Something to keep in mind when it comes to paying your content writer

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Doubt about paying your content writerI am writing this blog post for the benefit of those clients who often wonder why they should pay the amount I’m asking for. In more than 90% cases it doesn’t happen, but I think even if 10% clients have some doubt it makes sense to explain to them, what they are paying for.

What is content writing basically?

Content writing is of many forms but what I provide is a service that should help you build your business and put your best foot forward. I’m not in the business of providing $3-articles to improve your search engine rankings (they rarely do, and even if they do, it is a fluke that sometimes work and most of the times doesn’t).

I help you convey your message in a manner that it convinces your customers and clients to put your trust into your product or service (and into you) and consequently, do business with you. What I provide is a mix of content writing and copywriting. I might not be an excellent writer (I am gradually getting there) but when you want to speak your mind and when you want to make the right impact, I can certainly help you.

My content writing is a mix of content writing and copywriting

The fundamental purpose of copywriting is to help you sell, whether it is your product, your service, or your ideology or idea. Content writing on the other hand educates and informs your present and prospective customers and clients and creates a ripe ground for the business to take place.

So the content on your business website must be a balanced cocktail of content writing and copywriting. This is especially true when I’m writing for your homepage. Think of your home page as your front office if you open a brick and mortar business. You would like it to look its best and you won’t decorate it with cheap stuff. Every item in your front office reeks of professionalism.

Your website is your online office and your homepage is your front office. Although unlike a brick and mortar office, there are as many entrances to your website as there are pages and blog posts under your domain, eventually, sooner or later, people reach your homepage and this is where the most critical impact is made. You need to inform your visitors. You need to educate them as laconically as possible. And then you have to turn them into paying customers and clients.

Just like home page, most of the links appearing in your top most navigation are highly critical and in fact, sometimes they are more important than your homepage (because it is not possible to pack every bit of crucial information into your homepage).

So when you’re paying your content writer who is practically creating an entire business presence for you and you are wondering why you are paying what you’re paying, think about how crucial his or her job is. If you’re getting your content written professionally, it means that you understand that it matters to your business what text there is on your website.

I’m not saying pay your content writer through your nose and pay him or her at the cost of your business infrastructure, but don’t go for as cheap content as possible. Believe me, whether you do business with me or not, this doesn’t work. It might cost you your business if just at the outset you try to save on the most crucial aspect of your online presence – your website content.

When creating content, focus on value and not the length

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In a suggestion made in this Marketing Sharepa blog post titled Content Marketing: Focus on value, not length, the author says that it doesn’t matter how long your content is as long as it delivers value.

I believe this focus on content length is archaic…a vestigial reminder of media buys…essentially, the appendix of digital marketing…

And yet, people writing for your blogs and creating your content marketing may not be content experts. They may not be professional writers. Many are likely subject matter experts asked to pitch in and creating content is not a process they are comfortable with, so they want some guidance.

Now, I’m not saying quantity or length doesn’t matter; I mean it really doesn’t make sense to write just a simple sentence as a complete blog post even if that single sentence conveys the entire essence of your message. Nonetheless, you don’t need to go on and on just to create 400 or 500 words. A few years ago Matt Cutts  of Google advised that your blog post or webpage content must be around 400 words in order to make it search engine friendly and my personal experience has echoed this estimate. But what if your webpage requires just a single paragraph?

For a person providing content writing services and charging by pages and words this might pose a problem but only when you are working with clients who are not farsighted. When you’re creating content and when you’re concerned about your search engine rankings it is not a matter of individual pages, it is a matter of collective content on your website and blog. Although while quoting I always say (300-500 words) but once the initial communication is over I make it clear to the client that it isn’t necessary that I’m going to stick with this upper and lower limit. I might write 200-250 words for a document if that’s what it needs. Having said that, I also convey that I don’t bother if sometimes the number of words go beyond 500 words, say 600 words or even 700 words. I flow with the requirement and don’t constrain myself with exactly how many words must be written.

