The Chinese word bin, meaning 'guest'

Choosing a blog for your guest post

Initiatives such as Be My Guest provide an ideal platform for bloggers to approach each other. But you can also find suitable venues independently – just find a blog you like and submit a polite email to its owner, asking if you can guest on their blog.

The blog you choose needs to be relevant to your own site, and the more directly relevant the better. If you sell computer equipment, you won’t get much benefit from blogging at an angling site. The audience won’t be interested in your content, and the backlink (see below) will give you very little SEO benefit.

The ideal host blog is probably at a competitor site, since the domain is likely to be relevant to the same keywords as yours and their readership is likely to be similar to yours. But getting a guest slot with a competitor can be difficult if you don’t already know them somehow, for obvious reasons. (Build up a relationship through social media first, then ask.) So you might find it easier to target related sites that aren’t direct competitors, but still have busy and popular blogs. Look up and down the ‘food chain’, and side to side for linked niches. For example, a graphic designer could post at the blog of a web developer; a pie-maker could guest for an outlet that stocks their wares.

The approach

When you make your guest posting approach, it’s important to bear in mind the underlying transaction of guest blogging, which isn’t what it might seem at first glance.

On one level, offering to guest on someone’s blog is doing them a favour. You’re offering them free content that they would otherwise have to create themselves. You may also be offering fact, opinion or style that is different from the host’s, bringing welcome variety to their blog. If you have a high profile, or can promote your post in lots of channels, your guest post might attract more traffic than your host normally gets.

However, it’s not all one-way traffic. On another level, guesting on someone’s blog is actually an opportunity to promote yourself, enhance your profile and link back to your site. If you are a smaller fish than your host – that is, the blog you’re guesting on is very high-profile (or has a higher average PageRank than your site), then it’s actually the host who is doing you a favour by allowing you to blog.

So it’s a good idea suggest a mutual guest posting arrangement, and give your host as much flexibility as you can in terms of what you’re going to blog about, how much you’ll write and so on.

The get-out

To avoid embarrassment, it’s polite to give your host the opportunity to decline your offer of a guest post if they want to – not implicitly, but by saying so out loud. They might not want your style of writing or subject area on their blog, or they might not want anyone else guesting on their blog. At the end of the day, it’s their blog.

By the same token, it adds reassurance if you give them ‘final cut’ – the option to amend your guest post, ask for it to be amended or just reject it, with no hard feelings. Even with hundreds of solid gold posts on your own blog, your host can’t be sure what you’re going to give them.

To add weight to your initial approach, you might want to send your proposed guest post (or an example of one) along at the same time – with the option to request a replacement, or course.

Guest posting and SEO

The significance of guest posting for SEO can hardly be overstated. Most hosts will let you include a link back to your site in your guest post, perhaps in the brief author biography that accompanies your post. You can control the anchor text of that link, which is crucial. Your post title will almost certainly form all or part of the URL’s HTML page title, which is also key for SEO. And finally, you control the content of the page, since you’re writing it.

All that adds up to a brilliant way to gain a keyword-text backlink from a keyword-relevant and keyword-dense page, perhaps on a keyword-relevant domain such as a competitor’s site. In other words, the holy grail of SEO. Blogs are seriously rated by search engines because they are human-edited, content-rich, niche-specific online resources where links carry a lot of authority.

Also, blog posts get comments. Commenters do your SEO work for you, extending the content of your guest post along relevant lines and bigging up the popularity of the guest post in Google’s eyes – which, in turn, boosts the value of the backlink it contains.

Blogs that are integrated with social media through plugins like ShareThis and TweetMeme carry their own ready-made gauge of relevance and authority – which Google almost certainly uses to get another handle on how strong the page content is. If your guest post is popular in social media, that increases the link juice passed to your site by the backlink in your guest post.

Finally, your guest post might also attract backlinks itself, which also increases the value of the backlink it contains to your site – the phenomenon known as ‘link boosting’ in SEO circles. You could even build links to your guest post yourself, but keep it strictly white hat or you’ll nobble your host’s rankings – the blogging equivalent of leaving stains on the guest towel, and counterproductive for you too.

To sum up, guest blogging offers killer backlinks for modest effort, which most SEOs are desperate for. In fact, it’s practically the only way to gain such powerful links through your own proactive efforts – rather than being passively granted them, as when someone lists you in their blogroll.

The key points for SEOing your guest posts are:

• Include keywords in the title. You can’t control the HTML page title of your guest post, but it’s almost certain to mirror or contain the title of the post. Put keywords near the start if you can (e.g. ‘Snowboarding essentials’ rather than ‘The essentials of snowboarding’).
• Include keywords two or three times in the opening paragraph, and at least once in each subsequent paragraph – if you can. Don’t insult your host by trying to stick ridiculous keyword spam on their blog. They’d be entirely justified in rejecting it.
• Include synonyms and variations of your keywords too. Too much repetition looks unnatural.
• Use relevant keywords (rather than the name of your site) in the backlink to your site, if you can. Author bios often provide a good opportunity. For example: ‘Tom Albrighton is a copywriter…’
• Don’t push it with the backlinks. One link towards the end of the guest post is acceptable. Linking off the first paragraph looks spammy; more than one link looks greedy.

What about the SEO implications of reciprocal guest posting? If you’re getting a backlink from your host, aren’t they also getting one from you? Well, yes they are, but this isn’t such a big problem. Reciprocal links between relevant sites won’t harm your standing in Google; it’s only the spammy reciprocals that get you into trouble.

Exchanging guest posts with a direct competitor can often be beneficial: you’ll both get an SEO boost relative to the competition, and just because your rival has gained doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost out. If they are at #15 in Google, you’re at #11 and you each rise three spots as a result of the reciprocal link, you’ll be on page one and they’ll be a step nearer to it.

If you’re worried, you could exchange guest posts with a similar player who speaks the same language but is too far away in geographical terms to compete with you.

Content of guest posts

So far, I’ve taken it for granted that your guest post will be good enough to be accepted, read and commented. But to actually achieve that, you’ll need to create some first-rate content.

You might approach guest blogging with the idea of palming off some second-rate or hastily produced content on your host. Forget it. While you can get away with ‘potboiler’ posts at your own blog – brief comments on news stories, whimsical reflections, half-formed analyses, reposting YouTube videos – it’s really not on to offer this kind of thing for publication elsewhere. Instead, you should work hard to write the best post you can for the host blog: something at least as good as the content you post yourself.

Partly, this is out of courtesy to your host, but it’s also based in enlightened self-interest. Remember, you want them to create some quality content for you in return, and/or invite you back to guest post again. But also, as I’ve explained, the SEO power of your guest post is directly related to its quality, which governs the inbound links and social-media votes it will attract.

With your own blog, you can hit and miss – blogging away weekly or even daily until you discover by trial and error what your audience will take a shine to. With guest posts, however, you’ve got just one opportunity to post some killer content at a new domain that will attract links, comments and social-media mentions. So give yourself the best chance of success.

