Divine Write Copywriting Blog

I was recently asked if I’d be interested in writing some articles to increase a company’s search presence. I had to turn the job down, though, because the client was only prepared to pay US $10 per 500 words. (Actually, in light of my article PR experience, they generously upped their offer to $15 per 500 words…) This wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked to work for peanuts.

It blows me away that anyone would think they’d get any real return out of this sort of investment. For your article marketing / article PR to be effective, you can’t rely only on quantity. If your articles are crap, few webmasters will want to publish them, and even fewer readers will want to read them. You also need quality. That means:

• an excellent command of spoken and written English; AND
• a sound understanding of the needs of the target audience; AND
• a sound understanding of the needs of the client’s business; AND
• consistency in style; AND
• thoroughly researched, logical arguments; AND, AND, AND…

In my humble opinion, there’s just no way you can get both quantity and quality without investing in it appropriately.

Here’s why:

In my experience, a good 500 word article takes around 3-8 hours to research, write, optimize and edit. Add another hour or so to implement changes arising out of client review, and you’ve got a total of 4-9 hours. (Many take even longer.) That works out at between $1.11 to $2.50 per hour. Based on a 40 hour week, 47 week year (and no benefits), that’s a grand total of $1,087 to $4,700 per year!

I’d wager there isn’t a good copywriter in the world who’d work for that sort of money.

You might argue that the work could be outsourced – maybe to somewhere like India? I agree that it could, but you still wouldn’t get a good writer.

A cursory scan of Indian job search site Nakuri (http://jobsearch.naukri.com) reveals that a half-way decent copywriter can earn around 4,00,000 to 8,00,000 Rupees per year. That’s around USD $9,390 to $18,780 per year + benefits. So why would they work for $4,700 (much less $1,087) per year????!

They wouldn’t.

Sure there’d probably be plenty of unproven writers willing to have a crack at it, but that’s exactly my point. How many of them would be able to research and write a quality article as outlined above. Just as importantly, how many would stick around for more than one or two. Very few.

The upshot could only be pulp. Meaningless articles churned out for keyword density and nothing more. In fact, they’re probably just re-wording existing articles. Hardly a long-term SEO strategy…

Just my gripe for the day!

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We all know the advertising truism: focus on the positives, not the negatives. You’ll sell more by talking up the benefits of buying, than you will by harping on the risks of not.

In his book, ‘Scientific Advertising’, legendary ad-man, Claude Hopkins, says:

“We are attracted by sunshine, beauty, happiness, health, success. Then point the way to them, not the way out of the opposite.

Picture envied people, not the envious.

Tell people what to do, not what to avoid.

Make your every ad breath good cheer…

Compare the results of two ads, one negative, one positive. One presenting the dark side, one the bright side. One warning, the other inviting. You will be surprised. You will find that the positive ad out pulls the other four to one…”

If you’ve ever wondered why, here’s one theory… It’s called ‘Prospect Theory’. Developed in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it has its roots in Behavioural Economics. Simply put, it says:

1. give someone the choice between a guaranteed small gain and a possible large gain, and they’ll probably take the small; but
2. give someone the choice between a guaranteed small loss and a possible large loss, and they’ll probably risk the large.

Here’s an example cited in a recent CIO article by Bruce Schneier:

“Take a roomful of subjects and divide them into two groups. Ask one group to choose between these two alternatives: a sure gain of $500 and 50 percent chance of gaining $1,000. Ask the other group to choose between these two alternatives: a sure loss of $500 and a 50 percent chance of losing $1,000.

…When faced with a gain, about 85 percent of people chose the sure smaller gain over the risky larger gain. But when faced with a loss, about 70 percent chose the risky larger loss over the sure smaller loss.”

Obviously there are limits to the theory (you wouldn’t choose a guaranteed $100 over a shot at $1million…), but as most of a copywriter’s work is done within these limits, this theory should work well for us.

In the positive v negative advertising debate, it’s point 2 above that’s of most interest. It suggests that if you use negative advertising, most customers will risk the impact of not buying (i.e. the possible large loss) rather than pay for your product (i.e. the guaranteed small loss).

(Point 1 above pertains, not so much to the question of WHETHER to talk up benefits, but more to the question of WHICH benefits to talk up.)

