Content Magician, Freelance web content writers

Archive for the ‘Content Development’ Category

Everyone tells you how to do this, how to do that, how to find clients, how to write kick-ass copy, how to entice the customers to buy stuff from you just from the stuff you’ve written, how you can make millions writing ebooks…blah blah blah.

But no one bothers to tell a freelance writer the mistake is for a web content writer….one that he/she should avoid making at all costs.

The mistake is….to stop writing for yourself!

Listen, we’ve been in the freelance writing world ever since forever (it’s not true but it feels just about right) and we’ve made every single mistake there is to make in the freelance world because no on bothers to tell us and when we started out, all this freelance web content writing thing was…like….an illusion. Everyone wished that it could be the very platform that they can use to launch their products or services or start a business or earn some income from their websites, but no one dared trudge this way because only stoopeed people do.

The smart ones let the dumb ones go first. (more…)

Web copywriting is carried out keeping in mind two audiences: search engines (which can index your site and pull up your page rankings), and prospective human visitors (who can buy your products). Sometimes the right density and positioning of keywords is enough to make search engines happy, and get you near the top of search results.

But when people visit your site, they read your content and if they find every paragraph a medium to stuff keywords, it spoils your impression, definitely a bad idea. You need to get a copy that can please both digital as well as human readers.

There is no point in getting high traffic when your visitors abandon your page before you can get them to click on a link, read more, or make a purchase. Although you have “cheated” your way into the search results, you just lost any chance of getting bookmarked, or recommended to another user, or getting visited again by the same user.

On the other extreme, you could get content writing services that churn out good copy–lively prose, no bluffing, no padding, just informative and persuasive copywriting–but if the keywords are not strategically placed and repeated when they count, you won’t be making search engine spiders happy.

Your site might read well but is just not spider-index-friendly. But then, with word-of-mouth recommendations, your site has a source of traffic not directly related to search engine results. The problem is your site might be reachable by any online search using keywords.

Now you know that man cannot live on search engine optimization alone. You need good copy. So you either get people who are good in SEO copywriting, or you can learn it and do it yourself. (more…)

I started my writing career on freelance with sites like www.getafreelancer.com. If eBay was the site people went to for cheap stuff, then www.getafreelancer.com is the site people went to for cheap services. That’s how started my career as a freelance writer….producing really cheap writing materials. There was one time I wrote 100-word articles for about less than $1 a pop! No seriously. But the competition on the freelance writing world is tough…being that there are a lot of adequate writers in this world with a little bit of talent, who can whip out a decent article with a decent number of words, laced with keywords (splattered is more the word) in this world. Particularly countries like India where there are, admittedly, more talents than others….really cheap ones.

I’ve long abandoned my account with Getafreelancer because I started to have a client base and I focused more on quality these days. But I got curious, one day, and I went back in and took a look at the kind of projects that were being posted in there. And once again, I was sucked into a black hole….a vortex of cheap writing. It’s a wet market of cheap services….still. You can see it from the way people are focused on speed and cost.

For example;

“I need 50 articles with 500 words with keywords. More work to come. If good, will assign more projects regularly. Budget is $1 each article”

Article by: Marsha Maung

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Note: A pretty darn good article on copywriting, we sayy! YYYAAAYYY!!!

by John L. Alexander

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In a minute I want to come back to give you some examples, but let’s talk about that word “dialog.”

We know that the term dialog is really more correctly thought of as the dictionary describes:

“A conversation spoken between two or more people.” If you look up synonyms for the word “dialog” as a noun, you’ll find a lot of terms that focus on “vocal expression” or “utterance” or “verbalization” in some aspect.

So why do I use the term “dialog” in terms of writing Web copy?

It’s the best term I can think of to describe what I like to think of as the “flow of conversation” or nearly like writing your copy as though it was meant to be read “out loud” by voice. When I say “write for voice” I’m referring to how something is written for the radio or TV or other live media. (more…)

Aaahhh….the first article for my brand new website, www.contentmagician.com. If you don’t already know, ContentMagician.com is a website dedicated to the content writing and search engine optimization industry. We are a bunch of underpaid (hint! hint!) nerds sitting behind our desks working the keyboard up till it smokes writing web content for a whole host of website owners and online search engine optimization experts. Since we’re already doing this for other websites, we thought….heck, might as well write content for our own content website instead!

And we’re dedicated to bringing you top stories about content writing, sharing our experiences with you as writers and showing you the ropes if you don’t have the budget to hire us (and we hope that you make truckloads of money so that you can hire us to write your content for you one fine day! Sorry, had to get that one in….).

I was just on the phone with a friend who wanted to know what I did for a living about 48 minutes 23 seconds ago. I said ‘content writer’ and he said, “I don’t understand why content is such a big thing to search engine. It’s just words and people don’t read a lot on the Internet these days”. (more…)