There is a huge demand for quality web content.
The trouble is – for us writers – many, or maybe most companies have a nasty habit of low-balling us on price. They want great content, but don’t want to pay much for it.
When we tell them the content we write is worth more than they are offering, they may point us to sites like Freelancer.com, where they can find content writers for peanuts.
How can you break free from that kind of comparison?
Recently I have written a fair bit about optimizing web content.
My thinking has been, and still is, that too many companies rush to publish new content without first establishing a clear purpose for each page or post they create.
In other words, marketers often feel that the simple act of publishing a new page or post is enough.
It’s not.
For web content to deliver value – to both your audience and your company – it has to be purpose-driven. You have to figure out WHY each piece should be published, and then optimize it accordingly.
For example, one post might be optimized for the search engines, while another is optimized for social media. Another might be optimized to attract inbound links, and so on.
Recently I published a new course for online content writers and copywriters.
It’s called Web Content Optimization.
It’s a short, video-based course at a very low price point. And that means a lot of people not only got the course, but also completed it within two or three days.
And here’s the best part. People are already using what they learned to reposition themselves as optimization experts and charge higher fees.
Here’s what Steve Maurer had to say…
Go to Freelancer.com and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of freelancers competing for millions of projects.
It’s a free-for-all marketplace, and there is a lot of downward pressure on pricing.
Companies know there will be a lot of people wanting to work on the projects they post, so they can sit back and wait for the right writer at the right price.
In many categories this becomes a race to the bottom, because freelancers know the only way they can compete is to keep their prices low.
One of the categories hit hardest by this downward pressure is content writing. And this pressure to write for peanuts isn’t confined just to sites like Freelancer.com. It’s industry-wide.
Content marketing is a hot topic, and for good reason.
Content is the lifeblood of most websites, blogs, video channels and photo apps.
A constant flow of new and compelling content gets visitors hooked and keeps them engaged.
What is content? Often it’s an article or a post. But it could be a review or a buying guide. It could be a video, a photo essay or a slideshow. Or an ongoing series of photos on Instagram or Pinterest. Or a podcast or a vlog. It could be a multimedia mashup.
Add together all those new pages, posts, videos, photos and podcasts – plus all the tweets and Facebook updates that are created – and you have hundreds of millions of new pieces of content uploaded each day.
Clients like to feel they are getting their money’s worth when they pay you to improve on an existing web page.
This is true whether you are writing an online sales page, subscription page or some kind of content page.
In my experience, clients not only want you to completely rewrite the current control, but they also want you to base the new page on a totally new idea.
If you give them a variation on the current page or, heaven forbid, just make some tweaks to what they already have, they become very disappointed and will likely throw your draft back in your face.