Schneier goes on to say that a possible exception to the rule occurs when you introduce true fear. People are known to do almost anything to make that feeling go away. But on this point, I’d question him. It’s true that people don’t like to feel scared. So much so, in fact, that they’ll do almost anything do avoid feeling fear, in the first place. So when you use scare tactics, people may just cover their eyes and say, “That won’t happen to me!” The infamous Australian Grim Reaper AIDS campaign is a case in point. People remember it, but it wasn’t very effective.

So if you plan to use fear, you have to be careful. It’s a fine line. Too much fear, and it may boomerang. Too little, and customers may simply see a risk worth taking in order to avoid a guaranteed smaller loss (the purchase price).

In the end, the safest bet is – surprisingly enough – to take the safe approach. Listen to Hopkins, and focus on positives. Using computer security (the subject matter discussed in the CIO article) by way of example: if your audience already accepts the need for security, focus on the quality of your particular offering (it’s speed, ease of use, comprehensiveness, etc.); but if they’re not so sure they need security, focus on the benefits of security in general (peace of mind, the comfortable feeling that you’re doing what the experts recommend, faster computing, greater uptime, etc.).

Happy writing!

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Just read some very interesting statistics presented by one of my favourite writers, Gerry McGovern. (The statistcis weren’t from his research; he was just discussing them.)

According to a February 2008 study published by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, “Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years… [and] Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intended to spend more ad dollars on the Internet in 2008.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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‘Link baiting’ may just be a fancy name for ‘good web content’, but it’s a handy reminder that content is critical to a high search engine ranking. Simply put, it’s about making your site content so good that people can’t help but link to it. They feel they’d be doing their own visitors a disservice by not linking.

Of course, I’m not talking just copy here; I’m talking about ALL of the content on your site. Copy, videos, downloads, games, forums, survey results, articles… Anything that makes your site helpful and informative. (Think of it as reverse viral marketing.)

By way of example, take the Partner4Real online dating site. They originally engaged an SEO company to get them a high ranking for a number of terms, including “online dating”, “dating”, “personals”, “singles” and “free dating”. While this went ok, they’re now doing better by themselves, simply by focussing on link baiting. They have very helpful web content and a weekly video from a doctor of herbal medicine. For “online dating” they rank no.2 in the world when you search from Australia. Not bad considering the site’s only very new…

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Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool.

So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If you have any extras or any comments, please feel free to reply to the thread.

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While this isn’t, strictly speaking, the domain of the copywriter, it is a question I get asked quite often. In fact, this question came up recently in one of our forums (see Please critique my ‘Contact’ page.

As you might expect, my answer to this question is based on my understanding of usability, not copywriting. My reading tells me that you should always have your contact details easily accessible (on as many pages as possible). My own experience reinforces this.

If you’re interested, here’s the list of things I look for before buying online from a site I haven’t bought from before:

1. the Google PR of their site
2. whether or not their street address and phone number were available on the site - and to a lesser extent, a legit sounding email address
3. whether someone answered the phone when I called
4. whether they sounded legit when I spoke to them
5. the professionalism of their site

But this raises the sticky question of what to do about spam. The moment you publish your email address on the internet (in a regular something@somethingelse.com format, the world’s legions of spam bots will pick it up and inundate you with spam (otherwise humorously known as ‘High Volume Email Deployment’, but that’s a ‘whole nother story’!)

I know from personal experience that the above is true. I receive 400-500 spam emails every day!!! And I’m one of the lucky ones…

But even so, I still think you should include your email address on your Contact page (and on every other page). My reasons:

1. many of the published instances of my email address are actually in the bylines of my articles - my articles are everywhere on the Web and at the end of most of them, my email address appears. So much/most of the spam I receive is probably due to those articles.
2. spam is manageable - read on to find out how I do it…

Overcoming the SPAM problem - A review of a spam filter

I simply use a Web host who provides a good spam filter. Check out http://www.aussiehq.com.au. They are - without doubt - the best web hosting company I’ve ever dealt with. (I’ve hosted with Web Central before and I’ve spoken to, and researched, dozens more. AussieHQ are far and away the best in my opinion.) They use a spam filter that’s part of their webmaster config software, PLESK. So if you find a web host that uses PLESK and has an email filter, they’re probably using the same one.

