Writing for the Web

Before you say a word, be sure you’re saying the right thing.

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I have been writing a lot of copy recently. I have also been reviewing a fair amount of copy written by others.

Whether it’s my own copy or someone else’s, I keep finding weakness in the same area.

And this area of weakness is..?

It’s when the copywriter starts writing copy before he or she is absolutely clear about WHAT to say.

If the message is wrong, it doesn’t matter how talented you are as a copywriter. You’ll simply end up writing the wrong thing really well. And your ad or web pages or sales letter won’t achieve the result you were hoping for.

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Why I’m opting out of the content race.

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Leaving the raceI don’t like doing things just because I’m told to do them. Or when I’m told I have to do them.

And recently I’m feeling a little pressured to keep adding new posts to this site on an increasingly frequent basis.

Where is this pressure coming from?

It’s coming from the web itself.

Both the search engines and social media favor content that is new and fresh. (How often do you check last week’s tweets or last month’s Facebook updates?)

Also, readers seem to favor content that is fresh and new. There is an assumption that posts and articles that are new are somehow better and more valuable than content that was published last week, a month ago or even a year ago.

More and more the web is about what’s happening right now.

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Copywriters: Learn your craft like a cabinetmaker.

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Learn copywriting like a cabinetmakerI know plenty of beginner copywriters who are constantly taking courses, reading books, following blogs, watching videos and finding as many ways as possible to learn more about the craft of copywriting.

That’s a lot of time and money being invested.

And why not? As a copywriter you can make as much money as a lawyer or a doctor. And even if you buy every course and program out there, you’ll still be paying less for your training than those other professionals.

But…here’s a funny thing.

Back in the late 1970s, when I got started as a copywriter in London, I don’t think there were any copywriting courses. I certainly never took any. And during my first ten years as a copywriter I think I read just one book on the subject – The craft of copywriting by Alastair Crompton. It’s a good book.

So how did I learn my craft?

That’s easy. I learned by DOING.

I just wrote and wrote and wrote.

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If you have a WordPress website, get yourself the new bizXpress plugin.

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bizXpress keyword research toolWordPress has become the world’s most popular website-building platform. The site you’re on right now is a WordPress site.

Along with so many other people, I like WordPress for a number of reasons. You have total flexibility over the design of your site. It’s the most social of all platforms. And it makes it incredibly easy to add new content and edit existing content.

In short, I love it.

But not all my sites are built with WordPress. My money-making website, CoffeeDetective.com, is built with and hosted on the SiteBuildIt platform.

Why? Because the platform was created specifically to optimize the performance of content-rich, topic-specific sites like my coffee site. In fact my coffee site attracts over TEN times the traffic of the site you’re on now. And believe me, the coffee topic is fiercely competitive.

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Social media marketing and the mad electrician.

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social media marketerSocial media is not something you just add on to your existing marketing plan.

It won’t work if you say, “Hey, last quarter we tried coupons, this month let’s try social media.” It’s not an advertising medium.

If you want social media to really work, you have to pull apart your whole marketing plan, and your company culture, and rebuild everything with “social” at its heart.

I have worked with a couple of different companies over the last little while, both of them in the B2C space, both of them in their first year of business. But they have had very different levels of success with social media.

The first company built its company and its marketing plan along traditional lines. Old school marketing. And then they decided to give social media a try. They just bolted it on.

It didn’t work.

The second company was more of a “native” web business. Its founders were younger and had grown up with the web. This business had “social” at its core. Everything – from sales, to customer service, and to marketing – revolved around social media. In fact, even the way people communicated within the company took place on a social platform.

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Don’t make money for Facebook. Make it for yourself.

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Mark Zuckerberg has enough moneyHow much time in total have you spent writing posts and updates for your social media accounts? Dozens of hours? Hundreds even?

Do you create updates for Facebook? Posts for Google+? Videos for YouTube? Tweets for Twitter?

If you do, you’re a content creator.

And the content you create is making the owners of these social media sites rich. Massively rich.

Unless you have a particular passion for making other people rich, allow me to suggest an alternative.

Instead of investing your time and passion in writing content for social media sites, invest it in writing content for a website of your own.

No, I’m not suggesting you abandon social media.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is to show you what I do myself.

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