It can feel a bit sad to ‘give away’ content you’re particularly proud of. If so, remind yourself that your premium content will probably bring you more benefit at someone else’s blog than it would at your own. That should help you get over the heartache…

My guest posts

• Is copywriting evil? for Ben Locker
• Copywriting for conversions for MediaVision
• If you don’t know, say so for JargonWriter
• Five things your home page can do without for Emily Cagle
• Take your time for The Right Writer
• The top five freelance fears, and how to face them for Diary of a Mad Freelancer
• When clients attack for Freelance Folder
• Google’s Farmer update and the squeezed middle for Econsultancy

For sole traders like me, it’s a chance to muddle up our brands and our personalities even further. For multinationals, it’s another playground where they can deploy colossal marketing spend to bolster their already formidable advantage.

And for some of those in between, it’s all a bit perplexing. What is this exactly? Why are we doing it? And who are we talking to? But peer pressure is a powerful thing, so they gamely get with the programme and Twitter up. I just wonder what they’re really thinking…

For me, the key criterion was quality of output – not speed, website design or even cost. In this post, I’d like to revisit the concept of quality copywriting and explain why the whole scope of the Nublue test was so misguided – and what it tells us about the way people see blogging and online content generally.

True value

The key problem with the Nublue survey was that it only reflected the perspective of the client, not the target audience.

So, you think your new blog post is a cracker. It was easy to order, it arrived quickly and it was cheap. That’s great! I’m really happy for you. But the true test of quality is how your content fares out there on the web, and what benefit it brings you as a result. Only when it’s realised business benefit can you truly say it was quality content. Otherwise, your assessment of quality is just a personal judgement.

It may be going cheap, but will it ever bring you golden eggs?

The quality of a blog post has three dimensions.

• Commercial. What value will your post offer to customers? Will it help them make or research a purchase? Can it function as a landing page, guiding first-time visitors to the ‘business end’ of your site? And, whether they buy or not, will they form a positive impression?
• Reputation. Is this post truly unique? Is it going to build up your authority, credibility or standing in your niche? Does it differentiate you from competitors? Is it something you’d want prospective employees, partners or investors to read – and judge you on?
• Search and social. Is the post going to be commented, liked, tweeted and linked to? Is it going to be something you can push to social networks again and again, perhaps for many months? Is it going to get links and responses on other, reputable blogs?

If your posts aren’t valuable in these ways, why are you putting time, effort and cash into something that won’t bring you any benefit? Even if the content itself only costs a tenner, you still have to plan it, commission it, publish it, host it. Is it really worth it?

What’s the point?

‘Write me a post about IE9.’

‘Write me ten web pages about Irish whiskey.’

‘Rework this competitor’s content and make it unique so I can use it on my site.’

I get a lot of requests along these lines, and I always want to ask the same question: ‘Why?’

If it’s a blog post, what benefit will you really get from hastily written, internet-scraped, inaccurate or downright boring content? As noted above, no one will link to it, or like it, or comment on it, or (in all probability) even read it. It will just sit there, unloved and disregarded, making your blog look like a digital backwater. What’s more, there are hundreds of sites out there doing much the same thing; you’re aligning yourself with your competitors rather than differentiating. So what’s the point?

For SEO, the logic of cheap content is dubious at best. Even supposing you can get a ranking with your blatant spam (which gets harder by the day anyway), why should visitors stay on a site with average content? What impression will they form? How can such a site hope to convert traffic into sales?

For corporate web pages, the whole philosophy of ‘filling up’ the site with content as quickly or cheaply as possible is utterly misguided. As when buying a suit, a car or a meal, it’s about spending as much as you can afford to get the best possible result – scrimping and saving is just selling yourself short. And when you start thinking about hard performance factors like conversion rate, the idea of ‘cheap and cheerful’ makes even less sense.

The time factor is important too. While you spend months building a pointlessly derivative blog, or spamming the article sites with uninformative rubbish, your competitors are taking the quality route – building up such an advantage in terms of content, backlinks and SEO profile that you’ll simply never be able to overtake them. When success takes time, it’s best to start doing the right things right now.

Aim above adequacy

The depressing pursuit of ‘adequate content at best cost’, perfectly encapsulated by the Nublue exercise, misses the whole point of blogging – and online content creation in general.

Your aim should not be to create ‘me too’ content that achieves a passable standard of quality, but to make an exceptional and lasting mark on the internet with something that brings genuine, new value to the table.

But how do you get this wonderful stuff?

Choose better titles

Well, the first step is to stop posting dull, sheepishly topical briefs like ‘Review Internet Explorer 9’ to content mills and expecting anything good to come of it. A blog post can only be as good as the idea behind it.

Instead, try striking up a relationship with a copywriter who can come up with ideas that thousands of other people haven’t already covered. (Do I need to add that such a relationship can’t really be conducted via the web interface of a content mill?)

When you work with a professional writer regularly, they come to know your business very well. That puts them in the ideal position to consider how the expertise, knowledge and opinion you already have within your organisation could be turned into killer blog content.

What’s more, as you work together, you’ll become more alert and attuned to the blog ideas floating across your desk every day. Believe me, they’re there – but you won’t perceive them until you break free of the ‘get it done, get it cheap’ mindset.

Get better content

Having got a nice title together, make sure you honour it with some decent writing. Again, I don’t recommend going to a content mill, since you’ve got no control over who takes on your assignment, nor can you enter into a dialogue with them, nor is there any real mechanism for having your content revised or improved – which is the only path to quality.

Moreover, since they’re paid by the word, content-mill writers have zero incentive to add something extra in terms of research, snappy phrasing, humour, original opinion, different perspectives or anything else that might lift your post above the sea of mediocrity. So even the best writer, should you be lucky enough to get one, has no motivation to do the very things you want done.

It’s a crucial point, and one that content mills would rather their clients didn’t think about too deeply about. But there’s no way round it. The more time and effort goes into your post, the more likely it is to deliver lasting value to your business. There are no short cuts, no discounts, no quick and easy way. However, it does get easier the more you do it – provided you do it the right way in the first place.

Put quality over quantity

Finally, learn to put quality over quantity. Carefully considered content beats cheapo spam every time.

Some content mills crow over the fact that the typical freelance copywriter costs ‘ten times as much’ as their service, while glossing over the quality implications. For me, it’s very simple: while your cost per word is higher with a ‘real’ copywriter, your content is going to deliver far more benefit, however you measure it (backlinks, reputation, readership). Proper copywriters deliver far more bang for your buck.

Do they deliver ten times as much benefit, to justify their price? Well, as I’ve argued above, derivative and low-quality blog posts deliver little or no benefit at all, when you take all the factors into account. So a good blog post could be infinitely superior to a poor one.

To put it in the language of accounting, working with a copywriter makes content into an asset that delivers a return, rather than an overhead to be resented and minimised. Seen in this light, it’s easy to see why investing in it is worthwhile.

Start making sense

‘Best price’ offers, like the poor, will always be with us. In every sector, in every professional discipline, there will always be suppliers who opt for a value proposition based on the lowest price. And there will always be customers for them, too – people who see price as the overriding factor in every purchase, as well as those who lack the time or insight to analyse costs and benefits in a more balanced, reasoned way.

But when it comes to copywriting, there’s no getting away from it – the benefits from content-mill writing are small, and shrinking fast. That cheap content you’re buying could turn out to be very expensive indeed.