AussieHQ’s spam filter appends a string like “*****SPAM” to all suspect emails (you can actually set the string). You can then set up a rule in Outlook to send these emails to a dedicated SPAM folder, then check this folder a few times each day to make sure it’s not accidentally filtering out legit emails. (Alternatively, you can set the spam filter to simply delete the emails, but you have to be very confident of its accuracy before you do that.)

Additionally, you can set the filter’s sensitivity. i.e. An email must have X number of suspect elements before it is considered spam. I worked my way down from 7 and settled on 2. I find this has the best balance of catching ability and accuracy.

I also measured how many legit emails it caught on each of its levels. I tested each for 2 days. Here’s the results:

• I get around 400 spam emails per day (sometimes 500-600)
• In the 10 days I was closely monitoring, I received around 4000 spam emails
• In that time, I had just 2 false positives (i.e. legit emails flagged as spam) and these were on Level 1 - the most aggressive spam detection
• I didn’t test ‘7 Hits required for spam’
• Set at ‘6 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 20 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 95%)
• Set at ‘5 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 7 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 98%)
• Set at ‘4 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 9 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 98%)
• Set at ‘3 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 4 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 99%)
• Set at ‘2 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 5 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 99%)
• Set at ‘1 Hits required for spam’, the filter let through only around 1-2 spam emails per day (a capture rate of approx 99.6%)
• Oh, and these results were WITHOUT a white list. You can maintain a list of safe email addresses. The system just lets through any emails from these addresses.

Note that I only tested for two days per level, so my results may be a little too approximate in some cases.

For what it’s worth, I think AussieHQ’s product eclipses the product offered by WebCentral and that of Norton Internet Security 2006.

Hope this helps someone!

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Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things called ‘meta tags’. These are short notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when it comes to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they shouldn’t be ignored.

Whether you’re building your website yourself, or you’re getting a web designer to do it, it’s a good idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider:

1. Title
2. Keywords
3. Description
4. Alt

Following is a bit of discussion of how these meta tags should look and a few tips for writing them.

Title - e.g. <title>Cheap second hand computers – Widget Computers</title>

The title is the most important of the meta tags. Try to use your keyword at least once in the title, preferably towards the beginning. Also, it’s not just important for your ranking; it also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate (CTR). The text you put in the title will appear as the link text in your Google listing – the bit that people will read first and click on. Think of it as an ad headline – the better it is, the more people will click on it.

TIP: Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing. So try to keep your Title text to a max of 66 characters.

Keywords - e.g. <meta name="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="cheap second hand computers" />

Search engines used to look only at this tag to identify a site’s subject material. This isn’t really the case any more, but some search engines still give it quite a bit of weight (such as Yahoo). There are various ‘rules’ about how many characters you should include in this tag. The most recent I’ve been working to is 300 characters (including spaces). I’ve never been too strict about enforcing it though.

IMPORTANT: The most important detail about the Keywords tags is that Yahoo pays quite a bit of attention to it. If you do it wrong, you’ll be penalized. I learned this the hard way. You need to ensure that your Keywords tag is aligned with your web copy. By that, I mean that you shouldn’t include keywords that don’t appear in your copywriting. And I’m not talking about arbitrary stuffing or spamming here. I’m talking about legit keywords. For instance, I used to use my suburb, Bateau Bay, as a keyword for every page of my site. However, “Bateau Bay” hardly appeared at all in my web copy. There were quite a few other examples like this, too, like my state (NSW), and some of my neighboring suburbs. After ranking really highly in Google for about a year, I couldn’t understand why I was ranking so poorly in Yahoo. Turns out, this was the reason. I made the change, and my ranking shot up about 60 positions!!! And I don’t mean from position 1000 to position 940 (that wouldn’t be noteworthy at all). I mean I shot up from about 80 to about 20 (then gradually moved onto the first page).

Description - e.g. <meta name="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Cheap second hand computers for sale – keeping your business running efficiently without breaking the bank." />

The search engines pay some attention to this text when identifying your site’s subject material, so make sure you include your keyword at least once in the Description. Also, most search engines use this text as their description of your site (i.e. it’s the site snapshot that follows your link in the search results). Make sure it’s informative and compelling. Think of it as the copy for an ad.

TIP: Google only displays about 160 characters including spaces. So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters.

