Rules of a Copywriter

 
 

The work of a copywriter requires specific accuracy and precision. And so I decided to develop some code of rules, standards, techniques and methods to help us write professional advertising texts.

Basically I collected the information from my friends, colleagues, world experience and even from my own reflections. As a motto to my code of copywriter rules I took words of Jeff Stark, the editor at “Saatchi and Saatchi”: “No one has a monopoly for truth”. So, let’s think and create together.

The art of the copywriting is one of the most intricate arts in the world.  As in every profession there are some indispensable rules that every copywriter should stick to in order to impress his reader and produce appealing content  What are these well-known yet so often forgotten rules that every copywriter should follow?!  One should be as much precise and straightforward as possible in the writing of your text. Your text should have coherent and logical style. There should be some definite order in which all your message is written. Moreover, you should always visualise your audience in front of you and stress the most important points of your message.
In writing of the advertisement try to answer several important questions before you start devise and design the structure of your web site.

Make it easy to read. You message must have just one important point. It is not advisable to include several points in your message. Despite the fact that this is an advertisement and some exaggerations are possible and some specialists even encourage them, your message must not contain outward lies.  If the reader suspects that you are lying he will not be inclined to take your words and might even doubt the credibility of the whole company you are working for. The message must be written in simple, easy to read and understandable style. Do not patronise and try to have honest and equal dialogue with your customer. Do not be very technical in the writing of your message. However, it might be advisable to include some technical terms in your advertisement, otherwise write it in more general terms, as your message might be read by the person who is not familiar with technical details.

Check your text on grammar and spelling mistakes before you are placing your message on the web site or submit it to the advertisement. Do not use too many words; try to be as succinct as possible. Your message should be memorable. Talk directly to the reader of your advertisement. Try to use such words as “you”, “your” as much as possible, as the advertisement that communicates directly with your customer is more appealing.

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5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

 
 

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top.

Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR 0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

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Cashing In With RSS Feeds

 
 

You may already know that RSS stands for Remote Site Syndication, but what does that mean to you and more importantly, how can you use RSS to help you make more money? 

Simply put, RSS feeds are written in a computer language called XML, a special mark up language much like HTML. This means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

These readers are subscribed to certain RSS feed URL’s and constantly monitor them over the Internet, alerting the user when ever any new information has been added to the feed. So, how can you use this to your advantage as an internet marketer?

Here are the most popular ways to integrate RSS feeds into your marketing effort:

You can use RSS to supplement any email marketing you are currently doing, take advantage of RSS feeds to drive traffic to your blog or sales site or create your own RSS feeds so your messages and information show up on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

Although many marketing gurus will claim that email marketing isn’t dead, with the advent of increasing spam complaints and filters coupled with the threat of viruses originating from an email, more and more people are leery of even opening your email. So even if you have a large email list, the likelihood of your emails being opened is becoming increasingly slim.

With RSS, your messages won’t ever get filtered and they will have a much higher chance of actually being read vs. email. Your marketing results can only be better when people actually read your message. You can even incorporate autoresponders in conjunction with RSS.

Including RSS feeds on your content site or blog allows you to add fully dynamic theme-related content to your web pages making your site or blog very popular with the search engines. The constantly updated content is exactly what the search engines crave and helps increase your search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your page.

Probably the best way to use RSS to help your online marketing efforts is to create your own RSS feed. This way your information will be published on any website that is using the RSS feed you are supplying that information to. There’s even automated software to submit your RSS feeds to the various directories that supply the feeds to marketers using them on their websites as described above.

RSS is still a relatively unknown method of driving traffic to websites, but is becoming more popular every day. As an internet marketer, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of this new technology before the rest of the online community jumps on the bandwagon.

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