The Value of Good Copywriting

How Much is Your Work Worth?

I received an e-mail solicitation this week from a woman with a foreign-sounding name. She was not anyone I know or have met, and I'm not sure how she got my e-mail address. But her offer was this:

• Article writing - 100 words @ 1USD
• Blog writing - 100 words @1USD
• Free article submissions to 10 unique PR article sites, 10 directories & 10 social bookmarks

You've probably read some of those articles written by non-native English speakers. They come up in my Google Alerts on various subjects from time to time, and they're always good for a laugh.

Anybody who's worked with copywriters before, or who has paid for quality copywriting, knows that you can't get it for $1. Good copywriting requires skills and knowledge. It takes time for research, development of target audience profiles, analysis of the product/service being promoted, and a certain amount of "gel time" as the thoughts percolate in the copywriter's brain. And that's all before you even write the first word of copy itself, which requires certain skills in wordsmithing to pull together all the background work into persuasive copy that sells. It could take several weeks, at best, to accomplish. And that copy could be worth millions of dollars to the company buying it...certainly worth every penny of the thousands of dollars it should have cost them to obtain it.

I replied to that hapless spam e-mailer, expressing the opinion that her offer cheapens our entire industry and hurts us all. It makes prospects think, "Well, if this company is offering copy for $1, why should I pay any more?" They don't understand the copywriting process, nor do they respect the amount of work or training that go into writing truly quality copy. If this company is doing it right, they can't possibly stay in business and offer copywriting for that price...even if the writers are all working in a sweatshop environment and writing in broken English.

Writers, if you're going to enter this business, do your due diligence first. Find out what rates you should be charging. Don't put yourself out there as offering the same product as someone with years of experience, then undercut their prices. We already have enough clients who don't respect what we do because they don't appreciate the effort and training it takes. They don't recognize the difference between good and bad copy. They want to pay us less than we can afford to live on. When you come into our industry and offer bargain-basement prices because you're just starting out and don't have a lot of experience, it reinforces their perception that what we do isn't worth much. This hurts the entire industry, along with your future earning potential as a copywriter.

Do your career and the industry a favor: before you go out on your own, get a job where you're writing for someone else. Work with different types of clients and learn what it takes to write successful copy. You don't learn it all in school, even with an advanced degree. Practical experience is essential. Develop some marketing skills beyond your writing skills so that you understand how to do audience and product research. Get involved in the local chapters of some industry organizations such as the American Marketing Association, International Association of Business Communicators, Public Relations Society of America, or the American Advertising Federation to develop your professional skills, and seek additional training whenever you can. While you're drawing a salary for that work, start building the nest egg you'll need to start your own copywriting business one day. Then you'll have what you need to delivery quality copy to your clients.

If you're considering becoming a professional, self-employed writer, my series of e-books, A Professional Writer's Ladder to Success, was designed to help you. It walks you through planning for, researching, and launching a successful business as a professional writer. Each "rung" of the ladder builds on those before it to help you prepare your very own Ladder to Success Action Plan. Whether you choose to pursue being a copywriter, a book writer, a publicist, or any number of other types of writer you can be, following such a course is an important step you can't overlook.

Show Me the Money!

New Referral Rewards Program for Client Leads!

Who could use a little extra cash? Pretty much everybody, these days.

So now, instead of having to be one of our creative professional partners to earn thank-you payments for sending a client lead to Thompson Writing & Editing, everybody can!

Here's the skinny: 

If you talk to someone who could benefit from any of our book ghostwriting, editing, or author marketing services, just e-mail Lynn with the information. She'll follow up with the prospect, discuss their needs, and see if we can help them. If they hire us, as soon as we get a retainer fee, we'll send you a check for 10% of that amount.

But the money for you doesn't stop there! For each subsequent payment from the client on that project, we'll also send you a check for 10% of the total amount. Most larger projects are billed in three similar-sized payments, so you should get a couple more checks similar to your first one.

Still want more cash? 

