If you are good in copywriting you should know ways to impress people with your writing. If you want some creative writing ideas and enjoy fiction, you might want to try your hand at some short stories. Even if you can think of an idea that you think is dumb, use it and write. If it doesn't work out, it won’t be so bad because it was only a short story and didn't take you a long time . You might find that the dumb idea you came up with turned into a wonderful story.

For some good ideas, search around you. Watch those around you. Try to listen to their conversations. If it's interesting, maybe you could write about it? Pick a place you are familiar with, maybe at school, work, or a favorite destination and build a story around it. You could use one room in a building you know well and create a whole story about it. Try using the people you meet and know as your characters, or only use their situations. It is your choice.

What about your dreams? If you dream often and can remember your dreams, think about how you could make a story out of them . If you have odd dreams and love to write fantasy or sci-fi, this could be great for you. You could write down your dream word for word and then add to it. Or, you could just use one idea from it. Maybe a character, idea, or small event will pop into your head because of a dream you remember .

Think about all the different events that happen to you and what has happened to you in the past in your life. If you keep a diary or journal, read through it and see if you can find some ideas. If you don’t keep a journal, start keeping a journal for more ideas later on . It is a wonderful . Think about the funniest or most interesting thing that has ever happened to you and capture it into a story. If you think your life is full of drama, maybe it is full of enough drama to make an interesting dramatic story.

If you ever run out of creative writing ideas, all you have to do is look around. Give yourself some time and you will think of something. Even if you start an idea that you don't really like, you could think of a better one in the process. Even if you already have an idea, when new ones comes to mind , jot them down for future stories and projects. You will thank yourself. Whatever you decide, just keep writing.

Labels: copywriting

Well a silly question J . When you ask me it really doesn't matter who writes. I have seen some of the best male writers as well as some of the best female writers. Writing is an art, writing efficiently needs some skills not everyone possess those skills. In our company we had an employee who was very creative in writing she brought out some of the best articles we ever published on our website. Similarly we had an other guy in our office who wrote great articles.

Basically copywriting is more for women it's a delicate job you need to take lot of care and be patient to get best output. Penn library has a wonderful list of famous female writers. I was very impressed to see this list it’s a must see. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/

Controversial it may sound. A telegraph article which took a census few years ago said male authors fared much better than female authors.

"The company asked its 5,000 employees to name their favorite five books written since 1982, when Waterstone's opened its first store. The resulting list of the top 100 favorites is dominated by male authors.

The list features the cream, both male and female, of the modern, international literary world, from Umberto Eco and Bill Bryson to Robert Harris and Ian McEwan; from Margaret Atwood and Jung Chang to Zadie Smith and Zoe Heller. But male authors outnumber female writers by a staggering 66 to 27."

Labels: copywriting

A self confession � I started doing copywriting because? Well nothing I don't have any specific reason for it. My primary aim is to make money by doing some job that pays me well. I thought of all the stories I write in my exam papers when I wrote about world history and all those stuff. I got huge personal inspiration when I started writing. People liked my writing style sometimes I write stories that are so crazy I even got prizes for them. This is a very strange world. It doesn't know how to reward people they like you when you really crazy, sometimes this world likes you when you are very smart. It's a very different world. This world appreciated me when I started writing. My first essay was for an online journal and it got lots of reviews. Later I was hired to write for few blogs and most of the articles I wrong for them were successful.

I later joined Search Engine Genie as a copywriter here they pay me well in Indian standards and I am stuck to this job for more than 2 years. I enjoy doing SEO copywriting because of the diversity in writing behind it. SEO Copywriting is very unique it improves your writing style you tend to keep multiple things in mind when you are writing copies. My TL will give me certain set of keywords and some references and I need to keep everything in mind when I write my contents.

Labels: copywriting

It's a simple method to make money writing copy for the gaming market that exists out there.

1) Search through Google for the following terms: MMOG, MMORPG, RTS, FPS etc. These terms are as follow: MMOG -> Massive Multiplayer Online Game; or; MMORPG -> Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game; RTS stands for Real Time Strategy and FPS stands for First Person Shooter.

2) Then do a quick scan over the next several pages for sites like these:
top50.onrpg.com , mmorpglist.com etc. You are basically looking for any sites that would be a list or blogs that write about several games and have links to the actual websites.

3) Once you have compiled a thorough list of these sites that list all these online games, then go through them and list every official website. This will take some time but these are your leads.

4) Create your own site or have a sub-domain affiliated with a site you own and create a portfolio-type site. This is what these website/company owners would like to see.

