I’ve been asked after about a month-long trial to be a regular contributor to PC World’s Business Center (and yes, Canadians, that is how it’s spelled south of our border). I’m extremely humbled by this and look forward to helping PC World business readers navigate through the choppy waters of tech. You can read all of my posts so far at http://www.pcworld.com/author/Angela-West.

I’ve also created a Facebook page as well. If you want to follow all of my posts, I’ll be posting them up there. The Facebook URL is http://www.facebook.com/angelawestwriter.

If you are a small business, I highly recommend checking out Business Center since the whole purpose of the site is to translate all the goings-on in tech into terms real business owners can understand, and all of the writers on the site do a great job of sticking to this mandate.

There’s a reason that I insist on starting most of my projects from scratch. I’ve seen copy from clients that is “overwritten”. I have to edit it down harshly without regard for the feelings of the client if we both want it to be effective.

Here are a few tips on how to recognize and fix overwritten copy.

Florid Language

I just rewrote a website that I’m convinced Chaucer worked on. While “forsooth” wasn’t being used, it was just a tiny hair away from entering the paragraph. If your language has more flowers than a royal garden, slash and burn until you are left with something a little less heady.

Example: “Our company purveys the utmost in shoe leathers, exquisite craftsmanship is our aim.”
Should be: “We sell expertly crafted shoe leathers.”

Lack of subheads

If your piece is online and lacking the subheadings you see throughout this post, go back and sprinkle them in where it makes sense to do so. This will break up the text and make it easier to scan online.

Slay your sacred cows

If you find yourself spending hours crafting a turn of phrase, chances are good that it will come off stilted and overwritten. “Inspired writing” is something to save for your first novel, not advertising copy.

Don’t be afraid to be casual

Old school corporate language was stilted and boring. It doesn’t translate well into web copy. The same stuff that worked for a bank’s website or marketing material even fifteen years ago will not work now. Clients are younger and hipper and enjoy a fresh perspective, and if you can give it to them you’ll have an edge over your corporatespeak competitors.

Have you got any overwritten or corporatespeak copy that you’d like to have fixed? Contact me and I’ll get you a free quote.

I am pleased to report that I am booked up completely until the end of March of 2011. During this time, I will continue to service existing clients, but will be unable to take on new ones.

If you require web copywriting services, please contact me anyway at info@workingwebcopy.com and I will be pleased to refer you to other web copywriting professionals.

Are you in the Hamilton area? If so, come see my presentation tomorrow night on “WordPress 101″. It isn’t so much a standing up and talking at you sort of thing as it is a hands-on help session with the CMS that we all know and love. If you need help getting your WordPress site off the ground, or have a particular technical bugaboo that is haunting you, consider this the magic bullet to getting it solved. There is a meager cover charge and it is taking place at Hamilton’s arts incubator, the Cossart Exchange. See you there!

I am taking a few minutes out of my busy day to write this post just to make sure you are all aware of something really, really important that is developing in the social media sphere. Reddit is now a vital part of the social media landscape.

Before, Reddit was a nice to have. I used to like to call it “Digg for adults” until the new Digg caused Digg’s user base to migrate to something where they could do something that was the equivalent of the “Bury” function. While this sounds like a negative, this means that there are many more eyeballs on Reddit now than there were just a few months ago and as such you need to make sure that it is in your social media toolkit.

How do you do this? Install a plugin on your blog or website to ensure that users can submit to Reddit. I wouldn’t take away your Digg button just yet but you may want to give it less prominence than it had before. After you write a post, make sure you submit it to Reddit using your submission button. Try to do this daily to become a respected Redditor.

Make sure you submit other items to Reddit as well in addition to your own properties, and participate by commenting in the community. This will mean that your own stories are less likely to be voted down by an individual.

I have noticed real results from promoting client blogs and my own blogs on Reddit. One of them is up by 15% in overall visitors, and that is no accident. Submission to Reddit is the only thing that has significantly changed. Couldn’t you use a 15% boost to your traffic?

Check it out at http://www.reddit.com

If you have a Twitter account, you by now know what a “social media expert” is. They profess endless knowledge of the search engines while sporting a minimal client base and a dubious background. I’m often asked about social media, having a bit of background in this field, so here are some hard facts about it and myths that need to be dispelled.

1. Nobody Can Guarantee Results in the Top 20

The search engine results pages are like waves on the ocean. Any effort at search engine optimization will raise your results, but nobody can guarantee top 20 results without using dubious methods, such as spammy directory listings and reciprocal link programs where your site is being linked to 500 others without your knowledge.

The only thing that an SEO company should be guaranteeing is that they will be spending a certain amount of time on your account for a certain amount of money; it is this time, and not simply entry into their spam database, that will yield solid and lasting results.

2. Black Hat Methods Are Short Term

Black Hat refers to methods such as the ones used above. Some businesses will actively seek out black hat SEO companies in order to get good results, as they want them at any cost. In the end, that “any cost” may be too high. Sure, if you are just selling a flash-in-the-pan ebook or are marketing for a event that takes place on a certain date, Black Hat SEO may actually be your friend. For the average business that wants to rank more highly on a consistent basis, you should not be actively seeking this kind of firm out.