Here you go: if the same client hires TW&E for a second project, we'll also send you a residual referral bonus of 5% on that project's payments.

Not concerned with the cash? 

Here's another option for you: you can bank your referral rewards with TW&E, so that when you're ready to write, edit, or market your own book, your payments could be much lower! Refer enough clients to us and your fees could even shrink to $0! Just note in your e-mail to us when you refer the client that you'd like to bank your referrals instead of cashing in, and we'll keep a tab running and let you know how much you have in it.

So, there you have it. Surely you know someone who should be writing a book, or who has one written and needs it edited or marketed. Your boss, a client of yours, your Aunt Edna...

We've also just launched a beta test of our new website format; check it out here and give us your feedback! There's a page on it that talks about the new referral rewards program...or just click here to e-mail Lynn with your referral right now!

Who Owns Your Work?

This is a question that has plagued writers and other creative professionals for generations. If you've invested the time, money, and energy to hone your artistic skills, shouldn't you be fairly compensated for them, just as someone who's honed their skills as a physician, accountant, or attorney is compensated for theirs? Of course you should. But when you're selling an intangible product, the quality of the work becomes a factor in determining value, and how to measure that quality has largely been left up to whoever's paying for it.

Increasingly in recent years, writers who focus on magazine articles have been faced with contracts from major publishers demanding "all rights" to an article, or they won't do business with you. These include reprints, electronic versions, and any other way they want to use your work, effectively prohibiting you from selling the same article to other publications without major revisions.

Since no magazine publisher pays well enough to reimburse you for the many hours required to research and write a quality story, this was a major impediment to earning a living writing for magazines. The only way a writer could hope to earn a living writing articles was to resell the same article to multiple publications. But with these all-rights-or-nothing contracts, you couldn't even republish your own articles in book form without permission from the publisher that owned all rights to them! For magazines to use their muscle to bully writers in this way is, from the writer's point of view, wrong.

From the publisher's point of view, however, it was seen as a way to protect an asset for which they had paid. With e-publishing a necessity in today's online world and e-articles easy to copy and paste into other people's sites, publishers are increasingly looking for ways to protect their content from piracy. Writers who self-publish are facing the same thing. And since publishers typically have armies of lawyers to sue people, they've taken their fight into the courts. This has brought up the issue of "fair use" of published material, refining its interpretation under the law...or even provoking lawmakers in D.C. to propose new rules governing piracy -- you may have heard a lot recently about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, currently under consideration.

One ongoing lawsuit was filed by publisher Righthaven against the Center for Intercultural Organizing, which republished an article from Righthaven's Las Vegas Review-Journal in its entirety, without obtaining permission or paying a royalty. A local judge found in favor of the CIO, and the case is currently being appealed to a higher court. Internet giants are weighing in on the case, as well as on SOPA, as these could have a drastic effect on their business. You can read about the Righthaven case here.

So what does constitute "fair use"? If you're a blogger, this could have an impact on you. Just how much of someone else's article can you republish in your blog without getting sued? Suppose someone else republishes one of your articles completely without giving you credit or paying you a royalty; should you sue them?

Interestingly, Google also comes into play in the answer to this. With the release of Google's Panda algorithms in 2011, duplicate content on a website is frowned upon. Google wants each site to offer something fresh, new, and unique. So if you blog, you may refer to another article you've read, as I did above. You may link to it, so people can read that article in its entirety. But reproducing it verbatim on your blog will actually hurt you in search results. Google has now become the Karma of the Internet.

If you want to read more about how the law views this topic, here's a link to the U.S. Copyright Office's page on fair use. Wikipedia also has a fair use entry, as well as one on SOPA, and there are numerous articles on fair use from various universities and legal organizations. Just do a search (using whichever search engine you prefer) on the terms "fair use" and "stop online piracy act" to find them. The conclusion? Definition of the term "fair use" is still pretty much up in the air. And, depending on your viewpoint, that could be good or bad for writers.