*** You may think copywriting doesn't exist in these markets, but they do. These sites depend on good content that is written for their games. Often the first page of a browser-based/Online game is the most essential part and many game owners have absolutely no idea on how to present their games to potential people that would like to play it.

5) Go to your leads and start contacting the owners of these sites and ask if they would like to consider keeping you in mind for future or current work. Make sure you have AIM, MSN and YIM since these people usually communicate via these instant messengers. Some owners will require that you talk to them and for that you need XFire, Teamspeak or Ventrillo. These VoIP systems are easy to use and to speak to people. In the gaming world people use it to communicate all the time.

That is the easy 5 step plan to get some work in the gaming world.

"What about the actual copywriting?" you may ask.

Well the easiest jobs to find will be people that purchase browser-based or online games. Alternatively you approach the people in your leads. There are dozens of sites that have the worst copy on their main page. If someone is creative enough, and you can use words to tell a story and intrigue people enough to be able to sign up for the game, then that is all you need.

Some owners will be starting out and have no capital outlay and others would have a fair bit.

Your portfolio is important here. If you can provide great examples of how you can write and how you could take a normal game with (crappy) copy and turn it into a beautiful swan with fairies and monsters all rolled into one, then you will have a winner. That was just me talking :P

Your imagination is the greatest key here. You cannot sell to gamers like you would do on a normal internet marketing type of product page. It simply won't work.

An example is this....

I had a browser-based game once called Kingdom of Shadows. I needed something great to get people to sign up.

I rotated the copy on the website at least 3 times and every time it changed, more people signed up.

As an example I found one of Out spark’s games that you can see here:

mmozone.com/secret-of-the-solstice.html

Does that page inspire someone to play the game? Sure anime fans would... but a lot of people including me, need that extra bit more in order to make us sign up. That is where the gamer copywriter comes in. Your task is to take that page and make it seem more interesting with words as an example.

If you could get one or two companies like that under your belt, then you will start to see a whole world that will be open to you.

There are tons of opportunities available out there in the entertainment industry. You just have to look!

Labels: copywriting

From time to time we get emails from copywriters who are trying to sell their service through bulk, unsolicited emails. We get these type of emails once every week. I am personally against bulk emails. If you are good in copywriting you should already have good business then why spam people with your emails. Most individuals or companies feel people who send bulk emails as spammers and we are no exception. We do feel the same way so I recommend stop sending bulk emails to us.

Some sample copywriting offers we get:
"I am contacting you to offer my services as an SEO content writer.
I am an experienced web content writer who provides
professional SEO content at reasonable rates.
The following are my rates:
$25 per article for orders of 9 articles or less
$23 per article for orders of 10 articles or more
$20 per article for orders of 20 articles or more
You will have full rights to the articles so please feel free to mark
up my rates to your customers."
"I am writing specifically to explore business association with you since there is a lot of synergy between your offerings and our services. Web Designs is a website development and Internet Marketing company. I want to explore the prospect whether Web Designs can become your backend partner and service all copywriting, SEO, and/or Internet Marketing needs of your clients."

"Please consider this query to be an introduction to my freelance copywriting services. Because your firm demands quality SEO, reputation management, and public relations content, you should know that my resume includes a five-year, mid-level stay at an iconic Madison Avenue ad agency where I had contributed to multi-genre campaigns for clients such as General Mills, Wendy's, and Toyota. Today, I provide a small group of clients with consistently high quality copywriting to satisfy a broad spectrum of business needs."

"I'm writing to offer the services of a professional writer. I know how difficult it is to find a writer online, someone that will provide quality, accurate information. As an SEO company, I'm certain you require a variety of writing. Leave it to me! I know what you're thinking, why should I hire her? Not only do I have extensive experience in SEO writing, I also recently have written for various blogs, worked on large-scale web content, composed press releases for government agencies and completed various editing projects including editing articles, essays, cover letters, resumes, thesis papers and book manuscripts. Ultimately, I have written in nearly every popular niche on the web, and also others unheard of! Unique, professional writing is imperative for any business, no matter the niche. This is something both you and your clients pride your business on! The bottom line is this; I'm experienced, good and can guarantee quality work.

NCAs for copywriters

There are some clients who insist Non-Competitive agreement from us when we write for them. They are basically looking for us to sign an agreement so that in case we stop working with them in future we will not write for another client in same industry. These type of NCAs are pretty genuine if one client benefits from your writing and they start doing well in search engines as well as get good response from their website visitors and later stop working with you and you do the same to a competitor, this will hurt the other client's Business. I perfectly agree for an Non-competitive agreement to be signed in case the copywriter decides to work with a different client in same industry.

