Words to the Wise

I’ve been feeling rather bold lately. I don’t know if it’s my new-found connection with Penelope Trunk’s writing and the fact that I can almost relate to her, or if it’s just me getting older (my 32nd birthday is this week) and really not giving a shit about what kind of trouble blogging might get me into.

But the fact remains, I once quit a job over $1.

Granted it was a dollar an hour, so maybe it’s more precise to say I quit a job over $2,000. But I was hourly…so life back then was measured hour-by-hour.

I had been Mohegan Sun’s in-house copywriter for a couple of years. My list of duties had grown, and I was becoming increasingly relied-upon to get shit* done. And based on my salary at the time and reasonable comparisons in the local market, I deserved a raise.

So I did what most people in corporate America won’t do. I asked for my raise.

But, I knew I had to play my cards right, so I did my research, got my information together, and even gave the casino some options:

A $2/hr raise, or…

A $1/hr raise and a title change to SENIOR Copywriter.

I figured the second option was a no-brainer. My plan, I thought, was flawless. I knew the power the word ’senior’ would give my resume if I were to ever leave Mohegan Sun’s advertising department. And to be honest, the $2 option was just thrown in to make the 2nd option appear that much more appealing.

Throughout it all, I hadn’t planned for one slight twist: I wouldn’t be making my case to human resources or the Mohegan Tribe. No, that was done in secret by my immediate boss. I wasn’t even invited to offer any of my salary comparisons or to personally defend my position. So, I’ll never know what was said by my boss to back me up or what questions the tribe/HR raised and how my boss responded. However, I did trust her to make my case - that point I want to be clear. It was the process that I had a problem with. For a company that touts it’s human resources efforts, this was a total contradiction on Mohegan Sun’s part.

But talk about removing control from somebody’s career/self-determination. I waited…and I planned. I’d seen enough of how Mohegan Sun’s HR system worked to know that my desired outcome was no sure thing. A few weeks later, I was given the news. It was a no-go. Shortly after that, I quit for another job. If I wasn’t worth an extra $2,000 a year, then they weren’t worth my time.

Don’t get me wrong, there are no hard feelings. I could simply no longer justify working for a company who made decisions about my career in secrecy like that. In fact, had I received the raise, I might still be stuck there in Connecticut where gas prices and utility costs are among the highest in the nation, and making ends meet on a casino salary (below the title of manager) is next to impossible. Turns out it might just be the best decision an employer ever made for me.

*In addition to being bolder, I find I’m swearing more, too.

Jason Pedley is a freelance copywriter and legal permanent resident of the United States. His clients are in places like Dubai, Barbados, the United Kingdom, Canada and throughout the U.S. Don’t be shy, follow him on Twitter.

A web designer/friend of mine called this week to talk about the economy and his job. He mentioned that in these current economic times, he believes it’s often ‘creatives like us’ who are the first to lose our jobs.

Now, I’m no economist, but I am a big fan of exact language, so I had to correct him before he got too much farther into the conversation.

“You mean creatives like you,” was my interjection.

I’m paraphrasing here, but his response involved a blanket statement placing both of us in the same realm of creative ‘employment’ whose inhabitants are at increased risk of losing their jobs in tough economic times due to decreased marketing budgets, blah, blah, blah.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll never lose my job. Even if I have no clients and no income, it will ultimately be my decision to give up. Nobody can fire me, nobody can cut my salary and nobody can pass me on the corporate ladder.”

I think he grasped the concept, but he strikes me as a serial careerist, so I’m not so sure. The last eight years of my life have been a balance between freelancing, full-time employment, part-time employment, self-employment and (I’m being realistic here) plain old collecting unemployment.

But that was a long time ago. It took me a little while to catch on and say ‘hey, I’m in charge here’ and put my all into freelancing. I now count myself among the lucky ones to be working for myself. Yes there are added stresses, but, to me anyway, stress is just a code word for fear of which I apparently have little.

Look at all the things I have to be thankful for as a freelancer:

• I work from my home office via the Internet and buy gas one or two times a month
• My clients are located around the world - I estimate I’ve met 5% of them face-to-face
• Even if the economy sucks, I can find new income streams via the Internet without worry about the boss firing me for surfing the web
• My online network exceeds my offline network by a ratio of 75:1 - I am officially connected
• Nobody tells me to stay late - I decide when to do the extra effort
• There are no egos to protect, no gossip and no HR departments to hassle you with lame policies

I can certainly see my friend’s point about how tough economic times can affect creatives, and by no means do I consider myself impervious to the current markets. But, when my friend’s company cuts jobs, it means someone becomes unemployed. When I cut back, it usually means peanut butter and jelly for lunch - if I eat lunch.

Jason Pedley is a freelance copywriter in Clayton, North Carolina. He’s been hired, fired, laid off, yelled at, called ‘F#$^ing stupid’ and sent cease and desist letters by former employers. Now, he laughs at all (and thanks some) of his former employers while he writes marketing copy for his clients around the world.

