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Hiring a website content writing service
Hiring a website content writing service is one of the most critical decisions you ever make for your online business. It’s basically your content that gets — whether through search engines, directly, or through social media and networking websites — traffic to your website, and it’s your content that converts your visitors into paying customers and clients.
Rather than hiring full-time in-house content writers, most small and medium businesses prefer to hire a website content writing service because (read why you should outsource to a content writing service), aside from saving on time and effort, they can also avail world-class writers from across the globe without going through the pain of finding them, and then training them.
The Internet is a great tool, a gargantuan advantage. Just log on and you can find writing talent from every possible nook and corner of the world. This is also a disadvantage. Unlike in the brick-and-mortar business it takes less effort to get onto the Internet and start a business. No, I’m not saying it’s easier to do business on the Internet, just easier to start a business. Nonetheless, there are many businesses that somehow manage to get the initial push and somehow you happen to stumble upon them and end up doing business with them. But do they deliver? Only time, and their performance, can tell. The thing is, they might just be testing the waters, or playing around with a new “work from home” idea just in case it works, but you are into serious business. You have invested your sweat, money and talent into your business and a lot is at stake. You are not playing around with some idea or “this Internet thing”. You want real results.
That’s why it’s very important to hire your website content writing service with great care. But if you have never worked before with this service, how can you decide, how do you know doing business with this company can be a safe bet?
What to look for before hiring a content writing service
- For how long has your content writing service been in the business: You can easily find the age of the domain. Check out their blog archives (they have a blog, right?). Go through their online portfolio. If possible, check out their client websites and see how old the content over there is.
- How does the website look: Most of the established content writing services have well-designed websites. By well-designed I don’t mean they should have won awards for best layout and design, you can just feel it. If they take their business seriously, they should also take their website seriously, because they are supposed to be getting good business from the website.
- Does your website content writing service have a social media presence: This is not necessary but a service that’s active on the social media has a reputation to maintain. It takes lots of effort to build a brand on social media and networking websites. If they take their social media seriously, there is a great chance that they take their business seriously too.
- Do they have a blog: Now this is a must for a content writing service. Just imagine a service that offers blog content to you and does not publish a good-quality blog. A blog is not just a great communication and SEO tool it also manifests an open, progressive mentality. It shows you put in effort to regularly talk to your visitors and share with them your thoughts.
- What’s their quality of writing: This should logically be the first thing to consider.
- How many websites link back to your content writing service: Back links are not only good for SEO, they are also an indication of good quality. If their website enjoys lots of back links from other websites and blogs it means people like what they have on their website and also what they have been doing.
- What sort of testimonials do they have: Remember that many websites have testimonials that don’t seem real so you need to take testimonials with a pinch of salt, but reputed testimonials do matter. Be wary of testimonials not accompanies by website links. If they display big brand names and they themselves are not a very well-known name feel free to ask for direct links where their content can be seen.
Do you have your own consideration for hiring a competent content writing service? If yes, please share it in the comment section.
Is email marketing content different from web marketing content?
Of late I’ve been getting plenty of assignments that involve writing content for email marketing campaigns. Intermittently a few clients want to know what is the difference between writing content for marketing on the web and through e-mail. I’m sure they want to know whether I know the difference or not and I am writing this blog post to share my thoughts on the subject of writing content for email marketing as well as web marketing.
Fundamental difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing
Let me tell this at the outset that I am not writing this as a marketing person; I am a content writer who knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. Most of the things that I know have been learned by constantly working and interacting on the Internet with other professionals and also with clients hailing from different fields.
Marketing, as we will all agree, is an exercise to promote a product or service in order to increase business. It may involve running advertising campaigns, organizing events and distributing content that makes the recipients aware of the product or the service and its features. Of course I will be talking from the perspective of a content writer.
Content for an e-mail marketing campaign cannot be easily reused
An e-mail marketing campaign is most of the time a one-time affair, or there have to be long intervals before you send the same e-mail to the same recipients. Do it with regularity and it becomes spam. E-mail marketing is kind of push marketing even if you are using an opt-in e-mail list. It normally survives on numbers unless the targeting is phenomenal. The content for an e-mail marketing campaign, most of the times, is not reusable – you cannot send the same e-mail again and again. Every time you send an e-mail, there must be something new in it.
E-mail marketing content must always be to the point
Content for an e-mail marketing campaign must be concise, to the point, and use as direct a language as possible. Say your thing and get done with it. Remember that the person opening your e-mail would be having scores of unread messages in his or her inbox and it just takes one click to open another message.
This makes it more important to highlight the greatest benefits of your product or service at the top of the message. There should be minimal scope for confusion and misunderstanding.
It is debatable what should be the length of an e-mail marketing campaign. It depends upon what you want to convey and who is your target market. For instance if you are a real estate company selling real estate property then your customers will naturally prefer to read more and more before deciding to call you. On the other hand a less important product (for instance, an MP3 player) may not demand that much attention to detail. So write your content according to your market and the product or service you are offering.
E-mail marketing content should be personal
Content for an e-mail marketing campaign also needs to be personal because an e-mail is a personnel message. It is like knocking at somebody’s door in order to convey something. So the least you can do is address that person by his or her name. Even if the e-mail is going to a business e-mail address it will be opened by a person. Create a sense of familiarity.
Content for a web marketing campaign
A web marketing campaign stays where it is as long as you keep it. The content written for a web marketing campaign performs for a longer time. I am not implying that you don’t need to update your web content; I just mean to say it can stay up there for a longer period of time.
You don’t need to be as personnel as in the case of an e-mail marketing campaign because when it comes to your website it is not you who are knocking at people’s door but the other way round. People coming to your website are already inclined towards reading what you have published on your website. They have either found you on a search engine or have clicked a link on another website.
According to me the greatest difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing is that web marketing content is re-usable and it performs for a longer period of time whereas e-mail marketing content is usually created for a one-time affair so you have to make the maximum impact in the very first attempt otherwise it all goes waste. Web marketing content can be altered and tweaked according to the response you are getting; you cannot do this with e-mail marketing content, it’s like the bullet that has been fired and now you can do nothing about it.
Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?
By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.
Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.
There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.
Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.
This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.
Image source: brandis78
