.

I am ashamed to see that I’ve not blogged in this dearly beloved blog of mine for so long. Please forgive me, my readers. Anyway, I am back. One thing I am not very keen on admitting and submitting to is the somber outlook that most people have about the economy and how people are actually shrinking their marketing budgets till they’re next to nothing. Impossible! If we’re to remain in the game, we have to be aware of one fact….and that is if you don’t take full advantage of the fact that many giant companies are shrinking down THEIR budgets, we’re going down with them.

They can bolster it with many things….but we, smaller and much less significant entities, cannot.

What we can do while they’re down is to take it upon ourselves to aggressively grab their customers from them while they shrink their budgets. Trust me, when I say aggressively, I don’t mean it in the financial sense. What I mean is to explore other options open to us and methods that we’ve ignored in the past.

Anyway, this is just one of my thoughts about the sinking economy. Nobody can do anything about it and yet, we have to continue to feed the kids and send them to school. We’ve got to do something and that does not include sitting there on our laurels sinking into depression or stressing over things that are inevitable.

Things that we can do:-

• Online marketing
• Web content development
• Start a mailing list
• If you don’t have a website yet, get one up
• If you don’t have a blog, start one NOW
• Email all your friends (don’t be shy about this) about your endeavor and unabashedly ask for their support
• Pay special attention to your social networking skills - hone it and use it well
• Read and learn about ways to bring attention to your own business
• Draw up a solid marketing, online or otherwise, plan.

Whenever someone writes up a content for their web page, they’re thinking, ALWAYS, about how many people are going to be seeing this thing. How many people are going to be READING the article….but how many, do you think, will think along the lines of ‘how many people will actually ACT and positively react to this article?’

It’s startling that even some really experienced internet marketers and freelance writers don’t look at the way people react to their online articles. All care and concerned is focused on keyword, keyword and keyword. And then it’s all about where is it on Google every month, every week and they hawk over the google pagerank…and THEN the site visits every day thinking again and again…how many people are reading this.

What we should be thinking about when we write up a web content is to think about the quality discussion, engagement and conversion (into fans or sale) because of that article. Isn’t THAT the ultimate deal in the first place…that your web content is converting your site visitors into customers? It’s really befuddling.

What some people do to convert their website visitors into customers is to put into a call to action. But this, at the end of the day relies on how credible people think you are based on your web content and how much you’ve written in that article to break past the resistance and skepticism to purchase from your website. A website does not have to have a million website visitors or ten thousand people who read the web content in order to make it big. Let’s face it, a small website can make tons more money than a high traffic website if the web traffic is good. It depends, as said, on the conversion rate, how you’ve established the connection with the website visitor with your web content and also how much effort you’ve put into the web content to convince them that you’re worth your salt.

If you’re using Google’s Analytics, you’ll see something called conversion. Not a lot of people look at that – instead they’ll head straight for the hit count or the number of page views. I would like many other website owners to realize that it means nothing in the dollar sense when no one’s believing a word you say nor are they talked into purchasing something from you….if you have something to offer, that is…which I am assuming you do if you’re reading this article till this particular sentence.

The next time you log into your web stats, take a look, also, at how long these people are staying on your pages. How many pages do they go through and what’s your web content’s conversion rate..

It’s a matter of habit, really. However, the fact remains that where I sit down, yield the pen (or rather, the keyboard) to write the stuff that I churn out for my freelance writing clients is extremely important to me. This has, partly, to do with discipline. I’ve disciplined myself to tune into my work and come in sync with the topics that I have to write about only when I am sitting in my little ‘office’, a little room that I guard with my life.

Hence, whether I own an iPhone or a laptop is completely irrelevant to me. Of course, there ARE other freelance writers who can sit down and write whatever it is that is required of them whenever or wherever. But that’s just not me. I would rather associate a place that I feel comfortable with doning the ‘thinking cap’ instead of writing on my bed or in the living hall. The feelings just don’t flow.

And besides, I’ve two kids. Which means that I need to train them so that they don’t interupt me whenever I am working on something. Ever since they were young, I’ve taught them that mommy works from home, she writes and whenever she writes, she’s in THAT room over there. And when she’s in THAT room over there, unless it’s really urgent and requires immediate attention, they would have to wait.

But it’s a two way street, of course. For every article that I finish, I would stop, give myself a break and go out and hangout with them for a while. This is the only way I can balance my freelance writing career and my family life.

I envy those who can do their freelance work everywhere because this simply means that they can literally travel without any problems at all and STILL continue to deliver top-notch stuff to their clients. In time, I would have to learnt how to do the same thing. But for now, I think for a lot of people, in order to write well, you need to be in the right frame of mind. And the atmosphere and environment is crucial to how efficient the freelance writer is whenever she/he is behind the keyboard.

Where I live, people…business people tend to be more than a little uncomfortable about trying out internet marketing ideas and search engine optimization tactics. They would rather sit it out and WAIT FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN to their websites. A relative, with whom I spoke extensively with about search engine optimization and internet marketing, said that it would be OK with him if he just waited it out and see if he could get lucky!

There is no such thing as getting lucky with internet marketing. It’s either you put effort into it or you DON’T. Look, the Internet is a wonderful stage for business website owners. It’s the single one available vehicle to us that allows us a stage as big as television….bigger. And everyone’s fighting for footspace in cyberspace.

My question would be this…how does LUCK come into the picture when there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of people fighting for the first three pages of a popular search engine results page? If it’s so easy, why don’t everyone just hold back on the search engine optimization and internet marketing startegies, save the money and just wait for Lady Luck to smile at them.

Who knows? Maybe she takes turns?

If one wants a piece of the pie in cyberspace, it’s imperative for one to out effort in promoting one’s website or blog online. It just does not appear on your lap for no resaon whatsoever.

And frankly speaking, it’s not even that hard to do on your own. All it takes is a willing heart and an open mind….or is it the other way around.

By Deborah Owen 

While it is true that a few people can skip protocol and begin writing for large markets without writing credits, the ordinary person cannot. Be prepared, because every publication will want to know where you have been published before, and you should have a list of publications as long as your arm.Write for ezines that pay in subscriptions, (some will pay $5). Write for your church bulletin and bulletins at work. Go to your local newspaper and ask if they need someone to cover sports and/or political meetings. (These are hard jobs to fill, and almost every paper needs someone in these positions.)

You may be asking yourself, “But if I give writing references in ezines, bulletins, and local papers, won’t the editor know I’ve been working for nothing?” Yes, they will, but they won’t care. They will admire you for your tenacity. They will know you’ve been out working and learning the market, and they’ll know that you must be some kind of a decent writer, or no one would have published you.

There is yet another way that you can get experience, and that is writing for Associated Content and other such places. You can also write for article distribution centers. Everything counts.

When you send your first piece into a magazine, don’t make the mistake of saying, “My teacher said she liked this piece,” “I’ve never been published before, but I’ll be a hard worker,” or “I belong to a writer’s club and they voted this article as the best of the month.” These are amateur remarks, and any editor will recognize them as such.

If you don’t have any publication credits, avoid the subject altogether. Give the short story on how you got into writing and what your goals are, and always thank the editor for his time in reading your submission.

In conclusion: write articles free of charge to get publishing credits (and keep dated clippings from each one in a scrap book, as you will need that information later on); present yourself well and have the audacity of a Rockefeller. Remember, you’re selling yourself. Most of the time, you’ll get the chance you’re looking for, if you bluff your way through it.

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