Adding non-competition would be a good idea as a future safeguard without any specific intent at present. Not to say this makes it any better, but wondering if we might be seeing more of it? Really not sure on this, but just thinking aloud this might be a development of a cautious market?

Though NCAs are new NDAs had been there for a long time especially for copywriters because they write for a company and at times learn trade secrets and proprietary information of the company.

Labels: copywriting

I had one of my friends who wanted to do this. He wanted to start a website register with US copyright office for all the contents on his website and later sue anyone who copies his contents for potential plagiarism. He has already discussed this issue with an attorney and the attorney has agreed to operate with him to claim statutory damages for content theft.

Do you think this works? Well in my opinion it might work but it all depends on where the content plagiarism website is operating from. We have some of our web pages copyrighted in US and since we are in a popular SEO industry there are many low lives who want to steal our content and claim it to be their own. Most of these thieves are from third world countries like India. Its difficult to get hold of them they never respond to emails or phone calls only solution for us is to contact them to their hosting company. Even if we do that still we can only make them remove our contents. We cannot sue them because of weak laws in countries like India. You can do even the worst crime and still get away with it in India. Plagiarism is not a major offence there, countries like Russia, China too don’t have strong laws to fight internet content theft.

The only way suing a website for content theft can be done is when the individual or Business operates from US itself. In US copyright violations are taken pretty seriously and I am sure if sued you can get a little bit of monetary damages.

If you think like my friend of doing Business by suing people then you are actually joking. Internet is huge and there are new websites coming online every day. I am sure you need to find better ways to make money.

Labels: copywriting

Well, every now and then I change my tactics and put some spices in my copy. I'd like to tell you little bit more about the ones I use the most.

Here goes...

The spices I am talking about are what we all know as figures of speech. Their usage in text could trigger all sorts of different emotions depending on the way you use them of course.

So, here are the ones I would like to recommend to you:

The metaphor
----------------
a metaphor describes a subject as being equal to an object of a kind despite their differences

example:
Life is like a box of chocolates

The simile
------------
similes allow the two ideas to remain distinct in spite of their similarities

example:
Mike runs as fast a bullet

The oxymoron
----------------
oxymorons are expressions called contradiction in terms

example:
the lecture was clearly confusing

The synecdoche
------------------
part of something referring to the whole

example:
I'm all years

Do you guys use figures of speech in your copy?

Feel free to share your experience and thoughts.

Labels: copywriting

Flyers are everywhere these days both in offline and online marketing flyers play an important role. Flyers are a kind of advertisement (usually printed on a page or in a leaflet) intended for wide distribution; "he mailed the flyer to all subscribers" Flyer can be an effecting marketing strategy. Good flyers distributed by email marketing or by mailing list can get good responses.

Writing flyers vary based on the topic you want to cover. Say you are selling perfumes and your targeted customers are primarily women then you need to make sure you impress them with your writing. If you have good description about a particular product or brand you can use it in your flyer.

Make your flyer sound attractive offers on flyers get good appeal. You can say buy one and get one free or this perfume can reach the hearts of millions of people. Something catchy like that.

Some important points that need to be there on the flyer:

1. Why should someone buy perfume from you when there are 1000s of businesses out there selling similar or same perfume?

2. Good way to contact you like email ID, phone number, website URL, product URL etc.

3. What are your best perfumes that kind of perfumes you have can be highlighted in a short way.

4. People always look for offers good pricing and better offers attract people. Make sure your products are well priced and they get offers that are not common in internet? Also see if you can do additional offer like gift wrapping and include that in your flyer.

5. Buy one get one offers are always strong and useful see if you can offer it.

Labels: SEO copywriting

Flyers are everywhere these days both in offline and online marketing flyers play an important role. Flyers are a kind of advertisement (usually printed on a page or in a leaflet) intended for wide distribution; "he mailed the flyer to all subscribers" Flyer can be an effecting marketing strategy. Good flyers distributed by email marketing or by mailing list can get good responses.

Writing flyers vary based on the topic you want to cover. Say you are selling perfumes and your targeted customers are primarily women then you need to make sure you impress them with your writing. If you have good description about a particular product or brand you can use it in your flyer.

Make your flyer sound attractive offers on flyers get good appeal. You can say buy one and get one free or this perfume can reach the hearts of millions of people. Something catchy like that.

