Writing a blog can sometimes be an isolating experience. You hammer out a post each week (well, most weeks anyway) before publishing it and hoping someone somewhere will find it useful. Unlike paid tasks, you don’t get the luxury of an email or phone call letting you know whether you’re on the right track. Instead, comments and backlinks are the lifeblood that feeds your desire to keep pumping out posts. So it was uplifting to be listed in Odesk’s Top 40 Writing Blogs, alongside such illustrious names as The Copywriter Underground, Copyblogger and Bob Bly (and alongside another 36 excellent writing blogs too). Now the heat is on to carry on delivering whatever it is that’s earned me such an accolade. With so many writing blogs out there, I don’t take such recognition lightly. If you’ve arrived here from Odesk for the first time, welcome to The Copywriter’s Crucible. What you’ll find here are tips on improving your income, building your copywriting skills and how you can make yourself more valuable to clients. I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my humble blog because it is, after all, you, my readers, that keeps this blog alive.
Read more →When I started this blog three years ago I used it as a platform for banging my drum about the benefits of blogging for businesses (in fact, The Copywriter’s Crucible was originally called the keyword packed ’SEO and Business Blogging UK’ (I don’t know why I changed the name either)). I started blogging after being indoctrinated by ‘Naked Conversations‘ and discovering how powerful blogs are at SEO. At the time, I thought I was joining a revolution in corporate communication, and that is was inevitable that blogging about your business would become the norm. Three years later and there hasn’t been the groundswell in business blogging that I, and many others, had anticipated/hoped for. But that doesn’t mean more won’t be blogging in the future, particularly now it’s been given the more respectable title of ‘content marketing’. There are plenty of eBooks, studies and surveys on the benefits of blogging for businesses. And one survey receiving a lot of blog posts and Tweets at the moment is that of HubSpot (creators of the popular Website Grader SEO tool). From their data of over 1500 businesses they found that those with blogs attracted: 55% more traffic 97% more inbound links 434% more indexed pages Whilst these findings are certainly generalised and open to scrutiny, they’re encouraging for us blogging fans and reinforce what I started preaching about three years ago.
Read more →Last week I offered some advice on why businesses of all kinds (whether you’re a one man band or continent spanning corp) should consider starting a content marketing campaign. People are constantly searching the web for answers, so if you can provide useful information in a way that promotes your expertise then you can increase the chance of turning a prospect into a customer. So how do you go about it? Get WordPress Unless your web developers were prudent enough to equip your website with a content management system, you’ll need somewhere to post your articles to. My entire website is built using WordPress, so obviously I’m a big fan. Here are some of the reasons why you should consider using WordPress as well: Easy to use – you’ll need some basic techie know-how to upload the files onto your server and create a database; however, the instructions are clear enough that you should be up and running within an hour. Once installed you’ve got a dashboard interface you can log into from where you can fiddle with the settings and adjust how your blog works and looks. Customisable – you’ll want WordPress to reflect your branding and feature your logo; there are thousands of free themes you can easily customise or you can pickup a professional looking design for a reasonable price. My own multiple page website is a customised version of Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme. Plugins – WordPress has a global community of developers diligently creating programs to expand WordPress’ functionality and make it ever more powerful. Popular plugins are available to optimise your blog for keywords, enable your articles to be easily bookmarked and to create an autoresponder for your favourite posts. Capture email addresses – visitors can easily subscribe by email or RSS to your blog
Read more →Whether you call it business blogging, content marketing or engagement, giving away free content is a great way of building trust and credibility with info hungry web surfers. Google seems to like it too. It has taken a while for awareness to spread (I’ve still got a drawer full of business blogging leaflets from a Milton Keynes exhibition two years ago), but this year I’m finding more people are getting clued up on the benefits of weekly articles for boosting their online profiles. The latest place to find words written by me is the bda (Buckingham Design Associates) website. My current contributions are: Print dead in ten years? Only if we run out of tree Mobile Marketing: Do You Want to be a Temporary Intruder or a Trusted Friend? Over the next few months I’ll be covering various topics on print, mobile and digital marketing. So if these areas are of interest then hopefully you might consider subscribing for an added weekly dose of marketing news and tips? Otherwise fear not, because the Crucible is still high on my list of weekly duties for a variety of reasons: Helps with my daily workout of 500 words a day Gives me an outlet to write freely, and get as carried away with my metaphors as I want Enables me to network, question views and get feedback from other writers and marketers (my post on whether Indian writers used a different structure and syntax to Western writers has a particularly active comments section) Helps with my Google ranking (although I’m still stuck in the darkest depths of graveyard listings until I’m forgiven for changing my domain name) So to all my loyal subscribers who listen to my weekly sermons on the evolving role of the internet copywriter, please be assured that I’ll
Read more →This week I’ve guest posted over at Freelance Writing Jobs – The Internet’s #1 Freelance Writer Jobs Board. The topic won’t be new to regular Crucible readers, but I thought FWJ’s subscribers would appreciate a nudge towards promoting themselves as ‘added value writers’, educating their clients on content marketing and then demanding more money. FWJ’s Deb Ng has linked regularly to The Copywriter’s Crucible, so I thought I’d return the gesture.
