Working Web Copy

I can answer this in one word. WordPress.

With WordPress, any business can install their own website at a very low cost. They can also choose from thousands of free themes which will give them a professional looking design in seconds. If they want a custom design, they will want to hire a graphics designer, not me. The back end of web design and the writing have always been my specialist areas, not graphic design. That isn’t to say that I can’t make a photo web-ready, but an entire graphic design from scratch just isn’t something I do well.

I do offer to install a WordPress site for you with fleshed-out content pages (up to 5, after that I charge per page for writing services) for $700.00. You pick the theme from the many available, or I can refer you to custom theme design people who can give you exactly what you need if you have something specific in mind. These guys usually run between $100 and $500 for a custom theme. I offer this service merely as a convenience, because I’m hoping that once you have a site or a blog that you’ll hire me to write further content for it.

WordPress is great for you as a user because all you need to do is log in and make any changes that you want to your site on the fly. There’s even a shopping cart plugin available for it if you want to run a store. Everything you can do on a conventional site, you can do with WordPress, and often better than if you just had a straight HTML site.

A WordPress site is for you if you are a small business and you just don’t have the money to pay for a full-scale design and maintenance package yet. If your annual sales are below $50,000 a year, chances are good that you will do fine with a WordPress site. If they are more than that, I have some excellent web designers that I can refer you to that will do a great job for you. If you want a truly great site from a web designer, you have to budget between $1500 and $5000, depending on the kind of features that you are looking for.

If your sales start at $500,000 a year, you should probably be talking to an agency that can produce your print, web and collateral in one shot. They are expensive, but they are also worth it. Don’t skimp out on collateral in the interest of your bottom line; repeated studies have showed that higher quality print and web collateral lead to higher sales.

I have put together WordPress sites for friends and colleagues and realize that it isn’t something that everyone can do. However, it is something that can be done cheaply and effectively.

It wasn’t long ago that everyone who was in the know in SEO-land was merrily chirping that “nobody uses the keyword meta tag anymore”, including myself in a post on Google’s apparent abandonment of the often abused tag.

SearchEngineLand just blew that theory to kingdom come. Apparently Yahoo still supports the oft-derided tag, and with its technology soon to be merging with Microsoft’s Bing, it is anyone’s guess as to what the survivability factor of the meta keywords tag will be.

The lesson to be learned here is that no part of a website’s SEO efforts should be ignored wherever possible. Keep your keywords tag in play, since you never know when you are going to need it.

While many people think that the life of a freelance writer is composed of doing whatever you want followed by a bit of work, the realities are far different. Just as those in the work world, if we take time off for a medical appointment or sickness, we have to make up for it later. Here is a typical day in the life of a freelance writer.

7:00am
Wake Up
Really. We may not have a commute, but we have a lot of work to do so that time is generally filled.

7:30-8:00am
Breakfast. If you don’t want to become a puddle of mindless fuzz by 11:00, that is.

8:00-9:00am
Dealing with e-mails, minor bookkeeping, and any “busy work” that you need to get out of the way.

9:00-12:00pm
Work.

12:00-12:30pm
Lunch.

12:30-2:30
Work.

2:30pm-3:00pm
Depending on amount of work, this break may be shorter. Break for a walk or anything else to get active. A whole day in a chair is not good for your body. Personally, I take small breaks throughout the day and bang on my Wii Fit.

3:00pm-?
Work.

The question mark may denote 4:00, or it may denote 10:00. Frequently, it denotes around 6:00pm for me. If I am sick, I plug away at it anyhow since a sniffle doesn’t mean that I can’t type. I’m a bit slower at it, but I’m still productive.

On weeks where I have appointments for dental or medical purposes, I simply don’t make as much money as I could. Mind you, I do try to put my health before money as I didn’t do that when I was in the corporate world and that attitude had to change.

It is nice to be your own boss and not have to answer to anyone but your clients. I’ve always considered my clients my bosses anyway, regardless of where I’ve been. That attitude keeps my clients coming back to me for their writing needs; hopefully you are one of them or will be eventually.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do.

I’m not going to lie. Like the rest of the free world, I am addicted to Mad Men. I mean hooked. So it is no surprise that I found this awesome article which interviews George Lois, one of the Kings of Madison Avenue in the 60′s. There are so many tidbits in here that you just have to read it. Some:

• “What’s the Big Idea? It’s a point of view. Mnemonic visuals and words. When you think of a brand, you should immediately understand it from the advertising attitude, from the words and visuals.”
• “I saw copies being made on a Xerox 914 and thought it was miraculous. If you saw that first copy come off, you got a hard-on.”
• “You can’t test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre.”
• “The computer has played a role in destroying creativity with the Photoshop. Everybody thinks they’re a designer.”

George Lois is best known for his groundbreaking Esquire magazine covers.