Competing for Cash

Writer's Digest magazine is running several genre-specific contests in which the winners get $1,000 in cold, hard cash. Sound interesting? Better get that manuscript dusted off and sent in; the deadlines are all coming up in October!

Contests in the Young Adult, Sci-Fi and Thriller genres have an October 1 deadline. Romance is October 15. Crime is October 22, and Horror is October 31. (Yeah, Halloween. Clever, huh?)

For all genres, manuscripts need to be 4,000 words or less, which is short-story length. Each costs $20 to enter. No time for professional editing at this point, but if you want to have manuscripts ready for future contests, there's no time like the present for getting them ready. Visit TW&E's Editing page for information on submitting a sample for editing.

Best of luck in the competition(s) of your choice!

A Wonderful Story, With a Lesson

Congratulations are in order for editing client Jacob Singer, who has just released the e-book version of his new book, The Vase with the Many Coloured Marbles!

With a title that's a metaphor for the country of South Africa, the book is actually two books in one. Book 1 is about Emma, a young woman from Cape Town, South Africa during the rise of the government's apartheid laws. It's a fascinating look at how those laws affected real people, something you won't read in the history books. But Emma wants to escape from the social norms of her class that are every bit as restrictive as the official race laws. The two are so intertwined that she must leave her home and forge a new life for herself to escape them. Emma's views on South Africa's leadership and social makeup are extremely poignant, and as relevant in today's world as they were in hers.

In Book 2 the story continues, centered around Emma's daughter, Marla. The characters are based on the author and people he knew while growing up in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Will Marla ever find out her mother's secret? Will Josh ever love anyone but her? Will she follow Emma's example and get involved in changing her country, or merely observe from the sidelines? And what will become of Emma? All are answered by the end of Book 2: Marla.

The questions this book will raise for you, however, are many. What do you really know about apartheid? For most Americans, the answer is probably little more than the name of Nelson Mandela (with only a vague idea of his role), or a foggy view of really ugly racist attitudes. But it went much further than that, dictating where people could live, the types of employment they could seek, where they could travel, and the type of education they could get. Entire cities were structured around the country's racial profiling. People arrested for violating the apartheid laws spent real time in prison, just for trying to live their lives in freedom and seek a better life for themselves and their families. Those who worked to overturn the laws were often the targets of terrorist tactics, as you'll see in the book. It was a fearful, brutal time, yet also one when a good person's true character could soar to greatness. The racism that existed in America during the Jim Crow era was mild in comparison to South Africa under apartheid.

So if you want a good story that will open your eyes to life at another time in another part of the world, download a copy of The Vase with the Many Coloured Marbles for your Kindle, iPad, or computer. And watch for the printed version of the book, soon to come. I certainly enjoyed editing it, and you'll enjoy the read. (You've gotta love that British spelling in the title, too!)

Panda Changes Everything!

Those of you who remember Cyndi Lauper's song from the '80s about money changing everything probably have that tune running through your head after reading that headline. (Well, okay, I have it running through mine.) But if you have a website and you want to get traffic to it, Panda is most definitely something you need to learn more about.

Do you write your own website copy? If so, and if you've been to any SEO seminars in the past few years (that's "search engine optimization" for the uninitiated), you've probably been given the advice to cram as many keywords as you could into your website copy. It didn't have to be particularly interesting or well-written, just as long as it contained bunches of the keywords people would search on to find whatever you were selling. You didn't even need to write any text yourself, or pay anybody to do it for you; you could just get it all from article banks where professional writers posted content you could pick up for free! How easy was that?

Well, all of that changed when Google rolled out its Panda update. While Google's always tweaking its algorithms that determine which sites get to the top in search results, Panda was a major change. Companies who had learned how to play the SEO game well enough to consistently rank at the top have been reeling from the penalties Google imposed on them and trying to figure out the new system ever since. You probably heard about the penalties imposed on J.C. Penney's site for using what Google deemed "black hat" techniques to game their search algorithms.