As rightly pointed out by the author in the above-mentioned blog post, ultimately it is the value of your content that matters, not its length. Interestingly, if your content delivers real value  it automatically gets good search engine rankings irrespective of how long or short your individual pages are.

Creating content for Twitter and Facebook

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Creating content for Twitter and Facebook is all about targeting and engagement (I know, clichéd expressions, but they are relevant). Remember that people interested in Twitter and Facebook marketing aren’t interested in the billions of members, they are interested in vertical niches, even if it means interacting with merely 100 individuals.

You need to create content in such a manner that it creates a platform for your target audience/customers/clients to interact with you. You become easily reachable to them. The content must be generated according to people who will likely follow you on Twitter and Facebook. And they shouldn’t just follow you, they should also respond to your content and share it, among their own friends and followers.

Even among Twitter and Facebook, the formats are quite different. You post content on Twitter mostly

  • To forward relevant news and updates about your business, about your product or service, or about any event affecting your customers and clients
  • To share interesting information on your own website/blog or from somewhere else
  • To share interesting thoughts and anecdotes
  • To interact with people who want to interact with you or with whom you want to interact
  • To post answers to queries made by your customers and clients regarding your products and services
  • To carry out awareness and PR campaigns

Facebook on the other hand is more informal and flexible simply because you can post more than 140 characters (a limitation in Twitter). Compared to Twitter, it is easier to post videos, images and links on Facebook, although you can easily share links to videos and images on Twitter too. Before deciding on what sort of content you want to produce, you have to figure out where your audience hangs out; is it Facebook, Twitter or both? If it isn’t both, you shouldn’t waste your time creating content for both.

For Twitter, as already mentioned above, you create content to share information, internal and external links, reply to questions from customers and other people and to create general awareness. Visibility is very crucial on Twitter. People’s timelines are extremely fast and within a couple of minutes your updates are going to scroll down out of their sight. It doesn’t mean that you constantly post, but be as regular as you can. On Twitter, you are known by the tweets you post. So be very careful what causes you associate with and what ideas you promote. Your messages become your brand on Twitter, no matter what your profile says. Twitter is also used for curating… more on that later on.

Facebook is being used by many individuals and companies as a full-fledged content publishing platform. People are posting long updates in the blog format and they seem to be working quite well. Facebook is more transparent in the sense that people can immediately see which users are responding to your content in various manners (replying, commenting, sharing and liking). You can also create your company’s Facebook fan page and initiate a dialogue with your customers and clients through it. Most of the mainstream companies these days have a vibrant Facebook fan page (it is another matter how they manage it).

No matter what platform you choose, the basic idea of having a Twitter or Facebook profile is to facilitate real-time two-way communication between you and your audience. It is well and good that people should appreciate your content over there and your content should go viral and lots of people should share it. But all this means is, you get more people to talk to and exchange ideas with. That’s the fundamental purpose of creating content for Twitter and Facebook: expanding your circle of influence.

Researching the right keywords for your content

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Right keywords for contentIf a big chunk of your content marketing effort involves getting qualified traffic from search engines then it’s very important that you research the right keywords for your content. Generating content requires lots of effort and if you’re not careful about choice of keywords and key phrases you might end up generating tons of content, and consequently, tons of such engine traffic for all the wrong keywords.

How to decide what are the right keywords for your content

The best way of finding out what are the right keywords for your content is by talking to your prospective and present customers and clients. What sort of language do they use when they try to find something what you have to offer? For instance, I offer content writing services but people might not necessarily be searching for “content writing services”.  They might be searching for “business content writer” or “SEO writer” or maybe “website content writer” or thousands of other combinations. You have to create a comprehensive list of keywords and key phrases people might use in order to find your service or product.

You can ask people around through your Twitter or Facebook profiles or even through your blog. Normally people don’t respond unless you have established a significant presence for yourself so you might have to practice a little patience. There are many online forums where you can get some help regarding this.

