Words to the Wise

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!

The Internet is overflowing with dull copy. Set yourself apart by making your copy lively and on-topic, and you’ll get attention.

It’s easy to let a designer come up with web age layouts before consulting your copywriter. While it may save some back-and-forth on the front end, later on, when you copywriter complains there isn’t enough room for copy, you might end up kicking yourself.

Designers often say that ‘nobody’s reading copy anymore.’ If you’re tells you this, tell them to shut up. The truth is, nobody’s ready BORING copy anymore, and your designer might not know the difference. A good copywriter can work with a designer to create space for the exact amount of copy you need to seal the deal with your prospects.

From time-to-time I’ll land a project where the client advises that the designer is finalizing the layout and that when he/she is done, it’ll be my turn to fill in the blanks. While I’m more than up to the challenge, it’s been difficult converting clients from that mindset to one of integration with design, copy and client.

Content that adds value to your website is always welcome. While it can be hard to rationalize space for things like Q&A, FAQ, Tips, How-to info and more, this added value content is exactly that - added value. If you can include something relevant, well written and possibly fun, this extra value copy in your site may be the extra sales boost you need to convert your prospects into buyers.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to focus on website copy and what it means in the 21st century. I spend a lot of my time reviewing websites - noting what works, what doesn’t work, and why today’s consumers are visiting your site with a different perspective.

First of all, visitors to your website today are not the same as they were five years ago. Heck, they probably aren’t even the same as they were five MONTHS ago. Today’s consumers are buried under the piles of information, they’ve got less time than they ever had, their nerves have been overstimulated by wars, natural disasters, politics and the like, and they’re feeling a financial strain that is apparently not getting any better.

Just the kind of customer you were looking for, right?

So what do you do with your copy to reach these people? Well, first of all you have to get to your point - fast. When we visit a website that goes on and on without giving us some kind of payback, some gem of information or an opportunity to meet one of our needs, we tend to get ’sleepy eyes’ and move on.

Long, useless copy like I’ve described comes from a number of sources:

1. Some copywriters tend to ‘fall in love’ with their work. They churn out word after word to impress themselves, their bosses and, of course, you. Too bad you aren’t a copywriter. You might be more impressed.
2. Some clients love themselves too much. “We need a company name density of 12%” is exactly what I was told by one client last year. As if their company name was a keyword and their entire SEO strategy depended on it.
3. A copywriting budget that is too small. Truth be told, it takes longer to write a to-the-point, well crafted message than it does to ramble on and on. Get to the point. Hiring a junior copywriter may save you money, but you could end up with thousands of extra words that simply drive your prospects away.

Next up…why smaller is better. At least, in copywriting.

Nine times out of ten, you probably do a Google search hoping for results from the billions of pages that reside on the Internet. Search for Freelance Advertising and PR copywriter on Google, and you’ll probably be happy to get those 42,500 results.

But did you know you can use Google to search for certain terms on specific websites?

A real estate client of mine had a ‘problem’ with a particular property the other day. The property owner decided that my client would no longer be allowed to offer the property and even took things one step further by prohibiting my client from even mentioning the property’s name on their website.

Now, my client has nearly 1,000 pages on content on their site, so finding the instances where the property is mentioned might seem daunting. Aside from going into web development software like Dreamweaver, you can use an advanced Google search to find terms on any website you choose. You can even search particular sub-folders in the form domain.com/subfolder/subfolder1.

For example, if you wanted to find what pages on jasonpedley.com contain the word ‘copy’ in their text, description and body copy just do the following:

1. Go to google.com.
2. Click ‘advanced search‘ next to the search term field.
3. On the advanced search page, enter your search criteria, “copy”, in the fields in the first four fields.
4. Look down to the line that says “Domain” and enter jasonpedley.com.
5. Enjoy your 143 results.

You can also tell Google what part of the resulting web pages to search. The line above Domain lets you choose the following:

1. Anywhere in the page
2. In the title of the page
3. In the text of the page
4. In the URL of the page
5. In links to the page

So if you’re looking for a specific term on a specific site or in a specific location, Google’s got you covered. Again.