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Posts Tagged ‘copywriters’
Hiring the Right Freelancer to Write Your Content
10/4/2011 3:56 PM By Patrick OgleContent developers seeking a freelance writer must hire carefully. Hiring a copywriter for a freelance job seems like a simple matter—look over the samples, check the resume, interview the applicant, hire them to write your copy. But it isn’t always so easy.
Freelance writing requires more than just the ability to adapt and have a neatly presented portfolio of samples. It requires a writer that understands your perspective. It requires a writer who can write on your deadline. It also requires a writer who writes clean copy the first time without the need for extensive editing.
This last part is crucial. Many writers need the guidance of an experienced editor while others may not be equipped to write for all audiences. What happens if you choose a writer who does not write clean copy or one who does not understand your specific business needs? You have to edit or you have to hire another writer. In other words, you waste time and money.
So what can you do to ensure you’re hiring the right person for the job? Consider asking them to write some off the cuff copy on a subject when you interview them. Give them the resources they need to do research on the subject too. Often someone’s ability and willingness to research a topic is as important as the writing itself. The ability to gather and synthesize information, even when that information is not going to be directly used in the copy, is a sign of a potentially good writer.
Sometimes even the best writers aren’t the most appropriate fit for the job at hand. Hemingway didn’t write poetry. Goethe didn’t write user manuals. The writer you hire has to be the one who can write for your unique needs.
When Professional Copywriters are Most Valuable
5/5/2011 2:09 PM By William Pirraglia
Do-it-yourself writing can work for some businesses. However, in most cases, business owners and management are creating unnecessary problems that could be costly. Professional copywriters not only alleviate these potential problems, but usually deliver value far in excess of the cost of their employment.
One of the best resources for copywriters, coppyblogger.com, simply and succinctly offers suggestions to potential clients to strongly consider using professionals. Consider these straightforward reasons to hire professional copywriters and professional business writers for your company website and projects.
- It’s not your specialty. Unless you are a freelance writer or copywriter, authoring articles, tips, marketing pieces and sales letters is not your specialty. It’s much more profitable for you to concentrate on your specialty and let professional copywriters produce winning words for you.
- You have neither the time nor the desire. Writing superior copy requires talent, but the time commitment and desire of the author must be dominant. Should you try to save money by taking a do-it-yourself approach, you typically have neither the time nor the desire to produce outstanding copy, even if you have the native talent.
- You don’t have the expertise to target your writing to SEO, newsletters, or other copy to grow revenue. You have a successful business and want powerful copy on your website. But you understandably are not an expert in SEO, which is much more than “stuffing” articles with popular search words and phrases. Outstanding fiction author William G. Tapply perfectly expresses the professional copywriter’s goal: Produce “invisible writing.” Tell your readers a story so well that they don’t realize their reading a story or an SEO piece.
- You have a lack of objectivity about your business. Owning a small business or holding a responsible position with a larger corporation often places you too close to the subject matter to write objectively about the topics of your copy. Even when posting sales-oriented copy, you must project objectivity to your readers. Professional copywriters can achieve this goal.
- Producing unsuitable copy is too costly to your business. This issue is a bottom line obligation. There are few properly managed businesses that would intentionally risk authoring and posting detrimental copy on websites or in print materials. This is a win-lose challenge. Having professional business writers author your copy could materially increase your revenue. Posting poorly written copy could easily diminish your bottom line, driving away potentially lucrative customers.
Creating Your Online Portfolio
4/29/2010 10:26 PM By Sharon PotschNow that you’ve assembled a handful of .jpgs, you can start thinking about building an online portfolio. The advent of sites such as WordPress and Coroflot is it gives you a choice of templated websites ready for you to populate and crank up with relatively little to no web development skills needed. Basically, all the work is done for you!
I’ve noticed more and more writers using WordPress blogs to create an online presence. A blog can be a tremendously easy and effective method for writers to suddenly have a website. WordPress offers thousands (literally) of “skins” (a glorified way of saying “looks”) for you to choose from. A blog that showcases your professional work immediately assists you in promoting your brand and providing you with a 2010 URL to provide to your clients. You can create “tags” and “categories” to organize your work. For example, “Print Work” could be one category and “Interactive Work” could be another. Employing the use of tags such as “direct mail” or “banner ads” is a way to further categorize and organize your work. Using Snag-it will help you dress up your page by including screen-shots of your work and you can then upload the full-version as an attachment related to each post. It’s really a genius (easy, free) way for writers to build an online presence that you need in order to compete for writing jobs today. Did I mention it’s free? It’s free. All it takes is time.
Additionally, working within the content management system of a blogging engine provides you with in-demand CMS experience. Honestly, it’s a win-win.
Taking Screen Shots
4/29/2010 10:24 PM By Sharon PotschOk so you can’t necessarily just download software on a company-issued computer without getting approval or a company credit card but you can keep current by downloading on your home computer a super handy-dandy program Snag-it. Snag-it is the equivalent of taking a digital picture of your work as it appears online here and now and partnering with a decently-talented designer to crop it as you see fit. You can even insert content edits or call-outs as you see fit. Snag-it is a priceless tool for writers because it enables you to create .jpgs of your work which then enables you to create multi-page PDFs of your work. See where I’m going? You can use snag-it to help you start to build your online portfolio! It’s genius.
Writers: Save Your Samples
4/29/2010 10:17 PM By Sharon PotschPrior to my gig with Artisan, I was a writer with a global consulting firm. My work included writing online benefits content viewed by internal audiences of other global organizations. Let’s say I wasn’t penning Addy-winning pieces but the content was dense, information-heavy material spun to target a professional global audience. Most of my day was mired in uploading and organizing content using a content management system. I spent a year with this organization and it pained me to think about the negative impact the lack of creative work would have on my portfolio.
Fast-forward six years and here I sit at Artisan where daily I field requests from clients who want to see samples of precisely this type of content. Seriously! People want to see this stuff! Fortunately I had the foresight at my old job to familiarize myself with the organization’s copyright and presentation restrictions otherwise I’d have nothing to show for the previous year of employment.
The morale of this story isn’t ground-breaking; it’s a gentle reminder for writers to not only save your stuff, but print it. Get a cheap three-ring binder and print out screen shots of your work because future clients and hiring will want to see it no matter how mundane you think it is.
I’ve already written about the importance of familiarizing yourself with using various CMS tools and providing screen shots of your ability to work within them provides proof that yes, you can upload your writing to the web.