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Regular Crucible readers, and anyone who has read my eBook, will be familiar with my sermons on the need to provide informative, useful content in order to build trust and credibility with website visitors. Whilst giving away free content is a great way of making friends, it’s not going to pay any bills and it certainly doesn’t write itself. Well, some web publishers have had enough of relying on ad clicks to keep them fed and have moved to paid membership models. Subscriptions offer greater stability Over on the Teaching Sells blog, Brian Clark has discussed why a popular eBook and an SEO consultancy have now switched to charging subscriptions for accessing their latest content. The content they provide is so highly regarded and in such demand that they are now in a position where charging a monthly rate seems the only logical, and sensible, way of compensating themselves for the time they invest in sharing their expertise. Whilst I can’t see The Copywriter’s Crucible charging an entrance fee anytime soon, I can understand why websites with such a large regular audience and reputation feel that the time is right to evolve from living off a drip feed of ad clicks. Is there still money to be made from eBooks? News of the first few sites to switch to subscriptions has arrived just when I’m looking at developing other revenue streams beyond straightforward copywriting. Since I’ve started reading Skellie’s Anywired blog, about living the jetset remote worker lifestyle, my spare moments are now absorbed in trying to think up a passive business model which can generate income even when I’m not hammering away at my keyboard. Of the internet business ideas suggested in a recent Anywired post the most feasible for me seems to be that of knocking out a
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They often say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do, and I think moving domains isn’t a lot better and I hope I haven’t lost you all along the way. Ever since Google started indexing my blog as my home page, I’ve been steadily heading towards re-branding my copywriting business with my blog name. To complete the transition I’ve now not only updated my stationary but also my domain. ‘The Write Words’ was a bit generic and I’d always wanted a name that was unique and had a story behind it for whenever I handed out business cards. Mine is simply about how I discovered blogging as a marketing tool and how it took over the branding of my business. Although it has involved a little bit of pain (all my apostrophes have changed to ‘’’ ?!), I thought moving to a .com domain was also necessary for long-term growth and to try and establish more of a global presence, crucial for my plans/dreams of swapping my laptop bag for a suitcase. I’m still breathing into a paper bag at the thought that I might have lost my 300 loyal subscribers in the process, but here’s a brief checklist for moving your blog to a new domain with hopefully the minimum of pain. Ten steps for moving your WordPress blog to a new domain 1. Backup your MySQL database, preferably using the phpMyAdmin panel in your web hosting account as I had no luck uploading using WordPress database plugins. 2. Create a new MySql database and upload the copy of your old one. You might have to compress your database if it’s over 8 MB or (as in my case) contact your web hosting company to upload it for you if your browser keeps
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If you’ve started the New Year with a shiny new website, and invested in some copywriting for the landing page, you might be thinking that you can just sit back and wait for the sales to come flooding in. Well, it’s not that easy I’m afraid. It takes a lot of effort to successfully market and manage an effective website. You’ve got to find a way to signpost it so your customers can find you and then you’ve got to work out how you’re going to sell to them when they arrive. There are barriers to building trust online; people want to see more than some JPEGS and PayPal buttons before they’re ready to buy. But fear not because (inspired by a similarly themed post from Junta42) I’ve scribbled down my top ten internet marketing tips for getting your website noticed and building credibility with customers (I’ll give you a hint: it all revolves around becoming a publisher and being generous with your content): 1. Regularly post useful articles that contain your keywords Preferably articles should be posted onto a blog of some description so you can interact with customers and perpetuate the love affair between blogs and search engine optimisation. The key is to be offering insight and advice which will not only attract the search spiders, but will also help promote your expertise and answer the questions that might be blocking a sale. 2. Let everyone know the traditional way Tell all your contacts about the new site. An emailed message is too easy to dismiss. So dust off your telephone and call them up to announce your new venture, or send them a concisely worded and designed postcard. Both methods are relatively inexpensive and will make more impact than email bombing as many people as you can.
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Whilst the economic outlook might be doom and gloom, the content marketing bandwagon is rolling at full speed. It’s filling up with enthusiastic new supporters at every stop, and gathering pace towards its destination in marketing boardrooms. The ideas I first encountered when researching business blogging have been picked up, dusted off and given a new set of clothes in the form of content marketing. People are ignoring advertising, so the future is to barter for their attention with content of value. Add to the equation that the costs of becoming a publisher have plummeted along with the price at which you can sell content. Content itself is now a promotional, marketing tool for building a closer affinity, rather than a way of generating income in itself. I think content marketing has a bright future and is a future field for copywriters. In my own experience I’m finding more people who not only want words for the search engines, but also words that can provide ammunition to their sales teams and educate visitors. This week I thought I’d share some of the blogs I regularly read on the evolving demand for high quality, useful content. I’d recommend adding them all to your reading list if you’re interested in where marketing and copywriting is heading: Copyblogger – what initial started as a blog about copywriting techniques has now evolved into a speakers platform for sharing advice on writing for the web and the need to invest in quality content, rather than hammering out posts as though your PC is about to explode. Web Ink Now – blog of viral marketing evangelist David Meerman Scott who shares his views on offering content of value and throwing overtly sales tactics in the bin. Junta42 – a blog dedicated to content marketing. Whose doing
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