3. White Hats May Actually Be Black Hats with a Mask

Some white hatters do legitimately use methods that may be considered “grey”. Realistically, there is nothing wrong with that unless you are sitting firmly on a very high horse. However, there are some companies out there who market that they exclusively use “white hat” SEO methods when they are actually anything but when you check out their business.

To see if there is some shadiness going on, check out their client sites, and if they won’t let you see their client sites, that is a red flag right there. Check for any links to website directories; a common method used to gain rankings is to turn all of your client sites into a giant link farm that may help client rankings, but will bleed valuable Google Page Rank away from your site because you are linking to an untrustworthy internet ghetto rather than a lovely, trustworthy neighbourhood.

Check also for consistent keyword-stuffed copy on site pages. This was a common early 00′s method to raise website rankings, and many SEO companies still use this outdated and much frowned-upon method. If your words are not human readable, your site is not trustworthy, and people will not buy from you.

4. Real Social Media Experts Offer to Train You

Social media is not a mysterious beast that only a chosen few can master. If you can surf the internet, you can use social media. A real social media expert won’t set themselves up as being a master of an occult art; rather they will be approachable and offer to educate you on how to do it yourself, sometimes for a fee, sometimes as a part of the project that they are working on for you. Granted, not everyone is tech-savvy, but they will at least try to put the tools in your hands that you need to succeed with social media.

In the end, good use of social media such as Reddit, Stumble Upon, Twitter and the rest in conjunction with well-written content will win over both customers and search engines. There are back-end code issues that may be affecting your search engine optimization efforts, and any good web design firm will be able to sort those out for you. If you want me to recommend any, just drop me a line.

I have found Twitter search to be indispensable for my freelance writing business. Whenever I run up against a saturated keyword that has search engine results pages that are polluted by nothing but Yahoo Answers, paid search, and eHow articles, I turn to Twitter search to get some quality results.

One example is the term “green products” or “organic products”. I write a daily blog on green living and search for new and unique green products to share with my readers. I have all but given up on Google as a source now that I have discovered Twitter real time search. The products I find on Twitter are new, they are interesting, and best of all I don’t have to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant search results. They are ALL relevant. This allows me to drill down on my information within seconds, where before it would take me up to 30 minutes to find a good product to blog about.

I find traditional search results are getting clogged with bad content from content mills, enough that I have lost faith in the depth of material available to me on a traditional search. How many of you feel the same way? Here is a list of the sites I am talking about:

Yahoo Answers
eHow
Examiner.com
Suite101.com
hubpages.com

I have consistently found that pages from these sites return results with bad data and worse writing. Twitter search seems like a much more viable option to weed out these bad apples.

On websites where I have had access to statistics, or where my clients have given me feedback, new and well-written content makes your website hits go up.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is that search engines and readers both like it when you keep your content fresh. For this reason, it is recommended that you install a blog on a company site and have someone responsible for updating it at least a few times a week. For SEO reasons alone this is completely worth it.

The second is that what was there before may not have made your offer very clear. What is your product, what benefits does it offer to your customers, and how do they buy it? All important, but companies usually leave at least one of these steps out or make the process overly complicated. If you don’t want to sell online due to vendor relationships, at least offer a dealer locator or some other method for the end consumer to purchase your product.

If you are operating on content that was written for a brochure, particularly a brochure written in the 1990′s or early 00′s, the language is not web-ready. Have a friend or a family member read it, and chances are they will tell you it is stale, sales-oriented, and not informative. For the record, I don’t believe in the old school method of writing brochures that makes them sound this way, but there is an old school that dictates that marketing has to be done a certain way and that is why you see this.

It goes without saying that increased web traffic translates to increased sales, so if you were mulling over whether or not to go for a rewrite, dive in; your bottom line will be glad you did. E-mail me at to get started today.

Have you hit this wall?

You: “You need more content on your site.”

$$: “Can’t you write that for me? I am paying you to do the site!”

You: “You hired me to program the site (and/or) up your search engine rankings, not write content.”

$$: “Isn’t that the same thing?”

When I was working in customer service, people used to call me to complain that their shipments were late. They didn’t care that the problem was with the trucking company or courier, all they cared about was the fact that their shipments were late, which made my company look bad. In their minds, our company and the trucking companies were inseparable. They just wanted someone to solve their problem.

Your clients want you to do the same thing. They want you to solve all of their web problems and drive more traffic to the site, no matter how you do it. Some of them may even be hoping that you are using Black Hat methods, as long as it gets them results.

I’m your ace in the hole. A dedicated writer, researcher, and former web designer who knows what you are up against. You need quality content that is 100% on point and on time. That’s what I do, and you can see from my portfolio that I do it well. When someone needed to have the absolute best descriptions of Tarot cards on the internet, they came to me; and then they came back to me for runes and astrology when the results bowled them over. Another client reported that his hits went up to just under 1000 per day after I started ghost writing articles for his green building blog.

Good content equals eyeballs, and it makes you look like the superstar that you are. Let me help you take your business to the next level, and call on me when your next project needs killer content that blows everything else in the marketplace away.