Working Web Copy

While a group hasn’t taken direct responsiblity for the hacking of Twitter on December 17th, 2009, it is clear that it is a pro-Iran group. Techcrunch postulates that these incidents will be fewer and further between with the hiring of new security experts and engineers at Twitter.

Given its participatory nature, Twitter will always be a target of hackers. While the attempt could have been made by a pro-Iran cabal, it could have just as easily been any number of groups that may try to galvanize the other side of the issue with such an action. Who knows.

For me the big takeaway was that if you use your Twitter password for other accounts, now would be the time to change that password on those other accounts and Twitter. It took me a few minutes, but it is possible that it saved me a world of grief. I advise all of my clients and friends to do the same.

In all the cacophony of tweets and Twitter, we’ve forgotten about Facebook as anything more than a method of communication and a means to play some online games. Why should we still care about Facebook?

People in all age groups still log in to Facebook almost daily to keep up with friends, check messages and play games. Some are even using Facebook messages as the primary communication mode with family and friends over e-mail. This makes the audience large, captive, and easy to target.

If you have a small to medium-sized business, a Facebook group is still a good idea. If you have a larger company, a Facebook fan page in addition to a group is a good idea. If you are trying to reach customers within a specific geographic area and demographic, there is a lot to be said for advertising on Facebook to establish brand image and drive sales.

In the end, we produce more valuable and in-depth content and communication on Facebook than we have yet to realize on Twitter. While ads are probably the best avenue to explore on the popular networking site, a group and fan page are free to start.

Back in March of 2009, I spent approximately one solid week putting together a massive post called “The Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter”, which you can see a link to on my portfolio page. While some areas of the post are dated now, Twitter has become an integrated part of any online marketing plan, and it is still useful.

Bewilderingly, many business owners still dismiss Twitter as a fad. The application would not have grown so fast or be in use by so many people if it it was simply a fad. I’ve made so many personal and networking connections on Twitter that I can’t even count them. You wouldn’t even really count me as a “power user” either; I only do a few posts a week, usually throughout the course of one day. Those few posts, along with publication of my Twitter user name on my website, have netted me 840 followers to date. (@angelawest if you want to add yourself to that number).

That is really all it takes. Empower a few of your employees to tweet from the company Twitter account a few times a week, and you can start monitoring the results for yourself. Just follow the one golden rule of Twitter: Thou Shalt Not Tweet Crap. If you just had a peanut butter sandwich, nobody wants to know about it. If you had a bagel from a charming little deli that nobody knows about yet, they want to know. It’s pretty easy to qualify what is and isn’t Crap just based on your own common sense.

Customers always appreciate interaction. Twitter also reinforces your brand by reminding your clients that you are there, which is something you only got from ongoing magazine ad campaigns in pre-internet days. Only with Twitter, the same branding doesn’t cost thousands of dollars.

Update: Just a few weeks later, I’m at 1030 followers, and I haven’t even published any super popular articles in the last few weeks. Just saying.

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.

Here’s the final answer in a video from Matt Cutts. While keywords are still important in site copy, they are not important, to Google anyway, for site ranking.

Check it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to read the article over at Newsweek called “It Pays to be Nice“.

Now that is out of the way, let’s talk about what it means for setting rates. I’ve long thought that being transparent and open about rates is the way to go, at least for me. There is a lot of debate on this in the industry, the main argument being that you will cheat yourself if a company has set a budget for a lot more for your writing services. My significant other and more besides have called me naive and “too nice” when it comes to this aspect of my business.

If you look at my rates, I don’t think I am that generous. I charge just enough to make a living when you factor in items like benefits, pensions, and ancillary expenses that companies usually pay for a staff member, and that I do pay for myself. I am up front about publishing them, which is the important thing.

This all fits in with the “being nice” philosophy. I have been in the corporate world where I have been encouraged to “play chicken” with what the clients are willing to pay and then set the price at that level. Whether or not it is an accepted part of doing business, I never felt honest participating in those practices and I won’t do it in my business. I have my own business simply because I didn’t like a lot of the less human aspects of the corporate world, and want to bring that humanity back to my dealings with even larger companies.

I’m not going to brag, but so far it has been paying off to be nice. I haven’t been without business except maybe a few days in the summer when I wanted to be. I think the world can work together transparently and I think that most companies, since they employ humans, prefer to work this way as well. If that is naive, so be it; right now I’m being nice, and I’m getting paid.

I saw those words today on an insurance form that I’m about to sign off on, and I had a lot of pride in myself after reading those words. It’s not that I’ve never smoked. I smoked like a chimney from the age of 18 to about three years ago, when my significant other was diagnosed with cancer. Not lung, but still. Didn’t need to take any chances.

Smoking used to be a crutch, a way to self-medicate in moments of stress or pressure. Not only is it much healthier not to smoke, but I find I am psychologically more healthy since I’ve learned to deal with stress and pressure without the crutch propping me up.

I am aware that the years of smoking may have already taken their toll, but still – “Female, 35, Non-Smoker” looked pretty good today.