Stage 1

I build this site while still an employee, thinking of using it to find another job. It’s a simple online cv, but the graphics are animated in Flash. Although the design is lamentable, you have to bear in mind that this was developed around 2000 – lots of sites looked a lot worse than they do now.

The basic problem here – one that I wouldn’t solve for several years – is wanting to show off my feeble web skills rather than offer information in a way potential employers might actually like.

Stage 2

Freshly redundant, I create this site as a way to showcase my skills to potential freelance clients. The cyan and grey identity is done for me by a designer friend. Unfortunately the design I build around it is spindly, meek and rather self-effacing – reflecting my level of confidence at the time.

At this stage, I’m trading under my own name: this site was at the URL tomalbrighton.co.uk. (I think my reasoning was that success would be about selling my skills and building personal reputation.)

It’s still essentially a cv site, with none of the marketing copy you’d expect from a commercially minded freelance. Although I have given myself a tagline, ‘flexible editorial ability’ – I remember my sister laughing out loud at ‘flexible’, presumably because it evoked a circus contortionist.

The word ‘editorial’ shows that I’m still thinking of my skills in terms of the job descriptions I’ve had in publishing, rather than the words that potential clients might use to find someone like me. Lacking agency experience, I don’t yet feel I can use the word ‘copywriter’ to describe myself. Similarly, the ‘services’ are actually my own skill areas, rather than things a client might actually need done.

Stage 3

A slight improvement in design and a new tagline: ‘business content consultancy’, with a theme to match. I’m edging towards saying something clients might want to hear, but I’m still constrained by self-limiting beliefs about the applicability of my skills. Three self-indulgent pages on my ‘approach’ add nothing.

There are many more businesses calling themselves ‘content consultants’ these days, but I’m sure they all suffer from the same problem: ‘consultant’ sounds like someone who doesn’t do anything.

Stage 4

A new day dawns. I’ve now incorporated as a company – ABC Business Communications – and moved into a rented office. Having gained clients and confidence, my dream is to build my business up into an agency. (It never came true – or hasn’t yet.)

I’ve got a new logo (by the same designer) and some corporate colours, deployed to reasonably strong effect on this site. Unfortunately the domain I’ve chosen – abcbusiness.biz – is an absolute stinker. But I’ve still come on a lot since stage 1.

I’ve written a new tagline, ‘Are you reaching those who matter most?’ It’s not bad, but I’m not sure I’d use a question these days. It leads the reader into introspection and uncertainty, not clarity and action.

I even have some leaflets designed with this tagline and some more stock imagery. Nowadays I’d spend that kind of money on AdWords clicks rather than printed collateral – and I advise most sole-trader clients the same.

Stage 5

Now we’re cooking. I’ve finally woken up to the fact that, whatever my experience, potential clients use the word ‘copywriter’ to describe what I do. So I’ve adopted the trading name ‘ABC Copywriting’, got a new domain (this one) and built a new site.

Delighted at my discovery of <div> tags, I’ve built something that looks like it’s made from children’s building blocks. But at least it’s interesting, and shows signs of wanting to conduct visitors through information to an actual enquiry. It’s also the first site built with SEO in mind, and gratifyingly hits #1 for ‘copywriter norwich’ as soon as it’s spidered.

I’m still using the same tagline, but it’s woven into the copy much more tightly. If you’re going to use a headline, your copy needs to make good on its promise (or answer the question that it asks).

Stage 6

Boo-ya! How ya like me now baby? This is the first iteration of ABC Copywriting I’m really happy with; the first that looks and feels genuinely professional.

I’ve cleared out the solid colours and adopted a simple, flexible four-column layout (4x200px = 800px wide in total). White space gives a more relaxed feel, so visitors don’t feel so hemmed in by lines and blocks. Only the cutesy photographic images spoil the party – but imagery is a problem for almost every B2B site.

There’s another new tagline – ‘We’ll choose your words carefully’. It retains the second-person focus with ‘your’, but integrates some implication of skill on my part (which its predecessor didn’t). I’m still too close to it to tell whether it’s any good – you decide. The owner of a very reputable Norwich creative agency told me he liked it, and that’s good enough for me.

My blog’s appeared, but at this stage it’s still using an off-the-shelf theme (iBlog), so moving to the blog means encountering a completely different design style. It might as well be on a different domain.

Stage 7

Although I had a lot of enquiries with the site looking like this, I now regard it as a mis-step.

I feel the previous site is too self-effacing and discreet, so I make the home page different from the rest of the site and add these shouty all-caps headings to get in visitors’ faces a bit more. I also add a forceful (perhaps over-forceful) call to action, top right.

I scrap the imagery, realising that it serves no semiotic or cognitive purpose and also wanting to make a point about communicating only with words. But the end result is a bit obtuse and blocky, and arguably too copy-heavy too. In six months I will be itching to rework it again.

The biggest step forward at this stage is getting a custom theme built for my blog, so the WordPress pages have the same look as the main site.

Stage 8

You’re looking at it! I finally started looking at sites I really liked and thinking about how I could use those ideas on my own site. I’m not a designer, so I played it safe and kept things ultra-simple, ranged left, with lots of white space.

The 4x200px column layout is still here, but I’ve moved the navigation up top to make more room for content – such as the ‘Read more’/‘Where to go next’ column on the right, which aims to keep visitors on the site a little longer.

We’re back to icons again, but the design was just too dry without them. The ‘marker pen’ style just adds a touch of warmth and softness that acres of Helvetica can’t quite deliver.

The home page is much more tightly constructed, with the tagline, lead paragraphs and icon working together on the theme ‘words people love’. Time will tell whether this works better than previous iterations.

The blog theme is updated too, with more thought put into how lists of posts will look and a better home page. Also, the blog is more tightly integrated into the main site, with links from service pages to relevant articles. The aim is to build an impression of authority – I don’t really expect potential clients to wade through dozens of blog posts.

And that’s the end of the story – for now, at least. Your comments are welcome, but whatever you do, please don’t say you like an earlier version better than this one. It took me ages…

Different writing projects require different skills, and writers evolve different skillsets, whether deliberately or simply as the natural result of their working experience. So the terms ‘copywriting’ and ‘copywriter’, although simple-sounding, actually encompass a range of specialisations and capabilities. This post lists some of the most common types of copywriting and copywriters.

Note that some of these copywriting disciplines have parallel job titles/descriptions, and others don’t. For example, while ‘SEO copywriter’ is now a recognised job title, I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as a ‘long-copy copywriter’. Also, be aware that some of these labels are flexible – while there are different strands within copywriting, the distinctions between them aren’t always so clear-cut as my headings imply, and people may use these terms in different ways.

The freelance copywriter

The freelance copywriter writes in any medium directly for clients, usually operating as a sole trader or one-person company.

Businesses and organisations need a broad range of things written: websites, brochures, case studies, product descriptions, user manuals, press releases, presentations, internal documents and more. While many will simply use internal resource to get the writing done, many turn to a freelance copywriter to help them out.

Freelance copywriting is usually managed on an ad hoc, job-by-job basis, although some clients do strike retainer arrangements or set up longer contracts with freelances. Typically, the freelancer provides a price or proposal, does the work, revises the copy in response to feedback, and submits their invoice on approval.

