Professional Writing Services from MagneticWeb

What do you as an online business owner want from your web site?

The ultimate objective is increased sales. Nearly everyone would agree with that. And with increased sales comes increased profits and an enlargement of your customer base.

Web sites are the ideal vehicle for that. More and more business is being done online and before long it will be the norm. That’s one reason why thousands of dollars are spent by businesses on having a home page that appeals to their potential customers.

But what else do you need in order to achieve all this? An attractive web site is fine, but it’s not enough. Even though it looks good, it isn’t on its own going to make your potential customers buy your product. It isn’t even going to entice them into filling in your form and registering their email addresses with you.

The only thing that will do that is words. As long as you have the freedom to express yourself and your message then you have the power to get your message across to your potential customers. But you do need the right words, the right way of putting your message to them.

Which is why top copywriters can charge high fees for their services. With an expertly crafted sales letter on your home page you can expect to see a steady stream of highly targeted prospects sign up to your list and your sales to lift off.

It’s not just your home page where you need to hit home with your message, however. Other pages should have content – articles or short snippets of news or information – that keeps your prospects on your site and causes them to bookmark you for others to follow.

And with links from your home page to those articles you have a “sticky” site that keeps your visitors there, getting to know you and your business and feeling safe in doing business with you.

Philip Gegan

Talking about producing work that we can be proud of and that enhances the experience of everyone else who comes across it led me to thinking about the creative urge in general and freedom of expression in particular.

Here in the West we like to think that we have true freedom of expression, but that is an illusion. We have had imposed on us restrictions on what we can say and write, at least in public. Years ago I wrote an article about this in New Law Journal called “Publish and Be Not Damned”, so I won’t go over this ground again.

But today we have fresh challenges to our freedom of speech, or expression. The culture of “political correctness” has frightened many people away from expressing their true opinions, in case they are immediately pounced on by politically motivated critics accusing them of various thought crimes in true Orwellian fashion.

The risk is extremely high when expressing opinions about equality, whether based on race, sex or age (unless, of course, your opinions accord with those who tend to occupy positions of power in publishing and the media). Also at high risk are opinions about crime and punishment (or the lack of it), various economic fallacies such as free trade, the desirability or otherwise of “multiculturalism”, and various events of recent history, all of which are surrounded by a virtual “electric wire”.

In many countries, for example, merely to question whether millions of Jews and others really were gassed in gas chambers by the Germans in the years 1941 to 1945 is a criminal offence, and there are many people serving prison sentences for transgressing this law. This is in spite of increasing evidence that much of the evidence used to support the “holocaust” story is in fact deeply flawed.

There is obviously something really wrong here, when just questioning orthodox history can bring such drastic results. The advent of the internet has initially been extremely beneficial for freedom of speech, because anyone can now publish their thoughts online at very little cost, without having to get their content past an editor.

But there are now well funded organisations working day and night to bring this to an end, to bring about the death of freedom of expression online. Certain organisations have the nerve to appoint themselves as self-styled “internet police”, and are pressing to have the power to issue “licences” to anyone who runs a web site or blog.

In other words, they want to restrict freedom of speech online, so that no opinions or research material that runs contrary to their own peculiar views escapes into the public domain.

This would be tyranny on a world-wide scale. We must all work to expose, whenever possible, those who would shackle freedom of expression on the internet.

Philip Gegan

To a writer there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your work published (other, perhaps, than getting paid for it). Before the internet this always meant waiting at least several days, and sometimes, if you’ve written a book, it can be a year or more.

But now you can make a blog entry or write a few words on Twitter, click a button, and you’re published. You can do this several times a day, and many people do, but to me just making one post a day is equally satisfying. Better still, though, is to make several posts each day to each of several blogs!

With facilities such as Twitter and Facebook available, everyone and his brother is publishing their learned thoughts online and becoming a writer. But is this increasing the quality of all the writing we read on the internet?

Hardly. Good quality writing is still hard to find (just as it is offline). It just means there is more low-quality writing. The only thing any writer can do about that is to do his best to raise the standards of online writing by writing quality content every day and resisting any temptation to write sub-standard junk.

If you’re a writer you have to write in accordance with the creative urge within you. Just as a painter or sculptor wouldn’t place on public view something that was junk (apart from purveyors of “modern art” rubbish), so it is with true writers.

To be truly creative you have to be capable of producing work that enhances and reflects your culture, that makes people better for having come into contact with it, be it writing, painting, music or sculpture. The more spoilt for choice we are for such things the luckier we are.

So let’s all of us in our own way make the internet a better place for the content – writing, graphics, music, or whatever – that we ourselves produce.

Philip Gegan

One of the best things about writing for the internet is that there are so many different avenues to go down. You can specialise in article writing, blogging for other people, writing content for web sites, copywriting, writing short ads or ad copy, technical writing, Twitter entries, even writing fiction, and several other kinds of writing.

Article writing can be further divided into writing articles to order for one customer, and writing packages of articles aimed at a particular niche, to sell to marketers in that niche.

Each kind of writing is different, though, so the writer has to vary his technique accordingly. Articles convey information, but copywriting has to focus on the desired end result from beginning to end, i.e. to sell the product. Twitter entries are ultra short, while technical writing demands prolonged study of the subject matter and the ability to make complex issues simple.

Fiction writing is different altogether – easier in that you’re writing out of your own imagination with no constraints, more difficult in that you have to ensure you have your facts right and bring your characters to life.

But writing is not easy, though some writers find it more difficult than others. The worst thing is staring at a blank piece of paper, or a blank screen, and wondering how to start. The true writer never has to do that. He has a better way. He uses his imagination and the words just pour out. He articulates what other people would like to think. He is the mouthpiece of our culture.

Even though some of the assignments he has to do are ghastly jobs in themselves, he has to get through them and give them the same attention to detail as he does the better ones. That’s the mark of the true professional writer.

Philip Gegan

Whenever I feel jaded about writing yet another article or blog post I only have to think about how other people have to make a living to realise how lucky I am. And if you include people from past ages who have had to endure the most foul and degrading work then I really am near the top of the pile.

A few years ago there was a TV series in the UK called “The Worst Jobs In History” presented by Tony Robinson. Each programme covered several jobs endured by some less-fortunate folk of the time, that typically involved the most revolting and often dangerous tasks.

From cleaning the bottom of King Henry VIII to burying plague victims, from collecting human excrement (for its nitrate content – for making gunpowder) to disposing of amputated limbs aboard one of His Majesty’s war ships fighting the French, the number and variety of disgusting jobs throughout history is awesome.

So if your job is simply promoting your company and its products or services through persuasive communication, then be thankful. The worst that can happen is that you get writer’s block the afternoon the deadline expires. And you can even avoid that minor problem if you outsource your writing requirements.

Philip Gegan

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