One of the big changes with Panda was that sites started getting penalized for using copy picked up from "content farms". This is great for good copywriters like me, because it means that now your site needs to have unique, fresh content. You can't just use the same article that countless other sites may have also picked up from the same article bank. And it can't just be a bunch of mediocre copy with keywords stuffed into it, either. The content needs to be interesting, relevant to your site's purpose, and "shareable". If it's something people would post a link to in their Facebook or Twitter update, you're golden (in Google's eyes, at least).

Sites that were making a lot of money from advertising, but had minimal original content, were penalized, too. An entire industry seemed to have sprung up in recent years of sites with not much to offer but a bunch of advertisements. Those sites aren't getting to the top of the search engines any more. Got to have that good content to get SEO mojo these days.

Also considered a black-hat technique was what some companies were selling as link-building services. They'd add links to your site from all sorts of unrelated sites, just to boost the number of other sites linking to your site and raise your profile in search results. Now, if you have a lot of inbound links from sites that aren't related to what your site's about, it subtracts from your Google ranking.

Next, Google rolled out its "+1" button. This is similar to the "Like" button on Facebook, but for search results. It enables people to have input into the search results they see. And, Google hopes, it will increase the popularity of "good" sites. But if people were gaming the system before, surely some will do the same with this. Companies will start selling the service of having a bunch of people hit the +1 button for your site (if they haven't already). So I'm not sure of the impact this will eventually have on search rankings.

The latest enhancement to search results is that now you see several sub-pages of the main domain ranking first in search results. If your site has up to 12 relevant pages other than your home page that are often visited by people, they'll show up in a two-column list underneath your main URL link when someone searches on a keyword where you rank #1-10. So it behooves you to create quality content that will draw traffic to several of your site's subpages, not just lump it all on your home page, so you'll have something to display in those "12-packs".

Panda includes many more changes than these, and since Google is pretty secretive about their algorithms, not all of the new factors are well known. But the game has definitely changed. Bottom line: you need new website copy. And it had better be well-written, interesting and relevant to your site's purpose. So, anybody need a good copywriter? ;-)

Tips for Online Writing

In searching for products to feature on OldMaidCatLady.com, I'm always poking around online. Various trails lead me to relevant posts in blogs all over the world. Those can be fodder for more than just my retail site!

A good example is one that popped up this week. Although the blogger was said to live in California, he did not appear to be a native English speaker. And his post made me think of several things to keep in mind when writing for the web, be it blog posts, website copy or articles:

• Have a point. Yes, we all get random thoughts, but don't just use stream of consciousness writing online. What you put online is not only going to be out there forever, it's going to reflect on you and your brand. Make sure it says something good.
• Stay focused. Try to write about one main point, and make that point small enough that you can hold your readers' interest throughout. People don't spend a lot of time reading long articles online. You only have a couple of minutes of their time. If you have a lot to say about a subject, make it into a series of articles or blog posts.
  
• Know your audience. If you're writing a blog, you probably have followers. If you're writing an article, it'll likely be read by people who have something in common. Those are the people you're talking to. Keep them in mind as you're writing. Don't use jargon they wouldn't understand or assume they have knowledge they don't.
  
• Break up the text into bite-sized pieces. Have you ever taken too big of a bite of food and wondered how you were going to chew it all? Readers feel the same way when they see a huge block of text. Use short paragraphs and bullet points to break up your article into smaller pieces, each centered around one thought.
• Be logical. If you studied logic in school, you know that a valid argument has a logical flow. It presents evidence, then draws a conclusion based on that evidence. Make sure your writing follows a similar pattern.
• Use proper grammar and spelling. That should be obvious, right? Not from some of the stuff I've read online! While you can use an informal, conversational voice that doesn't always include complete sentences in the classic sense, you should still pay attention to sentence structure and make sure you've spelled all your words correctly.

Writing for the web is different than writing for print or broadcast. If you're a writer, you should already know that. While there are many additional components of good online writing, if you follow these basics, you'll be on the road to a successful job.