Some important points that need to be there on the flyer:

1. Why should someone buy perfume from you when there are 1000s of businesses out there selling similar or same perfume?

2. Good way to contact you like email ID, phone number, website URL, product URL etc.

3. What are your best perfumes that kind of perfumes you have can be highlighted in a short way.

4. People always look for offers good pricing and better offers attract people. Make sure your products are well priced and they get offers that are not common in internet? Also see if you can do additional offer like gift wrapping and include that in your flyer.

5. Buy one get one offers are always strong and useful see if you can offer it.

Labels: SEO copywriting

Most online business and offline quality Businesses today trademark their brand name or product name etc. But the common question asked can anyone trademark a single word generic word like seminar , training, class, college etc?

As per the rule of US trademark office you cannot trademark too common generic words. There are instances where people claim they have copyrighted a common single word. In most cases it will be fake you need to verify those claims I am sure you will see those are actually bogus claims.

In online Business there are lots of occasions where people get worried whether a keyword in their domain name if trademarked can be used in their domain names. First of all if you want to advertise for keywords like best or buy it's a problem. Best and buy are just common words you can advertise them or use them in your domain names like you can buy a domain bestforbuy.com. But for Bestbuy is a trademarked brand you cannot use that in a domain or advertise for that word. For example you cannot have the domain name bestbuyproducts.com I would consider this trademark violation and if the trademark owner disputes you can be fined. Even you can't advertise for best buy related keywords.

Labels: copywriting

“Murdoch also addressed concerns among newspaper publishers that search engines like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc help users to find stories by aggregating links to newspapers websites and blogs -- but then wrest ad dollars from them that they think should be theirs.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright... not steal, but take," said Murdoch. "Not just them but Yahoo."

"What Google News does, is give free publicity to the newspapers, by sending zillions of customers directly to the newspaper site.
It's exactly the same as if a new TV channel were set up, which did nothing but broadcast nonstop advertisements for all the TV shows on OTHER channels. Any NON-MONOPOLISTIC TV station owner would love for someone to do that for him.

NON-MONOPOLISTIC. That's the kicker. Murdoch obtains profits by pushing competitive views off the newsstands by his newspaper monopoly. Google restores the level playing field by letting people see all those NON-Murdoch news sources, as well as the Murdoch ones.

That's why blocking Google from indexing Murdoch properties doesn't serve Murdoch's desires. What he WANTS is for Google to stop indexing NON-Murdoch properties, so he can return to the monopolistic power he enjoyed.

This attitude has driven most of the big-media attacks on Google: not only newspaper, but book publishers, Movie moguls, and Music Industries Goons feel extremely threatened -- not by Google stealing content (it doesn't), not by Google promoting their own content (it does WHICH IS GOOD FOR THEM) but by Google promoting content from other sources, thus allowing those other sources free access to promotion (thus allowing the "little guys" to evade the monopolistic lock in distribution channels owned by the pigopolists.

Publishing ANYTHING for the purpose of promoting something IS an advertisement. Snippets are the ideal advertisement, as book publishers know. (That's why they publish multipage snippets of an author's next book in the back of the current printing of his last book.)
Snippets are fair use (by U.S. law). They do not substitute for the original, they are intended to promote the original and they do have that effect.

And it is not the publishers who have "gathered at great cost" the snippets. The publishers gathered (at whatever cost) the original article entire. It is Google who gathers, at great expense, articles of interest to surfers based on specified criteria--and promotes those articles to those surfers. There is no conceivable harm in this. The harm, I repeat, is that Google gives people alternatives and therefore bypasses the monopolistic distribution channels.

On your theory, Murdoch could prevent damages by taking his content off Google. He hasn't, and he won't, because THAT'S NOT HOW GOOGLE IS DAMAGING HIM. Google is damaging Murdoch by opening up promotional opportunities to Non-Murdoch news.

And that is not only perfectly legal, but of great public benefit. May they continue to profit as they deserve!

Labels: SEO copywriting

SEO copywriting is copywriting for your website with search engines in mind. Copywriting and SEO copywriting does make a difference. Copywriting has just few criteria you need to clear on the topic you right and make sure the requirement is fulfilled. But SEO copywriting is done to make both search engine algorithms and humans happy. You need to maintain a delicate relationship both with search engines and humans.

When you're doing SEO copywriting you need to make sure relevant keywords and phrases are used up appropriately in your copy. Keyword density and keyword distribution plays an important role when it comes to SEO copywriting. Only if you have proper keyword distribution search engine algorithms will understand your copy effectively.

For SEO copywriting its important to use keywords some may say otherwise but fact you need to use keywords. When i write copies for our website whether its web design service or search engine optimization service i will first research the keywords and later use them appropriately in my copy.

Labels: SEO copywriting