Here's a great infographic I found about freelance writing careers. If you're interested in knowing a little bit more about our lives, read this.
FYI, I tick most of the boxes so it must be true! Please include attribution to Freelancewritinggigs.com with this graphic.
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Christmas is perhaps the best time of the year to employ all your marketing know-how and really go in for the kill when it comes to your advertisement campaigns. Everyone is already on the search for presents, beauty treatments, dresses, hotel stays, spa days and the latest gizmos, so all you have to do is make sure what you’re offering catches their eye before anyone else. Here’s how: - Get found on Google More and more people are heading online for their Christmas shopping, and Brits spent as much as £968 million on Cyber Monday alone this year, an increase from £720 million in 2014. That’s why it’s important your business is the first they find when they Google what they’re looking for. Preparation for this takes months, with careful SEO techniques employed to ensure you rank highly in online searches. Tricks such as the right use of keywords, regular blog posts, and having a strong social media presence all help boost your rankings so start thinking about introducing these into 2016’s marketing campaign to capitalise on next year’s online shop. - Produce Christmas content As well as looking up gifts, people will be searching for Christmas-related videos, stories, images, recipes and so on. So make sure you have all the relevant copy on your site in time. You might want to encourage your readers to bake something new for Christmas Day or remind them to book their fake tans for their festive parties. Whatever it is you want to sell this season, have blog copy, Facebook ads, landing pages with tips and hints, banners, and social media chat at the ready so you can give your potential customers what they want. Christmastime isn’t just about gifts and cards, and consumers spend a lot on all the frills over the holidays. That’s why it’s a good idea to have content that reminds them what they may need or want to make their Christmas stand out. - Don’t oversell People spend a fortune at Christmas, with M&S revealing the average cost of Crimbo is £623, more than a third of which (£236) is on food and drink alone. Therefore, you can expect to receive a higher level of interest in your products and services than at other times during the year – because of this, it’s worth easing up on the hard sell. Consumers will come to you – especially if they have children and several expensive presents to buy – and they’re more likely to take you seriously if you aren’t pressurising them with one-time offers and guilt-ridden soundbites about treating their loved ones. - Don’t forget your mobile content I know I can spend hours running around shops only to find myself clicking on my phone on the way home to find the presents I missed. Mobile-commerce is huge during the festive season, so if you have a site that crashes on mobile phones or content that cannot be easily seen on handheld devices, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. An IMRG report from February 2015 revealed 45% of e-commerce traffic in the UK is through smart phones and tablets, and this is sure to increase during Christmas as people (like me) panic search for gifts while they’re out and about. Not only should your site be easily viewed, but you should also produce mobile-friendly content – short blogs, articles with bullet points and headings, and features that don’t have too many videos or images that will take a wile to download. - Prepare for the new year
You might be getting into a Christmas frenzy as December gets underway, but don’t forget the new year is just around the corner. That means you need to think about Boxing Day sales, New Year’s resolutions, gym memberships and healthy eating plans (for your readers, not you). The start of the year is when people cut back on their spending, so if you want them to sign up to your services or products, you need to really produce content that will encourage them to buy. January deals and prizes are therefore always popular, while your content should focus on things that consumers will be looking at – essentially, articles that give them tips on how to detox, get fitter and healthier, look better and younger, and save money for the next year. - Think about Christmas 2016 You might not be buying your 2016 gifts just yet (although, I have to admit I do get a few bargains in the New Year sales!), but it’s not a bad idea to write down ideas you may have for next Christmas' campaign. There’s always so much to do around the festive season, so making sure you’re organised, you start your strategy early, and introduce Yuletide stories in drips will mean your marketing for Christmas 2016 could be your best yet. If you want help with your Christmas 2015 or 2016 campaign and need a copywriter to produce top-quality blogs, features, landing pages, e-letters, social media outreach or print literature, get in touch with us today. It's not too late! Businesses thinking they can do their own copywriting campaigns is a challenge I face every day at work. It's so hard to explain that while everyone who can read, speak and write has the tools to be able to produce their own marketing literature, not everyone knows how to use these tools effectively.
