Professional Writing Services from MagneticWeb

One of the first things I learned when I was learning to speak in public was to always address the person at the far end of the hall. If he can hear you clearly then so should everyone else. There’s nothing worse or more off-putting than having your speech interrupted by someone shouting, “Speak up! We can’t hear you over here.”

It’s like that with writing web copy. You have to write so that the reader engages with you, and isn’t treated as just one of thousands, or millions, of people who may visit your site. While you have to remember that there may (hopefully) be thousands of folk who read what you have to say, each one of them wants to feel special when they’re on your site. And you can only do that by writing as if they were the only visitor you had.

That means writing as if you were talking with a friend in a relaxed atmosphere, with no pressure. Some people can do that and others can’t. Some can but only after a great deal of practice and effort, which they may not have the time to engage in. Such people outsource their writing requirements to professional writers.

And that’s where this site comes in . . .

Philip Gegan

What is the objective of every home page on a commercial web site?

It must be two-fold. First, to communicate with the prospective customer in a manner that the customer understands and appreciates. Secondly, to use that communication to persuade him that the product or service being sold is just what he has been looking for to solve his problem.

The first objective requires an ability to write in a tone that touches a nerve with the reader. It tells him that you the webmaster understand his problem and can supply the solution to it. Perhaps you had the same problem yourself at one time and, after searching, found the solution to it, or maybe you know someone else who had the problem and discovered how they dealt with it.

The second objective is the more difficult. It requires that you succeed in getting your reader to accept that what you are offering him is right for him. Not just that it has worked for others, or that it is cheaper and has more benefits for him than other, similar, products, but that it completely covers his situation from every angle.

In other words you have to persuade him. Just as in the case of an orator before the Senate, or an advocate before a court of law. The objective is the same. You have to get inside the mind of the prospective customer, understand his fears and hopes, his ambitions, his loves and hates.

Vocalise them – put them into words. Articulate them. Relate them to your product, and the benefits your product can bring to his life. This should be a natural flow, moving logically but with emotion from the exposure of his fears and the problem he is faced with to the future he can look forward to with his problem solved, thanks to your product.

That’s the power of persuasion. And when it’s done well, it’s hardly persuasion at all, just a lifting of the veil of ignorance to reveal what was obvious all along.

Following on from the previous post (“A Revolution in Writing“), the question was, “Is the pressure exerted by market forces (to constrict web content to pursuing the particular objective for which it was put online) good for the English language?”

I believe it is a factor that tends to benefit the English language. But it has to be seen in context, where there are a number of factors arising from the popularity of the internet that work against the interests of good English.

Deliberately mis-spelling words for the sake of commercial individuality and market share had been going on for many years before the internet came along. It still is. For example, advertising placards frequently contain words that are deliberately mis-spelt. Text messages usually contain words mis-spelt for the sake of brevity and saving costs. No wonder school children are leaving school (here in England, at any rate) barely able to spell the most elementary words.

These are the future custodians of our language. If fewer and fewer people can spell, or even read properly, what hope has English of surviving as a language, let alone the pre-eminent language of the world?

So by all means lets keep the internet – the greatest forum for the exchange of information and ideas ever invented – a lively place where there’s never a dull moment. But let’s save our precious language at the same time.

Philip Gegan

In just 15 years, since the internet first appeared, the way people write has undergone a revolution. I’m not just referring to text-speak, where people send each other text messages on their mobile phones where the words are shortened and well known phrases are initialised. I mean the way we write web content, newsletters and blogs.

Twitter has made this process even more noticeable. The limit of 140 characters, including URLs, has forced a certain amount of creativity out of everyone who uses it.

Whilst some web sites are composed as if they were simply an online version of an offline brochure, more and more businesses are turning to copy writers, and copy writers know for the most part that what works offline doesn’t work online.

People trawling the internet are searching for information. They have an objective, and if what they’re reading doesn’t look as if it will lead them to that information then they click away without any hesitation, to the next item that may yield the desired result.

This is what successful copy writers understand. And it has crystallised the thinking of all successful site owners. They have had to decide exactly what the objective of their site, or blog, is. And then they have to ensure that the written content pursues that objective from start to finish.

Web pages and blogs that don’t meet that standard, that contain surplus, irrelevant content, are not successful, and will sooner or later disappear. This can only be good for the internet. But is it all good for the English language?

I’ll tell you what I think in my next post.

Philip Gegan

If you run a business you probably don’t have time to write a daily blog entry. Even if you’re used to online business and have had a web site for years, you still have to manage your business first and foremost, so it makes sense to pay someone else to write it for you – a specialist web writer.

But where do you find these people? You can try searching on Google. A search for “web writers” (without the quotes) brings you 43.4 million results, and selecting from those on the first couple of pages is pot luck if you don’t know them already.

You can try rentacoder.com or elance.com (though you may find their web site navigation difficult to follow). One very good one is odesk.com, where you can specify your requirements and how much you’re prepared to pay, and writers will bid for your order.

