Professional Writing Services from MagneticWeb

Following on from my previous entry, I’m still on the subject of quality content, and the lack of it on so many web sites and blogs.

You may have come across it yourself. You click through to a site where you believe there will be some useful information about a subject you’re researching, and instead of reading something you can understand and follow, you find yourself reading complete nonsense.

How can people produce such stuff and then stick it up on their blog without bothering to read it? Or perhaps they did read it in many cases but still decided to put it up. Either way, it says something about what they think of their visitors.

It’s not just article spinners, which I mentioned briefly in the last posting on 25th May. It’s also another piece of software called “Automatic Content Providers”. These clever programs scour the internet, at the click of a button, for any articles, videos, images or audio files that are on the topic specified. The user then collects and slaps them up on his page, often without even looking at them.

Of course this can be done not just for the user’s own site or blog, but as a “service” for others. A lot of money can be earned by someone pretending to be able to provide valuable content for your site or blog. But if they use these article spinners or automatic content providers then they’re simply obtaining money by false pretences, and not providing a genuine service. Once their customers find out what is happening the game is up and these fraudsters have to look for a fresh lot of victims.

So the moral is to be very careful when you select a content provider for your web site or blog. Make sure you’re getting genuine, original content written by the person you believe to be writing it. No article spinners or automatically generated content.

Philip Gegan

See PhilipGegan.com for writing services that I can supply.

Two things have struck me in recent days while I’ve been researching on the internet. First, the number of different blogs that have on them exactly the same article. And, regrettably, few if any of them have carried the author’s bio box, thereby robbing the author of a link to his or her web site or blog.

The second thing is how badly written most of the blog entries are. In fact I’ve come to realise that many of them are not actually written at all. They’re “spun” by a software program, which takes an article written by a human being and “spins” it so as to appear different to the search engines and article directories, even though it is essentially the same article as the original. It just appears at first glance to be different.

What’s the purpose of this? Well, it enables the original writer of the article to post it, not just once with just one link to his site or blog, but many times, with multiple links to his site or blog, therefore giving it a “boost” in its search engine ranking with a resultant increase in visitors and paying customers.

All article spinners do is take the original article and substitute various words in it for other words with the same meaning, so as to make it a “different” article. But really nothing has changed. No new information or viewpoint has been added. Nobody will gain any additional knowledge or information by reading it. Multiply this by many times – some article spinners boast of being able to “spin” an article by as many as 50 times – and we can see how the internet is being clogged up with drivel.

Take this as an example. I found this recently when researching an alternative health topic.

“To minimize the attack of hay fever, work out a check on what assortment of plants provide off their pollen in the year and while they are flying active during the season within your field of the world, try avoid being outdoors as much as viable. Honey contains pollen as well so maintain away from them.

Hay fever could be treated at home as fine. Prepare 8 oz warm salt water using 2 tablespoons of table salt and gargle it to decrease sore throat.

There are some kinds of medicines obtainable in the pharmacy or supermarkets and always follow a information on a actuality leaflet.”

Can you make sense of this? No, I couldn’t either. In fact it was a pain reading it. The trouble is that software can automatically change certain words but can’t judge whether the resulting sentence makes any sense.

For example the first “the” should be “an”, the word “assortment” was probably “kind” originally, the word “provide” was probably “give”, and “field” was probably “part”. The word “fine” in the first sentence of the second paragraph was “well” in the original article, and so on. As you can see, there are plenty more examples in this short extract.

So an article that made sense as originally written has been turned into gobbledegook by an article spinner, and the person who wrote the original article (or, more likely, stole the original article) has been too lazy to go through the output and make any corrections.

All this is a great pity because it devalues the internet as a source of information.

This is a call for everyone to shun article spinners. They add no value to any article or to the internet as a whole and in the long run they won’t enrich anyone who uses them. They’re a fraud.

Agreed? Let’s hear the views of everyone else out there.

Philip Gegan

What is is that we all want to achieve with our web sites or blogs? There are a number of things, mostly, but what is the one thing above all others that we want from our online presence?

It must be that we want to spread the word about ourselves, or our business, or hobby, or whatever it is that is the focus of our web site.

Of course a business owner wants to make sales and profit, and a hobbyist wants to share his passion, but the only way they can do these things is by promoting knowledge of their existence in the online world. And that means telling people.

What people? Well, your visitors. But how do you get visitors? At this point I could launch into a long posting about search engines, social networking, and so on, but all I want to say here is that whatever means you employ to attract visitors to your web site they have to be persuaded of something.

They have to be persuaded that, before anything else, your site has something for them, most probably information. It may be information on how to solve some problem they have, or it may be simply to find the cheapest price for something they plan to buy offline.

Whatever it is, you have to persuade them that your site is where they can find it. And not only that, but that your site is also somewhere they ought to return to regularly for more information, and that their friends too ought to know about it. In other words, they have to be satisfied that your site is good for them, and a good place for their friends to visit.

You can only do that by regularly posting content that is of value to your target market, whether you’re an online marketer selling information or a keen sportsman or woman promoting your chosen sport.

So whatever you do with your web presence, it’s all about spreading the word.

If you need someone who can spread the word for you through articles, blog posts or simply Twitter entries, then just contact me at magneticweb@yahoo.com.

Philip Gegan

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

“Web content for sale – hire me to create custom articles for you”. Just click here.

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.