Beyond Words

One of my greatest frustrations as a freelance writer is the prospective client who believes he can get a page of web content for under $10 and expect  it will be ‘good’.  All I can do is laugh… and sigh. No one gets good content at that price.  And, everyone wants good content for their website, newsletter or blog. Actually, no. Not really. There are clients who believe that basic SEO work is all that’s needed- you know the guys. They’re the ones with a list of keywords and instructions to insert phrase A 3 times and phrase B one in the last paragraph. Do it fast, get the commas in the right place and get your $9 (which, by the way, is big money to some of these guys).

As I made my way through some business reading this morning I came across Search Engine Land for the first time. Wonderful content and this article by Ian Lurie caught my eye.  He captures the primary reasons to hire a quality writer, a content strategist. Like me, for example.

Here is an excerpt from  From Garbage to Gourmet: Fixing SEO Content Strategies

You have to stop serving garbage to your visitors, and to search engines. Here’s a couple ideas to get you started:

1. Write stuff that hasn’t been written before. There are already 999,999 articles about SEO and title tags. Try something else, or a new spin on your topic.
2. Be interesting. Put some thought into how the article is put together. Use visuals where it helps. Use humor, even.
3. Hire quality writers to write quality stuff.
4. Ask your visitors and customers what they’d like to read. Then write it.
5. Follow production best practices. Use good line spacing and typography. Place subheads to organize your story and make it easier to scan. A 500-word article vomited onto the page with zero formatting makes it look like you don’t care. If you don’t care, you don’t deserve to rank.
6. Brainstorm and maintain a list of headlines you can assign to writers.
7. Assign target topics and phrases to specific pages on your site. Think through how you’ll interlink new content with those pages to build authority.
8. Integrate content into your site. You probably won’t make much progress if you hang a bunch of lousy articles off your site like some kind of growth. Content has to be in the flow of a normal visitor’s movement through the site.

In short: think about it. Make content strategy part of your overall Internet marketing strategy and invest in it. You can’t outsource your writing to eLance for $5 per article and expect progress. Nor can you somehow automate or fake your way into the rankings. Yes, there are always the lucky few who manage it. But it’s not the norm.

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Think about it. It seems so obvious. Content should be relevant, readable and of value to your readers. The days of poorly written, stilted, almost nonsensical writing are gone. It’s worth your time and your money to pay for a few well-written paragraphs on your website, in your article marketing and blog. Yes, it will cost more money.  Take the long view-look to build your site’s reputation. Show off your product in a way that lets customers know it’s good. Good products deserve good promotion. You don’t really think the Mercedes Benz company hires a $9 an hour writer, do you?

If you’re in the market for content, feel free to give me a shout.  Here’s where you can find a sampling of my client work.

photo from Wayne’s eye view on Flickr