Content Writer Micky’s Blog

Archive for December, 2008

Have you had a website built by a web design company, but don’t have any good way of updating your website? Is the information on your website old and wrong? (if so, you’re losing customers – guaranteed!)

You may recognise yourself in one of these situations, which are quite common, particularly among small business owners:

• You have every intention of putting new info on your website regularly, but just cant’t find the time to actually do it.
• You’ve tried to update your website with new content but don’t know how to use the software.
• You’ve had your web designer update your website for you before, but aren’t happy with their services (either because of what they charge you or because they don’t put any real effort into it, or both).

Don’t worry: There’s someone out there (me!) who is a professional Web Content Editor with lots of experience, and who’s happy to take website updating out of your hands.

I can be your dedicated Web Content Manager from as little as $30 per request.

I generally use Dreamweaver to update websites without Content Management Systems, or if you do have a CMS, I can use that too if it’s web-based.

The way I charge for making changes to your website is by time spent, and I charge A$60 per hour. Small textual changes won’t even take an hour, but my minimum fee is $30 (to cover emailing back and forth with you about your requirements, logging into the system, making the changes, uploading it, checking it online and emailing you to let you know).

You can hire me for a one-off website updating service, or just email me regular changes (e.g. new restaurant menus, different opening hours, special temporary offers, holiday messages, etc.)  and I’ll take care of the rest for you.

The most important thing is that you KEEP YOUR WEBSITE UP TO DATE at all times. You’re losing customers every day you delay it! Contact me, Content Writer Micky, now to discuss your website content.

Writing for websites is different from any other kind of writing.

Visitors to websites don’t spend a lot of time reading text on a website. They quickly scan the page with their eyes and will leave in just seconds if they don’t see anything that interests them or that answers the question they had.

Web content has to ensure people quickly find what they’re looking for. They have to know immediately that they’ve come to the right page, otherwise you my have lost them forever.

Here are some important web writing tips to start with:

• Organise your copy in a logical way.
• Immediately cut to the chase. Don’t use more words than necessary. Keep sentences short.
• Put the most important information right at the top.
• Use bullet points, subheadings and bolded text or different colours to make it easy for visitors to quickly ’scan’ a page with their eyes (everyone is in a hurry).
• Use a professional writing style but a friendly, personal tone of voice.
• Target the writing specifically to the visitor of your website, your potential customer.
• Optimise content for search engines (search engine optimisation or SEO) and use relevant keywords and keyword combinations to help increase your search engine ranking.
• Use hyperlinks in the text to guide the visitor to related or important pages, such as the ‘buy’ or ’sign up’ page. Make sure the link label explains clearly where the visitor is taken (e.g. don’t link the words ’click here’).

My name is Micky Stuivenberg. I have been writing successful website content since 1999. Why not discuss your website content with me - an experienced and professional SEO-certified web copywriter - and see how I can help you?

Many company owners or staff who write their own content don’t approach it from the point of view of the visitor or customer. There’s industry jargon, vague ramblings or the all-important keywords are missing (the words people use to search for your products or services).

A professional web copywriter, like me, approaches your content from the point of view of your target audience, your potential customers, and makes sure the web content speaks directly to them.

By getting your words right, you’ll get more visitors on your website, they will stay there longer and are likelier to come back again, sign up to your newsletter or RSS feed, contact you or buy your products.

I’ve spent a little time this morning making some improvements to my blog.

You’ll now find Bookmark/Share buttons at the bottom of each post, so you can easily share my blog posts on social bookmarking sites or place them in your favourites for easy access at a later date.

On the right, at the top of the sidebar, you’ll see an RSS button and Subscribe button. You can now subscribe to my feed using RSS or any other feed reader you prefer. This way, you don’t have to visit my website or blog all the time to see if there’s anything new, but can simply stay up to date via my feed.

Simply subscribe to my feed if you’re interested in my thoughts, views and experiences related to my SEO web copywriting business, or would like to read future posts about some of my work projects (think copywriting, web content writing, SEO, website usability and creating effective, user-friendly & search engine-friendly websites).

To those who sign up – thank you for your interest!

This is a project I completed a few weeks ago and that I’m very pleased with. I created an entirely new website, wrote all the content and did the on-site SEO for Tensindo Sports.

Tensindo is a tennis ball manufacturer, producing its own ITF-approved TENS tennis balls as well as tennis balls for other brands (that are very well known but can’t be named).

Tensindo’s old website was done entirely in Flash, had little content that was difficult to read (in little frames with scrollbars within the Flash file) and was not optimized at all. It was a real challenge trying to find their website via search engines. You wouldn’t find them at all if you typed any of their product names in Google.

I was provided with the company logo, some images and basic information on the company and each of their products.

Based on that, I created a clear & effective website with an external CSS file to keep the code in the pages to a minimum for SEO purposes.

I’ve optimized each page with unique title tags and keyword-rich, informative content.

I’ve also tried to make it very clear in the new website that there are two sides to Tensindo Sports (with different target markets):

• they manufacture high quality tennis balls for other brands; and
• they produce & market their own TENS brand tennis balls (same high quality, lower price).

The new website was uploaded last week and we’re now just waiting for Google to come by for a visit and index the new pages. Then the SEO testing can start. I can’t wait to see how they rank!

Apparently there are people out there willing to write articles or web content for peanuts. (Where, you ask? Mostly likely in India, the offshore bulk content capital of the world.)

Before I put a “rates” page on my website, I used to get a lot of emails with requests for quotes from people who were obviously looking to get the most content for the absolute cheapest price.

Since content has become king, you can almost divide website owners/managers into two categories:

1. People who run a serious website for their business or organisation and need high-quality copy that is unique, persuasive and professional. These people understand they need to hire a professional copywriter who may need to spend a few hours getting each web page absolutely right – which is a one-off investment that will definitely pay itself off very quickly.
2. People who want to quickly grow a low-quality website (or several very similar websites) with massive amounts of content for other purposes, such as having pages on which to put Google ads. These people don’t really care exactly what’s on the page, whether it’s written logically or in good English, or whether the content will actually have any value for readers. And these people just want to pay as little as possible for this “whatever” type of content.

On my web copywriting rates page, I have made it clear that I do not supply bulk amounts of almost random, copy-and-paste type of content. Please look elsewhere if that’s what you’re after.

I spend the necessary time to understand your business and your products or services and write professional, persuasive copy targeted exactly at your potential customers.

The explanation on my website seems to have stopped 90% of the bulk/cheap writing requests. Which is just as well, because I was really wasting my time responding to quote requests from people who had no intention of hiring a professional copywriter.

But sometimes I still get them. Some people must not bother reading a few paragraphs on a website before sending out a standard email that probably goes out to 50 others, just so they can pick the cheapest one.

I got another one yesterday, it said something like this: “I have 100+ SEO articles that need to be written. US$5 per article. Does that sound good to you?”

Well, NO, it doesn’t. Say as an absolute minimum, a professional copywriter spends 2 hours writing one article. That would be US$2.50 per hour. A 40-hr working week would make this person a grand total of US$100 in a week or US$400 in a month! Enough said.