Freelance copywriting typically requires ‘broad but shallow’ copywriting skills. For example, in the course of writing a corporate website, the copywriter might find themselves writing long copy for information pages, snappy selling copy for high-profile pages and journalistic copy for news pages. At the same time, they might throw in a company tagline and perhaps name a product range or two – in some cases, without even being asked, since the client may not have realised that they even need these things.

As a result of working for many different clients, the freelance copywriter also tends to develop broad but shallow knowledge of different business sectors, allowing them to get a handle on new clients’ requirements very quickly. This is one area where older freelancers can consistently outdo their younger counterparts – experience cannot be faked, nor bought.

Conversely, some freelances specialise in writing for a particular industry or sector – pharmaceuticals, charity and so on. This may be because they previously held a salaried position in that sector. It may be a deliberate choice, or it may just emerge as a result of the jobs and referrals that come along.

Since the freelance copywriter deals directly with clients who may have little or no marketing experience, they also need some skills in project management, consultancy and diplomacy. Like business knowledge, these skills take time to acquire.

Freelance copywriters come from a range of backgrounds. Some are ex-agency copywriters who wanted a change of lifestyle; some have experience in related industries such as marketing, journalism or publishing; some are just people with a talent for writing who have decided to give freelancing a go.

The agency copywriter

Agency copywriters work in-house for graphic design studios, full-service marketing agencies, digital agencies, search agencies, PR agencies and copywriting agencies, where they produce text to order for the agency’s clients. They’ll usually be briefed by an account handler, or perhaps a designer, and will produce whatever the client requires. In some cases, they may deal with the client directly. 

While freelance copywriters spend a lot of time on the nuts and bolts of their business – marketing, accounts, new business – the agency copywriter will do hands-on writing for the bulk of their day. Some writers prefer this, seeing it as their true vocation, while others might worry about the pressure of delivering creative ideas and high-quality content under the pressure of the clock – and the management.

Agency copywriters, particularly those who have worked in London or another media hub, will typically be able to show some impressive national or multinational brands on their cv. However, big companies require a range of content types, and the projects involved may not have been high-profile marketing campaigns. Also, the agency copywriter is given his clients and projects on a plate, while the freelancer has to go out and close deals directly with real-world companies, all on their own. Arguably, this gives the freelancer a better grasp of commercial realities. 

The in-house copywriter

In-house copywriters are employed by large organisations who have their own marketing departments and need the services of a writer, or writers, full-time.

The in-house copywriter, obviously, works only for one client, which may limit their opportunities in terms of selling different products or working in a range of media. However, they may get the opportunity to develop a brand’s tone of voice in depth, and they are also likely to enjoy a productively close working relationship with their internal ‘clients’ – those who use their copy and brief them on requirements.

Advertising copywriting

This is perhaps the kind of writing that most people think of when they hear the word ‘copywriting’: writing the content of press, TV and other forms of advertising. Ad copywriting includes the creation of memorable headlines, slogans and taglines that people remember from broadcast media – but it also includes the drafting of long-copy advertisements such as sometimes appear in Sunday supplements or on underground (subway) trains.

Since slogans are such a critical part of any ad campaign, the ad copywriter will spend a long time getting them right. The words in ad slogans are probably the most time-intensive writing to be found anywhere.

In short-copy work, the actual words that finally appear in an ad may be less important than the central idea. So ad copywriters sometimes do ‘creative concepts’ or ‘copy plots’ (brief outlines of what an ad will cover) as separate tasks from determining the actual content.

Since an advert is a highly concentrated format, where words, images and design work together very closely, the ad copywriter often works with a designer or art director to develop ideas that use both verbal and visual communication.

Ad copywriters who work at the highest level need to be creative, lateral thinkers who can come up with very strong, original ideas under pressure. Further down the advertising food chain, the copywriter’s work may involve a little more pragmatism and compromise. But whoever they work for, advertising copywriters need to be able to deliver ideas and content that sell products.

Long-copy work

‘Long copy’ refers to any advertisement (or other medium) that contains a lot of copy – whatever ‘a lot’ means in context. For example, a long-copy sales letter would be several pages long, rather than just one page; a long-copy press advertisement would have several paragraphs of text rather than just one; and a long-copy website might have longer articles (1000 words and up) rather than the usual 100- or 200-word web pages.

There’s no such thing as a ‘long copy copywriter’. I’m using this heading to distinguish long-copy work from the sort of highly creative, concentrated writing that goes into writing a consumer marketing slogan – because the skills required for each are very different.

As noted, the ad copywriter is likely to be a free creative spirit who can come up with an arresting, original and memorable three-word slogan that can work across an entire campaign. But they may not be the right person to produce all the content that’s associated with it – the website, the packaging copy, the press releases and whatever else is required. Doing so requires skills in structuring and planning content, achieving a uniform tone of voice and maintaining a high linguistic standard – the key abilities of the long-copy specialist.

The long-copy copywriter is less of an artist, more of a craftsperson. Rather than leaping to peaks of creative brilliance, their work is all about sustaining the right level of quality over long wordcounts.

Copywriting for publishers

‘Copywriting for publishers’ is a bit of a misnomer, since publishers do not refer to those who produce their text as ‘copywriters’, but rather ‘authors’ or ‘journalists’. However, many copywriters have all the skills required to write for online and offline publications: researching facts and turning them into readable prose that a third party then publishes, perhaps for profit.

Writing for publishers is usually a case of working to a brief. The client will need an article or book about a particular subject and will ask you to write it, either for a fixed fee or a royalty (payment per copy sold).

One key difference between copywriting for commercial clients and writing for (say) a newspaper is the additional level of editorial control involved with publishers. While a commercial client would expect their copywriter to submit editorially accurate text (i.e. to proofread it, or have it proofread), reporters and journalists are more accustomed to having their work rigorously checked, and often rewritten wholesale, by sub-editors. Hence they can crank out the copy much more quickly, for example by dictating it over the phone (‘phoning in’ their copy).

Increasingly, however, as content moves online, publishers are also putting the burden of accuracy on their writers, as well as trusting to luck by publishing unproofed content in the knowledge they can always amend it later. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Website copywriting

Website copywriting is simply producing text for websites. However, the skills of the web copywriter don’t end at simply producing the copy. They’re likely to get involved in structuring the site, planning the user’s experience, setting tone of voice, ensuring usability and getting design and text to work together. As a result, the web copywriter needs a good working knowledge of web design and usability, and ideally technical aspects such as HTML, CSS and SEO (see below).

Although some copywriters do present themselves as specialist web writers, all they’re really saying is that they’re strong in these related skills and have experience of writing a lot of sites. The core skill of copywriting is the same regardless of the medium involved.

SEO copywriting

SEO copywriting is the creation of web text with two aims: appealing to readers and achieving prominence in the results listed by search engines for particular results.

Views on SEO copywriting and its relationship to ‘ordinary’ copywriting differ sharply. Some regard it as a completely different discipline, while others feel that writing strong, well-structured copy that works for users will ensure that SEO takes care of itself.