Marketers typically break search marketing into three major pieces:

• Price (How much you’re willing to spend each time a customer clicks on your ad)
• Positioning (Where visitors will see you ad when it’s displayed)
• Phrase (The keywords and phrases that will get your ad displayed among the results)

You might want to consider adding another part to the mix though:

LANDING PAGE

I’m talking about landing pages - the place visitors land when they’ve clicked on your pay per click ad. Companies spend outrageous amounts of time and money searching for the right combination of terms and phrases for their PPC ad campaigns; monitoring and subtracting/adding new keywords and phrases as time goes on. The problem is, many companies are sending EVERY person who clicks on an ad to either one landing page, or, even worse, their home page.

The problem with this is that search engine users are typically looking for specific things like “Louis Vitton Sweater” or “iBook Charger Cable”. People who search with these specific terms don’t want to waste their time on your home page - they want to be sent to the specific content they’re looking for.

In an effective search campaign, you should be modifying your keywords when a searcher is in the “sales lane.” People who search for terms like “Buy a Vitton Sweater” are much more ready to buy than people searching for “Vitton Sweater.”

The pages these two searcher see could spell the difference between a sale and setting sail.

Simple things like lowering the number of clicks from your home page to your conversion page and conversion-optimized landing pages designed specifically for searchers can bring your conversion the front of the sales process while still allowing visitors to browse your site.

Don’t sacrifice time spent on keyword research, and budget, but do spend more time on the fourth piece of the pie: Landing Pages.

I had a budding copywriter email me the other day with a question about how, and most importantly, where to put her online copywriter portfolio and information about her services. She mentioned that she didn’t have a lot of money, didn’t want to pay a designer, and that she was slightly averse to the idea of paying someone to host a site that might not get a lot of traffic out of the box.

I can appreciate her need to save money, and I can also appreciate her desire to get her work online so she can compete in the online marketplace. Fortunately, there are solutions to her problem.

One of the best solutions is Google Pages. Leave it to Google to offer you a free, web-based service that lets you make your own pages with a simple web page editor and host the pages with the search-engine giant - WITHOUT the annoying ads and interference that you get with other free pages like Tripod.

I’ll tell you what, if you want to read the rest of this post about using Google pages for your site, you’ll just have to visit my example Google page.

See ya there!

With all the SEO buzz that’s on the Internet these days, it’s easy to get caught up in all the jargon and “secret” insider conversations happening on blogs and other sites. If you’re heavily involved in SEO, those terms are your lifeblood. But, if you’re a company simply looking to hire a content copywriter who understand SEO, most of the topics and definitions aren’t worth the time it takes you to learn them.

Remember, I said ‘most.’ There are some terms out there that you should know before you have a conversation with a content copywriter like me. Knowing these terms will help you better understand a content copywriter’s services, how they arrive at their prices and the rationale behind the copy and content they provide for you.

Here’s my list:

“Bot” (AKA: “robot”, “spider”, “crawler”) -This is a program that search engines use to find and add web pages to their indexed searches. However, search engines aren’t the only ones who use bots. Spammers use bots to ’scrape’ content in order to plagiarize it and use it as their own content.

“CMS” (Content Management System) - These are programs which allow publishers of online content to focus less on webmaster and coding tasks and more on publishing their content. WordPress is an excellent example of a CMS.

Long Tail - Longer, more specific search engine queries that are usually less targeted than shorter, broad queries. For example, a search for “Copywriter” is a very broad term with millions of results. “Content Copywriter in NC” would give you far fewer results. Long tail terms typicaly have three or more terms within them.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) - Just a fancy term used to describe the way search engines index commonly associated words in a document. Most SEO experts refer to these groups as “long tail.” (See above) The significance is that while it might be next to impossible to rank a new website on page 1 for a term like “Student Loans”, it is fairly easy rank on page 1 for a “long tail” term like “Student Loans for Underwater Basket Weaving Classes”.

META Tags - Statements of HTML page located in the HEAD section that give browsers and search engines information about an individual page. Some META tags are visible in search engines and in your browser (like titles), while some are not (like publisher info). It’s vital to have unique META title and description tags because search engines rely on these things to (a) determine what a particular web page is about and (b) give information about you page to search-engine users.

Static Page - A static page is a web page with no dynamic content or variables (such as session IDs) in the URL. Static pages are great for SEO. They’re inviting to search engine spiders and are fairly easy to create.

URL - Universal Resource Locator - Just a fancy name for a web address.

Widget - A small application or program used on web pages to provide a specific function. The link to my copywriter job board in the upper-left of this page is a widget provided by Job-a-matic. It’s also a generic term borrowed from economics that represents and product or commodity. Thanks for teaching me that, Mr. Holmes.

Site Map - A page or group of pages that link to every accessible page on a website and is intended to improve site usability by simplifying the structure of the site for users. It also helps search engine spiders find all the pages on a site.

SEO - Maybe this term should have been at the top, but if you’re here, chances are you understand at least a little about how SEO works and why it’s important. SEO is the process of increasing visitors to your site by ranking higher in the search engines. The theory is that, the higher you rank, the more people will visit your site since search-engine users typically don’t click past the first few pages of results.

Landing Page - Generally referred to as the page a user lands on when they click a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad. It can be used to harvest email addresses, track campaign results and promote specific products or services.

These ten terms just scratch the surface of the SEO dictionary. But if you understand these ten, you’re probably ready to have a conversation with a content copywriter who’s ready to write your next website, blog, press release or article…like this one.