Alt - e.g. <img xsrc="filename.gif" alt="Cheap second hand computer in use" title="Cheap second hand computer in use">

The Alt tag is designed to help visually impaired people use the World Wide Web (WWW). They use software to read out loud the content of your website. When the software encounters a picture, it looks for the Alt text to learn what the picture is, then reads that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important to search engines because they assume that your pictures have something to do with the subject material of your site. But like the visual aid software, they can’t actually see the picture, so they look at the Alt text as well. Try to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text.

Summary

You can use the same meta tags on each page, or you can make them unique. It all depends on how many keywords you’re targeting. If you’re targeting a different keyword in the copy of each page, your meta tags for each page will be unique (i.e. you’ll target that page’s keyword within these meta tags).

TIP: If you have any high ranking competitors, take a look at the way they’ve done their meta tags, and follow their lead. You already know they rank highly, so chances are they’ve done a good job.

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Whether you’re an SEO copywriter or not, you’ve probably heard plenty of rules (accurate and otherwise) regarding how many words you need on each page of your website. Chances are, the loudest voices in the clamor are those advocating HEAPS of copy. But remember, the person with the loudest voice isn’t always right…

While I definitely agree that ‘content is king’, there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a page wordcount of between on most pages. As a rule of thumb, below 100 is probably too little for the search engines, whereas above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors.

Don’t be intimidated into writing pages and pages of copy for your home page (or any other page where short, succinct copy is required). When it comes down to it, Google and the other search engines don’t count your number of words and strike you off the list if you’re too high or too low. They’re only interested in your word count insofar as it’s an indication of the helpfulness of your website. Typically a helpful website will have a lot of words and an unhelpful website will have very few. (It’s a very limited way of looking at the world, but you have to remember that search engines aren’t as good at assessing the relevance and usefulness of a website as humans are. Also, remember that they use other rules to help them decide what sites should rank highly.)

When it comes down to it, the one and only thing that you should absolutely do is write for your visitors first. After all, they may buy from you; there’s absolutely no chance the search engines will!

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It’s been a while since my last post. Sorry! But I have a good reason, honest…

As you’ve probably already guessed from my headline, Divine Write has launched a copywriting forum. It’ll interest copywriters, business owners, marketing managers and webmasters most, but ‘regular’ writers will also find it useful (I hope). Current forums include:

• General copywriting
• SEO copywriting
• Web copywriting (non SEO)
• Direct Marketing (DM) copywriting
• Advertising copywriting
• TV, print & radio copywriting.
• Grammar, punctuation, etc.
• Copyright of copywriting
• Copywriting as a career
• Critique my Copy

You can register by clicking the ‘Register’ link at the top of the main page. Hope to see you there!

Anyway, that’s it for today.

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When you’re writing your SEO copy, chances are there’ll come a time when you’ll wonder whether you should target the plural of your keyword or the singular.

e.g. Do I target “tennis shoe” or “tennis shoes”?

To answer this question, the first thing you need to do is find out what your target visitors are actually searching for. If the vast majority are searching for “tennis shoes”, then you’d target that, and forget about “tennis shoe”.

However, in the real world, things are rarely so black and white. More often than not, the number of searches for each will be similar, and you’ll still be left wondering which would be the more effective keyword.

Your next step is to think about why visitors search for one and not the other. It may be that people search for “tennis shoe” when they’re researching whether to buy a tennis shoe or a running shoe. On the other hand, people may search for “tennis shoes” when they want to actually buy a pair online. In this case, if you were selling tennis shoes, you’d most likely choose “tennis shoes” as your keyword phrase.

Still no closer to a decision? Maybe you can target both… If the only difference between the singular and the plural is the addition of an “s” or “es” on the end, you can simply target the plural. You’ll be targeting the singular in the process. e.g. Target “tennis shoes” and you’ll be automatically targeting “tennis shoe” at the same time.

But if your plural is more than the addition of an “s” or “es”, never fear. In reality, you can target either and still enjoy a high ranking. Google is smart enough to identify the relationship between plural and singular. It knows that people who search for the plural may still get some value out of sites that target the singular. It’s true that - all else being equal - when a user searches for the plural, a site that targets the plural will outrank your site that targets the singular. But you can swing the balance in your favor simply by working harder on the number and quality of your inbound links. e.g. Take, for example, the distinction between “copywriters” and “copywriter”. My copywriting website, Divine Write, targets “copywriter”, but it still outranks most sites that target “copywriters”. That’s mostly because I have more inbound links.

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