My own view is somewhere in the middle. While SEO copy needs to do all the things that every piece of copy does – engage readers, communicate benefits, explain information, prompt action – it also needs to be written in the very specific way that indicates relevance to search engines. And, crucially, that may require some compromise in terms of phrasing and expression – for example, by using a keyword repeatedly rather than varying the usage through synonyms as a copywriter normally would.

SEO copywriters need a broad range of skills, some aesthetic and some technical. They need to be able to write reasonably good web copy that appeals to readers and generates sales. But because SEO is largely a function of the way a web page is coded, as well as the content it features, SEO copywriting shades into web design and web development. SEO copywriters need to understand technical issues such as meta tags, heading levels, anchor text, word-stemming and keyword density. These concepts might be a completely closed book to an advertising copywriter.

For more on the unique attributes of SEO copywriting, see this post.

Online article copywriting

On the face of it, writing online articles is the same as writing for offline media – there’s a brief, perhaps a word count, and the copywriter produces the text. However, because some SEO strategies require the creation of large amounts of on-topic copy, there’s a large market for mass-produced, relatively low-quality articles and web pages that are posted at article sites or used to add search-friendly content to clients’ sites. Sometimes, online press releases are also used to build search profile, and these are also churned out with an eye on speed and quantity rather than quality.

To satisfy this demand for content, so-called ‘content mills’ such as Copify and Demand Studios have emerged. These act as middlemen between clients (often SEO or digital agencies) and freelance copywriters, setting rates (usually by the word) and taking a percentage of the fee as their reward. It’s a high-volume, fast-turnaround business.

Writing online articles may be a good way to get started in copywriting, but it’s important to keep your eyes open. Because the content may be intended more for search engines than human readers, you’re not going to be widely read or build up a winning portfolio by creating it. And because the rates are low, putting too much care and attention into your copy simply reduces your effective hourly rate – potentially well below the UK minimum wage.

My article on the content mill phenomenon, What copywriting clients can’t get from content mills, discusses the drawbacks of paying for content by the word.

I won’t explain Instant again, since Andrew’s done such a good job of it. For those who don’t know, long-tail searches are highly specific searches that lead to a smaller number of results. For example, a broad search term such as ‘ice cream’ leads to 111bn results, while ‘organic ice cream’ leads to 5,450,000 and ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ leads to 244,000. So ‘ice cream’ is a generic term, while ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ is a long-tail term. Long-tail terms are generally less competitive, but they attract less traffic; generic terms are more competitive and attract more traffic.

Andrew’s view is that Google Instant will encourage more long-tail searches, with the instant feedback encouraging people to type additional words to see how they modify the search results. I’m sure this is true. They’ll probably try chopping and changing their search modifiers too, as well as deleting them if they feel the resulting set of results is too small.

However, the order of words in long-tail terms will be crucial in determining the impact of Google Instant. Specifically, if the search modifiers come after the main keyword, I think there’s more likelihood of diversion before the search is completed.

Let me work through an example that’s close to my heart. Someone in Norwich needs a copywriter. So they go to Google and type in ‘norwich copywriter’. Until they type the second word, Google will have no idea what they’re searching for. With just ‘norwich’ typed in, they’ll probably be looking at a load of tourism sites. Then, once they go on to add ‘copywriter’, Google will give them the results they’re looking for.

But what if they type ‘copywriter norwich’? With Instant active, they’d see the (UK-wide) results for ‘copywriter’ before they typed ‘norwich’. At that point, they could easily think, ‘you know what? I don’t really need my copywriter to be in Norwich. Let me have a look at some of these ones.’ And if they click away from the search, they might never return.

Let’s suppose they do stay with the search. Two keystrokes later, at ‘copywriter no’, they might see the results for ‘copywriter nottingham’. They’re perhaps less likely to click a result at this point, but experience shows that we should never underestimate the laziness, inattention or sheer obtuseness of the average web user. Not everyone is hyper-search-literate, fine-tuning the Google machine to chime with their carefully considered intentions. People just don’t care that much what they click on. (You could argue that the whole PPC advertising phenomenon depends on that fact.) And even a mistaken click to a rockin’ site might be enough to divert them from their original intent.

Note that none of this could happen with the ice cream example discussed above. Since the adjectives precede the noun, Google has to wait until the end of the phrase to know what ‘thing’ the searcher wants to be organic and dairy free.

In other languages, where adjectives usually follow nouns (such as French), it would have a much better chance of showing some diverting results before the searcher got as far as entering all their modifiers.

To sum up, I think Instant will result in some ‘leakage’ back to generic terms from long-tail terms that previously locked in their traffic, particularly if the modifiers (adjectives, locations) in the search phrase follow on from the main subject (noun).

Also, although it’s less likely, a long-tail term including a string that will return a list of potentially relevant results (as with the nottingham example above) carries a smaller but still potentially damaging risk of leakage.

These changes could make some difference to the long-tail terms that are worth targeting: terms with differing word order that were previously equivalent might turn out to be less attractive, as might those including sub-strings that return potentially diverting results.

Brand bidding is the practice of bidding on the brand terms of a third party, so your ads appear when their brand is entered as a search term. For example, an insurance company X might bid on the brand term ‘Aviva’.

The idea is to grab traffic on the brand term and redirect it to your own site. The brand bidder’s reasoning is that if they can write a sufficiently eye-catching, memorable ad, the web user will click on it, arrive at their site and choose their product instead of those of the brand owner they originally searched for. The aim is diversion, in both the psychological and user-journey senses of the word.

Affiliate brand bidding

Affiliate sites sometimes bid on advertisers’ brands without authorisation, diverting traffic that rightfully ‘belongs’ to the advertiser to their own sites before directing it back to them, generating a commission from the advertiser in the process (while also inflating the bid cost for the advertiser). For example, a hotel booking site might bid on ‘Hotel Hilton’ (or whatever), perhaps promising reduced rates, to grab people who would probably have found the Hilton anyway.

One way to fight against this is for the brand owner to authorise a handful of affiliates (a ‘closed group’ in network terminology) to bid on its brand, with the traffic directed to approved landing pages or microsites devoted to the advertiser’s products. If done effectively, this technique allows advertisers to harvest a significant proportion of the traffic from page-one results while blocking out rogue bidders.

How brand bidding works

To illustrate how brand bidding works in practice, let’s work through an example. Fountain Partnership, the ethical copywriting agency based (like me) in Norwich, have recently begun bidding for my brand term, ‘abc copywriting’. The image below shows their ad appearing for the relevant search.

At the time of writing, Fountain’s ad appears for ‘abc copywriting’ and ‘copywriting abc’, but not ‘abc copywriting norwich’. This suggests that it has been set up to appear on an exact match for those two phrases. (You can read more about AdWords keywords matching options here.)

But couldn’t the ad also be targeting a broad match on ‘copywriting’ – as the ad for Copy Unlimited (on the right) presumably is? I don’t think so, because a search for ‘copywriting’ reveals that ad still appearing on page one, while Fountain’s doesn’t appear on the first ten pages. So we can deduce that Fountain are almost certainly targeting the brand term with their ad.