Or you can try joining the Warriors at warriorforum.com and viewing the postings from professional writers looking for work. Craigslist.com is another place where you can find the people you want for writing your blog.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a lively, interesting blog, with fresh content added most days.

Philip Gegan

How often should you post to your blog?

To answer this, let’s put the question another way round.

How many posts should you have on your blog? Surely the answer is, “the more the better – as long as they are relevant and useful”. The more content a blog has, the better, provided it gives valuable information to the visitor.

So you should post to your blog at least every couple of days, ideally. The search engines favour blogs that are vibrant and humming with the latest news and comment in its niche. Nobody likes a blog that hasn’t been posted to for weeks or more, that is dormant and stagnating.

To start with you’ll have to do all the posting yourself, or outsource someone else to do it for you. But if your blog is successful, they’ll be plenty of visitors who will leave comments on various posts. That will take the pressure off you, and you won’t have to make so many posts, because the search engines will still be “pinged” with new content through your visitors’ comments.

Just another advantage of blogs over static web sites.

Philip Gegan

Since the advent of blogs as a viable form of online business representation around 2006 onwards we have seen the gradual death of static web pages.

Visitors to your site don’t expect to see the same content every time they arrive on your home page. And now blog themes can be obtained very cheaply that allow for the same quality of graphics, header and other web page ingredients that regular web pages provide.

This development does represent a problem for most online businesses, in that they have to get hold of fresh content on a regular basis. Business owners who have their time cut out just managing their business can’t be expected to write that content themselves, so it has to be out-sourced.

Another business expense? Or maybe another opportunity for business. It’s the businesses who take their online presence seriously enough to out-source their blog content who will have possibly a decisive advantage in the new business environment of 2010 and beyond.

Philip Gegan

What difference does a form make to your home page?

There I go asking questions again, but it’s one that you should consider.

If you don’t have a form of any kind on your site, how do you expect prospective customers to contact you? How can you build a list of prospects, and start converting them into paying customers, if you can’t get them to communicate with you?

I think you see by now that having a form on your web site is an absolute must. Yet there are thousands and thousands of web sites out there that don’t have one. Many of them cost thousands to have set up, with quality graphics and various gizmos, yet they are for all that simply expensive indulgencies.

A form, whether on the web page or as a pop-up form, can succinctly state the benefit of signing up to your list, and invite the visitor to insert his name and email address in order to obtain a benefit.

That can be a free guide of some sort, or something as simple as a discount off the price of their next purchase with you.

Actually the possibilities are endless. Think about it.

Philip Gegan

How powerful is the copy on your web page? How persuasive is it?

What is its purpose? Does it perform that task effectively?

Have you read it lately, and from the viewpoint of a potential customer? Take a fresh look at it right after you’ve read this post.

The job of your home page is to attract prospective customers and make them into actual customers. That means you need one or two keyword phrases in your heading and in the first paragraph of your copy. Your heading should be in the H1 heading format and the phrase in your first paragraph should preferably be in bold.

This is solely to attract the search engines and ensure they give your page as high a rank as possible for your keyword phrase. Only by doing that will your page stand much chance of appearing in the top results for anyone who searches for that phrase.

But that’s only one part of the job. The other part is to persuade a high proportion of your visitors to sign up to whatever you’re offering. This is often a newsletter, but it could be a free (digital) gift or a special offer or discount.

Often the inducement isn’t over the top in the benefits it will bring to the visitor, so your copy has to make up for it in its power of persuasion.

Now look at your home page again. Would it persuade you to sign up to your special offer? (You do have a special offer, don’t you?)  If you don’t, then make it a priority to get one in place.

Can’t think of an offer you can make to your visitors? Don’t worry. There are thousands to choose from, and most of them are freely available, or of very low-cost, on the internet. You just need to know where to find them.

What about the form you’ll need, so your visitors can give you their details and you can send them your newsletter or special offer? Well, I’ll come to that shortly . . .

Philip Gegan

So it’s all about interactivity. And you have that with a blog. For offline businesses it’s becoming an absolute necessity. Times are changing. The web has moved on from what it was when it first burst on the scene in the 1990s.

Then we only had static web pages. The surfer landed on your page, read what you had to say, went “Uh-huh”, and swiftly surfed on to the next site. Unless you were lucky enough to make a sale that time, or, later on, get him to sign up to your newsletter or special offer.

We kept hearing that it was all about building relationships with your prospects, but how could you do that with a static web page and a form? Then Web 2.0, as it’s known, came along. And blogs were in the forefront of it all.

And the magic of them is – they’re so simple to set up and maintain. All you need is regular content that your customers and prospects will find of interest or entertainment value.

Ah, yes. Regular content. That a problem? If it is, then outsource it. Whatever you do, you must have a blog. It’s becoming the first rule of business survival.

Philip Gegan