Copywriting and WordPress work this week

I’ve been writing some web content for Emma at Chatoyancy, a development company based in Bristol. In addition, I’ve been setting up a new WordPress site for 14Hive, a Sharepoint consultancy. The work for 14Hive will almost certainly carry over into next week.

The remainder of my copywriting work this week has been regular weekly blogging assignments. We now have quite a few clients using this service, so this takes up around two days each week.

Technical writing this week

Mathew has been working on manual updates for License Dashboard this week. Their License Manager product is in the process of being revised with some major usability improvements. We’re expecting this technical writing work to take up most of Mathew’s time over the next few weeks.

I’ve been doing my usual blogging work for cloud computing review site Rated Cloud, although my attempts to review SimpleSignIn and RegsApp have fallen flat. Both companies asked us for a write-up, but neither has approved my request for a login, meaning I can’t follow up and actually cover the sites.

PS. My Evolven review for Rated Cloud was picked up and featured in the Evolven newsletter too.

PR work this week

Did you know we’re trialling a new PR service? We’ve teamed up with Sarah, a freelance PR consultant, and working in tandem on PR work for Love TEFL who are recruiting new teachers to go live and work in China. Love TEFL are dream clients: we always have something new and exciting to work on! We’re expecting to see the company in the national press in a few weeks’ time, and you might see Red Robot Media mentioned on some of the press releases.

I’ve also been beavering away on creating a Pinterest site for Love TEFL.

Any other business

We’re planning for a huge relaunch of our website and services in mid-June, just after we return from a short break. Watch out for more information. The new site looks amazing and will be a huge improvement on the one we have now.

Speaking of holidays: we will be away from 9th until 16th of June. Yes, we do work on holiday unfortunately, although we try to keep it to a minimum.

• Any regular blogging work will be completed the week before we go for a seamless service.
• If any copywriting or technical writing crops up between 9th and 16th June, please drop us a line and we will make sure it gets done in good time.

Finally, I’ve set up our copywriting portfolio on Pinterest. Have a look!

The Penguin update was controversial at first, largely since it put paid to a few ‘cheap and nasty’ optimisation techniques that have been doing the rounds for a while. But this week, SEO websites seem to be coming around to the idea.

Post-Penguin, you’ll definitely have to pay more than a sweatshop wage for quality website content. That’s true enough. But the aim of the update is to increase user experience, and there’s no arguing with that. Besides, really good website content need not cost as much as you might think: many of our clients spend more on their web hosting than they do on article marketing. One of the articles on our blog generates more than 20% of our organic search traffic. As far as value for money is concerned, you simply can’t argue with that figure.

Want to read more? Here’s a great article about the importance of quality web content: Creating quality website content is the new SEO

We work with tiny businesses and household names to produce quality website content. Need a website content writer? Drop me a line today. 

Yesterday we invested some time into setting up a new copywriting portfolio on our website. It’s powered by Pinterest, one of our favourite social networks. The portfolio page allows you to see a diverse range of copywriting and technical authoring content from one tidy screen.

Pinterest is a great site for sharing screenshots and images, so we thought it would be a really good platform to display our copywriting work in a very visual way. Rather than providing flat PDFs, Pinterest allows us to showcase our content writing and copy in context on the page, and it demonstrates the variety of ways our content has been used on a wide variety of sites.

I’m nervous of using Pinterest for social media marketing. I’m not a big fan of the recent pollution of the site by social media marketing ‘gurus’ posting an endless stream of trendy infographics, but hopefully our use of the platform is a little bit more creative. We’re often asked to provide examples of our work in a real-life setting, and Pinterest does that really well. We have also put some thought into the way we’re using the site so as not to spam people with screenshots every few minutes.

We’ll be adding more examples of our copywriting work to our Pinterest boards in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please keep sending your feedback about our work and our website: we’re redeveloping the look and feel at the moment, and your comments really help us to improve.

If you’ve ever needed a word to describe ‘a face badly in need of a fist’, ‘a beautiful girl viewed from behind’ or ‘the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey’, you’re in luck. Copywriters should take inspiration from this excellent blog post: 25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist in English. Thanks to our favourite stationery store Present And Correct for alerting us to this post via their Twitter.

PS. One of our clients, LoveTEFL, are experts in teaching English. In fact, they are currently recruiting wannabe teachers who are taking their first steps towards teaching English overseas. If this post caught your eye and you have a love of language and travel, their free Supported Jobs programme might be of interest.

This morning I read a really good article about headlines. It serves as a great reminder that titles really matter in freelance blogging; tweets and Facebook status updates are quickly washed away in a tidal wave of information. Bloggers need to craft a snappy summary in order to draw the reader and interest them in a blog post. The article cuts a little short which is a shame, but the point is made well nonetheless.

Why ‘Man’s Head Explodes in Barber’s Chair beats Read My Latest Blog Post

We already provide content writing services for several clients on a rolling basis. They organise the leads and resell our work to their own customers.

There are huge benefits to working this way:

• Because we charge low prices, our resellers can pass on savings to your clients as well.
• Our work is of the highest quality, and we provide free amendments.
• You can mark up the price. We don’t set any limits: charge whatever you like.
• Reselling content provides added value and a more complete service for your customers, making them more likely to stick with you over the longer term.
• Offering SEO copywriting or article marketing is a good way to broaden your service catalogue.
• Freelance blogging will tie a client in over a longer term, providing a valuable ongoing income stream.
• Red Robot Media has a fixed team of writers who have written for the BBC, Lifehacker and Ordnance Survey.
• There’s no commitment to long term contracts with us.

Resellers normally resell our white label content writing services after using us for their own copywriting projects. They can assure their customers that we are reliable and our work is of the highest quality. And we never miss copywriting deadlines.