The legal position on brand bidding

In May 2008, Google announced that it was allowing brand bidding for the first time. From then on, advertisers could use third-party trademarks as target keywords, provided those trademarks don’t appear in the text of the ad. (It’s easy to see how using the brand in the actual ad could constitute ‘passing off’ – pretending to be someone else for commercial gain.)

This change proved controversial and was challenged in the courts in several countries, but to no avail – the outcome was that advertisers can bid on trademarks as long as the trademark terms aren’t included in the ad creative.

As a result, advertisers who depend on digital marketing have to be extremely vigilant about who is bidding on their brand, often using ad-monitoring technology to help them. (Read Google’s full policy on trademarks in PPC ads here.)

Assessing the threat of brand bidding

How much of a threat is brand bidding?

The search for a specific brand signals a strong interest in researching, or purchasing, a specific brand. Users are generally not in browsing or comparison mode when they search for brands.

Some brand owners use this argument to ignore brand bidding, whether by competitors or affiliates. ‘If someone’s searching for my brand,’ they reason, ‘they’re not going to click on an ad for a rival domain. And even if they do, they’ll realise their mistake immediately and click through to my site instead.’ This argument is given more weight if the brand owner appears at #1 in the natural results for their brand – as nearly every brand (including mine) does.

It sounds comforting, but it’s almost certainly not true in every case. Research shows that a significant proportion of search engine users (around 20%, from memory) click on the ads that appear above searches (as Fountain’s does).

It’s only natural, since they occupy the screen position where high-ranking natural results would appear in the absence of ads. People are accustomed to finding strong, relevant results there.

However, the raw stats are too crude. Many factors affect what people click on – most obviously, how relevant the content of an ad or search result is to their own search term. For a brand search, 20% is almost certainly wildly optimistic for an ad that doesn’t include the brand term in its text. But it could still get some traffic. And remember that it’s a risk-free deal for the brand bidder – they only pay when people click. And with little or no PPC competition for the brand term, they could pick up some very cheap visitors who are definitely interested in their offering on a general level.

Another factor is where the ad takes the visitor. Fountain Partnership’s ad simply leads to their home page, funnelling the web user down their standard sales channel. Arriving at this point, a user looking for my site might well backtrack, finding no message tailored to their search. But the ad could easily lead to a page featuring, say, a point-by-point comparison of ABC’s service against Fountain’s. Such a tactic might make visitors more likely to remain at their site.

See this post for an account of how Mazda ran ads targeting a term used by Pontiac as the basis for their online campaign, successfully diverting a huge wedge of valuable traffic to a page that compared their cars favourably to Pontiac’s.

Responding to brand bidding

Like any brand owner faced with brand bidding, I now have to decide what to do. A fair few people search on my brand: 43 visitors reached this site from that search during August 2010, which is more than one a day. What’s more, that traffic is very valuable to me, because it represents pre-qualified visitors – people who’ve heard of ABC and are motivated enough to search for the brand. For a B2B company, one visitor like that a day is worth having, and therefore possibly worth paying for.

The most common (and easiest) way to respond to brand bidding is to bid on your own brand, outbidding the brand bidder for the top AdWords slot. This was my chosen response and the image below shows the search results with my ad appearing.

Since I can use my own brand in the ad text with impunity, I benefit from having the matching words emboldened, which always helps to draw people’s eyes to an ad. (Moral: always include the search terms in PPC creative if you can.) Of course, the Fountain Partnership ad still appears, below my own. But I now control more of the screen ‘real estate’ for my brand, including the #1 PPC position and positions #1 and #2 for natural search (Google usually grants me a second position for this blog). Short of hiring affiliates, that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Is it worth bidding on your own brand?

Some marketers advocate bidding on your own brand regardless of who else is targeting it, for a number of reasons. As explained, it gives you more ‘real estate’ on the all-important page one. It gives insurance against temporary blips in your natural search position. It allows you to vary the marketing messages you present to searchers before they click. And, in the absence of competing ads, it’s cheap. (More details on this here.)

However, if you’re bidding against rivals, you’re effectively being forced to pay for traffic that, if not for the brand bidders, would almost certainly have reached your site anyway – which is galling as well as costly. In this situation, rival bidders are like trees in a forest, trying to grow taller than each other to reach the sun in a sort of search-marketing ‘arms race’. Ultimately, the endeavour absorbs resource and marketing effort for all concerned, but leaves the relative positions of the players pretty much as they were before.

What is content spinning?

Content spinning means creating variants of the same content that will appear different to search engines. Typically, the underlying meaning is exactly the same – so human readers won’t get any benefit from reading the new version.

The holy grail of SEO is unique content. Content spinning is a way to get more ‘juice’ from the same content ‘fruit’, so you can submit the same content to multiple sites, publish it in more than one place, and generally use it more effectively as an asset. Wherever your spun content goes, it gets better SEO results (whether in terms of building or attracting links) if Google regards it as unique.

Many article sites stipulate that all content they publish should be unique. In practice, their checks are minimal (or non-existent) and you can in fact get away with the same article at four or five sites. But if you want to steer clear of duplicate content penalties (see below), it’s worth spinning multiple submissions – particularly if the content is strong and you feel it’s got a good chance of republication.

Does content spinning work?

I expect some SEOs might jump on this article, saying the content spinning is an outdated technique. Well, I’m still being asked to do it by reputable search agencies who get results for their clients. SEO isn’t like social media – it’s all about what works, not the next big thing. And right now, content spinning still works, within its own limitations.

Is content spinning a ‘black hat’ SEO practice?

Tricky. If you use a software package to do it, I’d say yes. But creating alternative versions of articles is something every writer has done, or might want to do. After all, there’s no substantive distinction between content spinning and ‘editing’, ‘updating’ or ‘improving’ your own work. You’re not asking humans to read all the different versions – only Googlebot has to do that, and it doesn’t get bored. So if you accept that posting a low-quality, unoriginal or hastily written article purely in order to get a backlink is ethical, I think you have to accept that reposting variants of the same article to get links is also ethical.

Duplicate content penalties

A word about duplicate content penalties. Reading some sites, you’d think that posting duplicate content will bring the massed armies of Satan down on your site, laying it to waste. In fact, the web is full of duplicate content. Indeed, if you’re posting to an ezine or online PR site, that’s kind of the point – your submission is propagated across multiple syndicates or publishers, hopefully generating a new link to your site every time. All Google does is downgrade or disregard the duplicates – in other words, five links from republished ezine articles might only be worth one from a unique page on a reputable and relevant blog.

Is your spinning top?

The takeaway is that you don’t have to sweat content spinning: you should do as little as you can to get the result you want. The worst that can happen is that your content is seen as duplicated and your links don’t do much good. That’s a waste of effort, but it’s not going to see your site crash and burn. It’s silly to spend ages carefully spinning out content when the time could be spent writing something that’s really new.

With that in mind, here are some tried and tested content-spinning techniques. Use the ones that work, and don’t use any more than you have to.

Consider a wholesale rewrite

When you spin content, it can sometimes be quicker and easier to rewrite the text completely rather than laboriously editing the original word by word. Print out the original and keep it by your monitor as you rewrite it. If you’re going to reorder paragraphs (see below), do this once you’ve finished rewriting.