Without insulting potential clients, I have to tell them that copywriting is a specific skill that I have spent many years learning how to perfect, and a lot of time gaining good qualifications and the top grades to prove my abilities are worth paying for. At the end of the day, if you want to see real impact with your marketing, your web content or your blog traffic, there's no substitute for a professional copywriter. This is a quote that I find really useful with my copywriting. As someone who used to write length, prose-like features, I often scribbled down many paragraphs before I got to the point.
Now, don't get me wrong - I love my old travel pieces, anecdotes and personal blogs. But copywriting is a completely different skill set. To be a good copywriter, you need to get to the point. Fast. You need to address the reader and tell them what they want to know as quickly as possible. No one has time to read 'unnecessary words' anymore (although, it pains me to call any words 'unnecessary'). I still have to pull myself up on this sometimes when I get carried away with a piece that I'm really enjoying, but I have to remember giving the reader what they want and the client the results they expect is the most important thing. Like I said, copywriting really is a skill and it takes years to master the art of getting the information, the sales pitch and the tone across without the reader even realising they're being sold to. For more information about our copywriting and editorial services, click here. Mark Twain couldn't have been more spot on with this quote. So much of good written work is about the editing and that's where most people get it wrong, thinking their copy is good enough when it's only in its raw state.
In fact, even copywriters have to proofread, spellcheck, break up sentences, change paragraphs, and take out superfluous words in their copy. But the end result is crisp, clear content that engages the reader. If you think your editing is letting your business down, don't fear as we can help you whip your words into shape and make them count towards keeping the reader interested and attracting new customers. Contact us here or take a look at our services for more information. One of the most important skills of copywriting is turning something quite complicated into something easy for the customer or client to understand.
While the world of finance, mortgages, politics or technology may be straightforward to you, to the general public it can be a minefield. That's why it's often better to get a third party to write content for your business, as we can do so in a way that they will understand - simple and clean cut. Your aim is to get your content to reach thousands of people and the only way to do that is to cut the jargon and speak to them in a language they are familiar with. You'll find simple sentences, straight-to-the-point facts, and publicising the most relevant information are what will target your clientele best. For help on doing this, click here. Have you seen the number of businesses using Halloween as a marketing tool these days? The marketing side of me is proud of how many companies are latching on to the obvious interest of this holiday - particularly among families - and using any excuse to sell their own brand. I'm also going to use this time to advertise my company - encouraging businesses to use Halloween as an opportunity to look at their websites and see if they need to enlist the help of copywriting professionals such as ourselves to fix their dated, inaccurate or badly written content.
Providing blogs, newsletters, news stories, landing pages, web pages, Facebook ads, social media campaigns, e-books, white papers and so much more, we can sort out your website right in time for the Christmas marketing campaigns! ;) This is a great quote that really sums up the importance of content marketing. Anyone who doesn't understand its value in the online world should remember how often we use internet searches, how huge the likes of Google is and why we all got excited when we could start to ask Jeeve all those questions. Without content providing the answers, none of us would be searching at all… And just imagine living like that in this day and age! Of course, the value of good content should also be recognised in this quote as well. If we all got rubbish, uninformative and uneducated answers every time we Googled something, it wouldn't be long before we stopped looking anything up. The knowledge to provide useful articles and the ability to write them in an engaging manner is why good content writers are brilliant at what they do.
Here's a great article I also found on ProCopywriters.co.uk as well that sums up some of the difficulties for working for yourself as a freelance copywriter. Enjoy!
One of the biggest mistakes small companies make is thinking they can do their content marketing themselves. This quote sums up my belief that not everyone is a storyteller, not everyone can write, and (disappointingly) not everyone can spell. And it is these things that you need to produce a professional, effective and engaging marketing campaign, website, leaflet, blog or white paper that will capture your target market. So, if you want to attract more customers or clients, get a professional copywriter on board to tell the story of your product or business in a way you'd never be able to.
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Natasha Al-AtassiRead my thoughts and ideas on the latest search engine updates and copywriting trends that could improve your business marketing plans. Archives
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