If instead of people you want to use technology then there are many free and commercial tools available on the Internet that can help you create a massive list of keywords and key phrases associated with your niche. One of the most prominent tools is Google AdWords Keywords Tool. You can enter a particular keyword or key phrase and it presents to you a list of matching keywords that you can use within your content. You can also enter the URL of your website and it will go through your content and accordingly present to you a list of targeted keywords and key phrases.

How to use less competitive keywords for your content

When you’re just starting out in a highly competitive market it makes no sense to aim for high competition keywords. In every niche there are high-competition and low-competition keywords and you can always start with low-competition keywords so that you can first gain traction among those keywords and then gradually move towards high-competition keywords. Take for instance, “content writing services”; this is certainly a high-competition key phrase and optimizing for this key phrase will take lots of content and time. So comparatively “website content writing services” or “business website content writing services” are low-competition keywords. You can find similar low-competition keywords in your niche.

The importance of finding the right keywords before you start creating your content’

As I mentioned above, you will end up saving lots of time if you research your keywords and key phrases before embarking upon your content writing expedition because then you will be generating all the content around your appropriately targeted keywords instead of using the guesswork. If I know that “content writer” and “content writing services” are important key phrases for me I won’t waste my time creating content for keywords that are not used by people.

What do you understand by copywriting?

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There are many writers who cannot/do not draw a distinction between copywriting and content writing. Originally the word “copywriting” comes from advertising whereas, content writing, as far as I know, is a more recent terminology mostly used for creating online content. Although I might be wrong because even for newspapers, magazines and even course books, what you do is write content. Anyway, about copywriting.

Copywriting is basically content written to promote a product, a service or an idea. Copywriting can be done for a website, for a radio advertisement, for a print publication advertisement and for television. In copywriting you have to come up with highly engaging, entertaining and contextual content whose primary purpose is to increase sales or promote an idea. Writing blogs and information articles cannot be called copywriting, but it surely is content writing. Even on your website whatever content you publish that prompts your visitors to do business with you is copywriting, including your sales copy.

The thought came to my mind that although I’m writing content for various business websites, I never draw a distinction between a home page, the primary pages and information pages, although I charge more for the homepage and the primary pages (product descriptions, services, profile, about us etc.). A big reason perhaps is that the client is not bothered about what I call it. He or she simply wants text that helps him or her sell more. But if the client really wants to appreciate the criticality of the content he or she is publishing on his or her website, then he or she must understand the fundamental difference between content writing and copywriting.

Copywriting is about selling

As I mentioned above, the primary purpose of copywriting is to sell/promote a product, a service or an idea. It can exist in the form of a story that eventually leads its audience to the final goal – purchase of a product or a service or an endorsement of an idea. If you simply produce text then it is called sales copy and when you write it for audiovisual advertisements you call it a script. Since copywriting helps businesses sell, some copywriters can ask exorbitant amounts of money for coming up with even a couple of paragraphs. Copywriting does the job of educating the audience and selling the idea at the same time, although selling the idea is of utmost importance.

Content writing is about informing

From the perspective of websites, content writing paves way for a more effective copywriting, or vice versa. You first inform your audience with content writing, and then you sell your product or service with effective and compelling copywriting.

So which is important, copywriting or content writing?

Going by the amount of money charged by copywriters, I would say copywriting is much more important compared to content writing, but this doesn’t mitigate the role of content writing. If your audience is not informed it is all the more difficult for your copywriting to work.

Am I a copywriter or a content writer?

I can wear both the hats, I mean that’s why I’ve been writing sales copies and I always write the homepage when I take on a content writing assignment. On the homepage the primary purpose of your content is to engage the visitors, inform them as concisely as possible, and get them hooked to your website. The text must be informative as well as entertaining. It must be created keeping in mind the core audience (techy, geeky, spendthrift, miserly, etc.). It must be able to convince. I manage to achieve that.