Alternatively, rewrite each paragraph in turn by typing a new version under the original in the document, then deleting the original.

Change the title and description/summary

Obvious maybe, but your first step should be to choose a completely different title. For example:

Perennial weeds: ten ways to keep them out of your garden

might become

Perennial weeds: ten top tips to get rid of them for good

Note that any key phrases, such as ‘perennial weeds’ in this example, should be retained – near the start of the title if possible.

The summary should also be rewritten, again retaining keywords.

Find synonyms

Synonyms are words that mean the same, or nearly the same, as other words. Swapping individual words for synonyms is one of the easiest ways to vary your body content. Microsoft Word even has a synonym finder that will suggest them for you – just select the word, command-click it (control-click on Mac) and find a list of synonyms. For example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

might become

Annihilating those relentless perennial weeds is all about selecting the correct approach

The first three changes are all single-word changes of the type that Word might suggest. The fourth one is a more human change, involving switching one idiom for another. You’ll have to engage your brain to find these.

It follows that if you’re writing with content spinning in mind, write adjective-heavy text that gives you lots of opportunity to swap synonyms around.

Take care if spinning content several times – it’s easy to end up putting the original word back. Although as long as you’re making lots of other changes too, you’re unlikely to end up recreating the original version verbatim.

Swap clauses

With a minimal edit, you can swap the clauses in a sentence to make it completely different. Let’s return to the previous example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

This can be switched around to read:

Choosing the right tool for the job is the secret to destroying those persistent perennial weeds

OK, you had to type a few words – but you’ve ended up with a completely different sentence.

Add sentences

For a quick and easy substantive change, simply insert a new sentence that duplicates the meaning of the one before it. For example:

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem.

might become

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem. They are a real headache for gardeners.

This adds extra content without requiring you to do any research, or indeed think very hard.

Reorder lists

A frequently used writers’ device is the comma-separated list (usually of three items). These can be reordered to make the content different without affecting meaning in the slightest. For example:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: running roots, layering and self-seeding.

It’s a quick and easy job to change this to:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: self-seeding, layering and running roots.

Bullet-point lists are even easier to spin – just shuffle those bullets around until the order is completely different.

As before, it makes sense to include lots of these lists if you’re planning to spin your content.

Reorder paragraphs

It’s surprising how often you can reorder the paragraphs in a piece of text without substantively altering the meaning. You just have to take care that you don’t introduce any nonsense – for example, using a word repeatedly and then carefully explaining what it means, or saying ‘see below’ in the last line of an article. (Although, if we’re being brutal, neither of those will bother Google.)

Reordering paragraphs in conjunction with one or two other techniques is a quick, easy way to get big changes in your text for minimal time outlay. More than any other technique listed here, it’s worth tailoring your text for – in other words, writing your paragraphs in such a way that they can be reordered. That usually means breaking your content into clearly delineated ‘meaning modules’ and making sure your paragraphs follow that structure. Use headings to help you. For example, the tips in this article could easily be presented in any order without changing the meaning.

Mix and match

The best way to get results with these technique is to mix it up. You’ll have to discover through trial and error what works for you, and what you find easiest and quickest to achieve. For example, you might go for a process like this:

• Change title and summary/description
• Rewrite first two paragraphs completely
• Swap synonyms where possible
• Rewrite last two sentences

That will almost certainly create enough difference for your new version to be regarded as unique.

A final check

When done, you can use Word’s ‘compare documents’ feature to highlight all the differences between the new version and the original, in a similar way to tracking changes. There’s no particular percentage of changed content to aim for (as with keyword density), so this is really just a quick visual confirmation that you’ve got a good level of difference throughout the document.

Often, there will be a discussion about what I could do for them before they commit to buy. And that discussion is usually pretty wide-ranging. To illustrate the services I can provide or broker, I’ll propose many SEO tactics that would be specifically useful for them – as opposed to generic tactics that would work for anyone.

In fact, if they were taking careful notes, they’d end up with a passable SEO strategy just from the conversation. What’s more, the follow-up tasks involved are sometimes relatively mechanical (directory submissions, article marketing), allowing them to be handled in-house or overseas. The prospect could easily take what I’ve given them for free and use it to create significant value for themselves – and I’d never know. In other words, my effusive proposal could easily lead straight to being jilted at the altar.

It’s a serious issue for freelancers, and service providers generally. When does advice stop being an incentive to purchase and start being a product in itself? Where does a comprehensive proposal become a suicidal value giveaway? How much valuable knowledge should you share without payment? And just what is your advice really worth?

What you want

Let’s say you’re submitting a proposal to a client. On the face of it, your aim couldn’t be simpler: convert the prospect to a sale. But there are subtler concerns. The negotiation or proposal stage offers a valuable insight into how the working relationship might pan out. What will the client be like to work with? What if they question your advice, or refuse to act on it? How will differences of opinion be dealt with? Working through a proposal now could give you a chance to find out before any commitment is made. That gives you the option of walking away, or (more likely) quietly incorporating some ‘messing around money’ into your price.

Even if they’re not going to buy right now, you want them to remember you fondly and come back later – possibly after trying someone cheaper. And even if they’re never coming back, you should be mindful that people do talk to each other. Not just locally, but globally, through social media and other networks. Deal or no deal, you’re putting your reputation out there every time you pitch.

What you don’t want

So there are lots of reasons to submit a detailed proposal, offer useful advice and answer your prospect’s questions in some detail. But there are just as many reasons to hold back, or at least carefully consider what you want to share.

The first and most obvious reason is that you’re not being paid. The time you spend preparing and discussing your proposal must be either written off as an overhead (effectively, spreading the cost across all your clients) or charged to this particular prospect when they become a client (not explicitly, but as a tacit element of the price). For freelances, this sort of accounting is largely notional, since they rarely tot up every hour and assign it to a cost centre. But it’s still worth considering how much time you’re investing for an uncertain reward. Think of the opportunity cost – the money you could have earned elsewhere with the time you’re spending. Is this prospect actually worth that many hours?

The second reason is that you don’t want to give away valuable knowledge for free. For freelances who are paid for tangible deliverables (text, designs, websites), it can be tough to get clients to recognise the value of advice. The idea that ‘talk is cheap’ is pretty powerful. Indeed, it can be hard to recognise the value of your own consultancy, if you’re stuck in the same materialistic mindset.

Remember: if your free proposal can help someone add value to their business, in any way at all, you’re effectively giving them something for nothing. From this perspective, it’s worth thinking more like a lawyer, who charges for every conversation regardless of its content. That might be an impossible goal for most freelances, but it’s still a worthy principle: the band don’t play for free.

Thirdly, you don’t want to cede negotiating power. You want the prospect to understand what they’re buying, but not gain the ‘little knowledge’ that would allow them to misguidedly pick and choose from the service menu, or attempt to impose an alternative pricing model (for example, hourly rate instead of price-per-service). You also don’t want to give them the confidence to go back to the market for a different provider (say, one from a low-cost economy) – or, again, use the threat of doing so to secure a lower price.

Finally, and most subtly, you don’t want to seem too needy. Giving away the farm at the proposal stage suggests you’re desperate for work, which won’t instil confidence in the prospect. Remember the negotiation adage: ‘she who cares least wins’. So you need to respect yourself and do the right thing by your business – although, obviously, without striking an arrogant tone that will turn the prospect off.

