Unleash The Copywriter In You

“Anyone can write – this copywriting malarky is money for old rope!”

Is that right?

Many people believe they can write sales copy. Others appreciate how difficult it can be to produce something that:

1. sells
2. is interesting
3. appeals to the reader and resounds with them
4. appeals to the search engine spiders

I’ve been a freelance copywriter for about 2 ½ years and I learn something new on every project I work on. There is so much you have to take into consideration when writing:

• what format will your copy take?
• what media will you be using?
• what message do you need to get across?
• who is your audience?
• what problem do they have that your copy will solve?
• what tone should I take?
• is there a ‘house style’ I have to stick to?

…and that’s just for starters.

SEO Website Copywriting

This is a biggy – everyone is beginning to realise their website has to work for them rather than just look pretty.

But if you want targeted traffic you have to appear in the search engine results.

In the past (and sadly it still happens today), some copywriters felt the way to achieve this was to stuff their copy full of keywords.

Wrong!

Keyword density isn’t important – what is important is writing in a natural style which your reader can understand and finds interesting. If you can achieve this, you’ll automatically include the optimium number of keywords in your copy.

To be a great SEO website copywriter you also need to know where the keywords should go, how to structure your pages, you need to understand internal linking structure….

See, it’s not as easy as you thought is it?

So I guess you’re wondering why the ‘Yoda-like’ title for this blog – well, after sitting through the recent re-runs of the Star Wars saga I came across a recent post on Copyblogger which made me smile.

In The Force is Strong With This One: 10 Ways to be a Copywriting Jedi, David Wright and Sean Platt take a Jedi look at Direct Response copywriting. Having gone through the stages of deciding to embark on a career as a freelance copywriter and building up my business to the success that it is today, their words of wisdom resounded with me and I thought you might get a lot from it too.