If you’re interested in reselling our content writing services, or you’d like to expand your service catalogue by providing SEO copywriting, we’re ready when you are. Just drop us a line to get started.

For new clients who want us to deliver regular blogs, we’re standardising our invoicing and payments to make it even easier to organise.

• From now on, clients who require freelance blogging services can opt to order a trial piece as a one-off taster of how we work. This trial is provided for a one-off fee with no obligation to continue.
• If you’re pleased with the trial, you can then opt to be invoiced either weekly or monthly for ongoing article writing and blogs – in fact, we can use whatever schedule makes sense for you.
• You can also order several articles at once and use them all without setting up a regular arrangement with us.
• To make weekly or monthly payments even easier, we also now take Direct Debit from UK clients using GoCardless. You can read about GoCardless elsewhere on our blog. 
• If you’re not in the UK, don’t worry: we can take payments via PayPal, and we can even set up a PayPal subscription if you want us to. 

The blogs we write are uploaded to a cloud system. Just login, download and publish as and when you wish – the copyright is all yours.

Blogging for your business can be a chore, but freelance blogging need not be expensive. We think it’s one of the best investments you can make for your website, and we’d be happy to provide a trial piece if you’re interested in getting started.

For more information about our freelance blogging service, drop us a line today.

This blog from BusinessZone is probably the best I’ve read on the subject. Tips include not chasing Likes and followers, and not creating accounts if you have no intention of using them for social media marketing.

Using Facebook as a platform for discounts and surveys is a really good idea too. We’ll be looking at that when we relaunch our website.

How to use social media to win new business: The Dos and Don’ts 

So what’s Penguin?

In a bid to weed out poor-quality web content, Google have repackaged some of their ranking criteria to get tough on underhand techniques. This new release could have profound implications for your website and any article marketing campaigns you might be running. In fact, if you have blogs and articles on your website, you may already have been penalised for bad practice.

If you use articles for marketing and SEO purposes, you need to urgently review the content you’re paying for and make sure your writers know about the new rules.

Article marketing = quality copywriting

When given a list of keywords, a bad SEO copywriter will stuff those keywords into the article, link titles and ALT tags over and over until the content becomes unreadable. Better copywriters naturally incorporate keywords into the content. (Not sure what keyword stuffing looks like? WebProNews has some good examples on their blog).

A top-notch freelance SEO writer knows how to weave keywords into concepts, ensuring that each word or phrase always appears among relevant, meaningful sentences. That provides real value to the reader, and that’s what Google like to see.

The Penguin update places greater emphasis on well-crafted content. Keywords should be supported by related terms. It’s no longer about packing as many keywords into your text as possible, or repeating keywords a certain number of times. And it’s no longer good enough to rely on a poor copywriter for good SEO.

For your article marketing to be truly successful, you need to ensure your SEO copywriter can write to a good standard, research topics thoroughly and gain a solid understanding of the subject before they start to write. This means they will promote related terms among your keywords, giving the copy a more natural feel and pleasing your readers.

(If your article writer is any good, they will already be doing this.)

Duplication and stealing content

Tempted to re-use copy from Wikipedia or ‘borrow’ it from a competitor? Not only is this easy to spot, it will tarnish your reputation if you get caught out. A good SEO copywriter can come up with an original page of content on your chosen topic in a few hours. In fact, we can write a small website for under £100, so cost need not be a barrier. There is no reason to steal content from elsewhere when having your own original content is pretty affordable.

Emphasis needs to be natural

When I started taking on SEO content assignments, I was often asked to bold certain words a few times on each page or place them in italics. This kind of keyword emphasis looks cheap and scruffy, but it’s also bad for readability. Once you notice the writer doing this kind of bolding in a blog post, you know that the real purpose of the content is to attract search engines – not humans.

Again, it’s a question of context. Don’t do anything that looks strange when putting together blogs for article marketing. If it looks weird to you as a reader, it will probably count against you.

Don’t publish unfinished content

There’s nothing more irritating than finding the content you need, clicking a link and discovering the page isn’t ready. ‘Under Construction’ gifs are thankfully (mostly) a thing of the past, but empty pages do still crop up on websites. One of the biggest culprits are small business owners who set up blogs and leave them blank because they don’t have time to write anything.

Don’t be tempted to publish empty pages, and don’t allow key pages to go online with less than 300 words of content. If the copy for your site isn’t ready, drop us a line. We’ll often create the content for an entire site within a week, and we can create a block of articles for marketing purposes which you can then schedule to run over the coming weeks and months.

A word from the experts

Google have published four basic principles to ensure your content is top notch. You can read about them here, but I’ll paraphrase quickly:

First, make sure your content is written for users; in other words, hire a good copywriter who can write engaging articles and blogs that are actually worth reading.

Second, don’t try to cheat by inserting hidden links and strange keyword phrasing. If it looks weird, take it out.

Third, don’t try to manipulate your PageRank by using underhand linking techniques. Don’t pay for links either. Use article marketing and ghost blogging to get organic links from other sites.

Finally, don’t use programs that auto-submit your content to Google.

With good quality content, a well-organised XML site map and a solid article marketing strategy, there should be no need to rely on techniques that will cause problems with your SEO.

The four younger orangutans are more keen on the device than their elders; they tap pictures to request food or medicine. The older ones have little interest in learning how to use a tablet PC.

Elsewhere in America, the Apps for Apes program has been set up to collect donated, used tablet computers for use in animal training and communication. There’s even talk of orangutans being able to communicate with relatives in other zoos using video conferencing tools such as Skype. Eventually orangutan experts like Linda Jacobs at Miami Zoo hope to mount super-durable touchscreens in their enclosures so they can communicate with zoo visitors.

Orangutans at Miami Zoo use iPads to communicate