What they want

It’s worth considering the client’s viewpoint too. They want to understand what they’re buying, but they’re probably making a foray into an unfamiliar market where they must buy with incomplete knowledge. They’re not going to splurge on a ‘black box’ solution where money goes in and results come out – most firms will stick with the status quo rather than take that sort of risk. (A notable recent exception is social media – in its infancy, firms were clearly spending on ‘gurus’ with little idea of what would be delivered in return for their fees.)

Most firms also appreciate that experts must have trust in order to deliver, but they don’t want to pay for snake oil. And behind the business rationale lies the deep-seated and very powerful need of human beings not to feel humiliated in front of peers by making a mistake or being taken for a ride.

Setting the boundary

In such a situation, only those in-demand suppliers with stellar reputations can set their personal ‘paywalls’ at the outer limits of their expertise. Like film stars who no longer have to audition, they don’t have to prove their worth. The rest of us need to do our little dance to make it rain.

So somehow, you have to set the boundaries on the advice you’ll give away for free. In theory, this will dictate the point in the conversation at which you will say (or imply), ‘If you want to know more, you must pay’. And it’s clearly worth deciding where this point is before you get talking, so you don’t end up putting the phone down with the sinking feeling that you’ve given away far too much.

General knowledge

One solution is to provide loads of advice, but keep it generic. You could have a ‘one size fits all’ template that you simply adapt for each new client, tweaking the content a little and changing the title page.

This can work, but most firms have already moved this type of content one stage earlier in the sales process by offering it for free in the form of web pages, blogs, white papers or free ebooks. Available to everyone online, it serves a dual purpose: building credibility before the client approach, and building SEO profile. So you might not win many client hearts by serving up this kind of content as a proposal.

Also, it’s not really about what you know, but how it’s applied. You may have testimonials, articles and past clients in abundance, but your prospect is still asking themselves whether you can do it for them.  Will you understand what they do? Will the service benefit their business? Generic content won’t deliver that kind of reassurance.

A better approach is probably to indicate the general themes of the service you’d deliver, without going into great detail on what will be involved. This can still be very valuable to a client who knows nothing, but it should be possible to leave them a lot of work to do if they want to exploit it without you.

Buying with the heart

Another perspective on the proposal dilemma is the emotional mindset of the prospect.

No-one likes buying stuff they know nothing about. And yet most of us buy far more with our hearts than with our heads. At some point in the process of appraising a product or supplier, we’ll decide (perhaps unconsciously) that we’re going to buy. This might happen, for example, when we first step over the threshold of a property, or when we see a pair of shoes on someone else’s feet. Our subsequent ‘research’ or ‘shopping around’ is actually about building up confidence and gathering data to support a decision that’s already been made – or, perhaps, so we can justify it to others. The intellect serves the emotions, not vice versa – and we may never admit how and when the true decision was made.

So you need to be attuned to the point at which your prospect clicks emotionally with your offer. If you feel they have decided to use you, you can force the free consultation phase to a close with confidence. Continued unpaid dialogue adds no value for you and could even risk unselling them. Prospects will carry on listening to free advice even though they’re ready to buy – they won’t want to look stupid or gullible by thrusting cash into your hands for something you’re willing to give away. People need a cue to act, so give them it.

I’d be fascinated to hear your own experiences on this topic, and how you decide where to set the limits on proposals you submit to clients.

This post presents my responses to Martin’s post (and will make more sense if you read his post first).

What’s in a name?

What really got everyone’s goat about Copify was their hijacking of the term ‘copywriting’, for instance in their tagline ‘changing the way people think about copywriting’. If they’d set up as ‘content generation services’, or whatever, far fewer copywriters would have been bothered. Equating 2p-a-word content creation with the careful, considered approach of an experienced marketing, publishing or digital professional is ludicrous, and Copify were duly called out on it.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet

For my money, ‘copywriter’ still denotes the high end of the market – right up to highly experienced creatives who can charge hundreds for a single advert or slogan. There are many different types of writer under the umbrella of ‘copywriting’, but the sense of a consultancy/service rather than a by-the-yard word factory is pretty well understood – with the possible exception of ‘SEO copywriting’, which does have some connotations of cranking out the copy I think. (But that’s not to say that all SEO copywriters are content-crankers, Andrew!)

Come for the writing, stay for the thinking

It’s this consultancy/service aspect that distinguishes a ‘proper’ copywriter from a content creator. Or to put it another way, clients pay for the thinking, not just the writing. Working with a copywriter who takes the time to engage with you, your values and your character as a business is what makes the difference between getting content and being content. And it’s dispiriting to trade under a name that implies you simply churn out the words without paying much mind to the purpose of the exercise.

J’accuse!

However, when I look at my own website, or those of other copywriters, it always strikes me that we do tend to sell ourselves short in this regard. There’s a general emphasis on ‘words’, ‘writing’, ‘content’ and so on, although the incidence of pen imagery seems to be on the decline. This rather prosaic positioning is sometimes leavened with some promise to drive sales or build brands.

We tend to push the craft of copywriting rather than its business benefits. And when we do try to force our way into the boardroom, it isn’t always convincing – perhaps because we don’t quite believe we should be in there ourselves (but that’s another story).

Let me reiterate, I include myself in this criticism. My own tagline, ‘We’ll choose your words carefully’, is typical. Why should a client care about that? What does it do for them?

Where’s the value?

If I were advising a client who was a copywriter, I’d probably exhort them to emphasise the value being added rather than the service being delivered. As with tool manufacturers who are in the business of selling holes rather than drills, it’s the ultimate benefits that sell a service, not the nuts and bolts of its delivery. Positioning as a seller of words weakens the offer and invites like-for-like comparison with low-cost providers.

Could we therefore rebrand as ‘content consultants’ or similar, just as designers might describe themselves as, say, ‘creative directors’ or ‘senior creatives’? My feeling is we could, but there might not be such a benefit to it.

First, ironically, we’d lose out on people searching the web for ‘copywriter’. Online, you can’t get away from the need to use the language your client uses, and people start from a perception that they need content, so they search for the word most closely associated with their need. (Many firms developing their websites don’t even get that far, so we should be grateful.)

Secondly, we’d lose the very important emphasis on language as the tool for marketing communication, and the positioning of ourselves as the people who can take the client all the way from concept or value proposition through to words on a page. In my experience, being the person who ‘gets’ a company and can express its values in writing is a pretty good position to be in. I wouldn’t want a title that made me sound like an expensive luxury.

So, in summary, while it’s probably worth talking about the high-end stuff we can do, I think we need to keep our feet on the ground.

What the future holds

I personally think that the market will sort itself out. ‘Content’ and ‘copy’, for want of better words, will diverge more and more as clients become more literate, and there will actually be less need to differentiate, not more.

Those who just want content will get it. Those who want something better, and try to get it from a Copify, will change their approach. Those who think they just need something written will soon realise, from working with a professional, that they’re not just delegating an admin-level task that they could just as easily handle in-house. And those who appreciate the value of a true copywriter won’t be going anywhere.