Life is not a spectators event. You must participate. You either live it making things happen for you or live it allowing things to happen to you.

The year gone by... and to look ahead..!

Another one bites the dust...

Not the right euphemism I guess..!

Another year goes by and well, looking back on it... progress is still minuscule...

By me, for me, the progress has not been satisfactory, however, the better news is that I have stumbled on a lot many opportunities that I have taken up. Working on them to build a better year ahead.

This year has seen many a awesome changes across almost all spheres of life and I am sure we will be seeing more. If change is progress, the world has certainly progressed with Obama going down the political rankings and Anna going up the same..! If we were to go by opinion, Obama still stays in position and Anna still in his coup. So, progress by all means stays relative and bound by political and geographical parameters..!

Many a names have been etched in memory - Shammi Kapoor (the original Yahoo aboriginal), Dev Anand (the forever young hero who had an unparalleled fervor for living..!) and many more..! Don't come to my mind.. no more..! Their contributions to mankind have been jaw-dropping..!

If sharing means anything anymore, across boundaries, I would love to share blessings and good wishes with everyone I know and their families. May the new year be a new dawn and help all of us focus on making our lives and the planet earth a better place to live..!

Senses Vs Search Engines – Making your copywriting cope..!

This is something like Bruce Willis doing the impossible – stopping a meteor from crashing on to the planet we live on... earth... To say the least, he was way out of his niche… as far as I understood he was an oil tycoon trying to trigger a nuke in swinging gravity… all to make sure that he portrays himself as a responsible citizen to his son-in-law. Seems to be a little too far-fetched, don’t worry; I am no film critic, nor a die hard fan.

As you can understand, it is all a matter of interpretation. Many of us did not think in the same terms when we watched Armageddon, did we?

A copy that is well-written appeals to human senses, the basic foundational reason why we write copy… to sell, what else?

However, would the same copy appeal to search engines? This is one question that fails to excite the right thought process amongst internet marketers. Today, the competition in any virtual business niche is making sure that all internet marketers get thousands of “SEO articles” written and submitted to further thousands of “Article Directories”. Keeping aside the “reach factor”, is it really helping? Reach is of no use, if it does not result in response, the right response, does it?

Some say it does help..! If the articles are good and informative, it brings in a lot of traffic. How many or how much converts is visible in the lifestyles of such internet marketers, are they making money or are they spending almost whatever they are making?  We need to consider two aspects of such copywriting before we go further…!

What is a good and an informative article?

Well, I guess the answer to that would be an article written in proper English that has no grammatical or spelling errors and has some information that pertains to the niche. This is the answer any internet marketer or a virtual businessperson would give you..!

How does that help?

Considering this from the traffic (or visitor) perspective, when one writes 100 articles about “quitting smoking”, how much information would be repeated? This is anyone’s guess. So, if a visitor reads ten articles, probably he has read them all and even if he misses a little point, I don’t expect that he would go through the rest of the 90 to find it. What does a visitor (reader) think here? If the article(s) he has read are really, really good, he would visit your website through an embedded link. A buying decision here is a longer story..! Believe it or not, it is a war out there…!

How to win the war?

The answer obviously would be niche dependent and of course, I am not in the right position to answer this. However, there is one rule that I read somewhere about Google. It says “Write for the user and we will take care of the rest”. Trust Google and many internet marketers would say eh..! Well, this response is not too difficult to understand. They think that the position they are in (spending so much money writing content, submitting and practicing SEO) is due to Google and its spiders. No, absolutely not, this course of action has, as far as I know, never been prescribed but practiced by each in their own way, out of their own discretion.

Writing, changing content and appeasing the user are good marketing practices.

However, getting 100 articles written for $1 each (remember, these will not pass the grade to appease an educated user) is surely a bad practice compared to getting 10 articles written for $10 each.

As far as my experience goes, a user who reads any of the $1 articles has a 0.1% of visiting the website that they were written for and a visitor who reads any of the $10 articles would have a  25-30% chance of visiting (remember these are my calculations). Conversion is entirely a different factor. Coming to million dollar question… how to write a good copy?

The answers would again be wide and varied. I will describe my experience on this, point by point.

a.       Writing good copy means choosing the right words. When I write a copy, be it an article or the page content, I need to think, explore and understand the kind of visitors who would visit the website. I call this profiling. Once I profile the user, I write for them, in their language that would appease their senses. I don’t need to appease everyone, only the customers who need to “quit smoking”.  I would use words that appease to their senses – words like statutory warning, cancer, smoking for fun, grass, why we smoke and so on. Google calls these words semantics. No wonder Google also has a concept called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). So, the keywords need not be “quit smoking’ and “quitting smoking” or “no smoking”. I am sure many of us know this. But we need to understand how many of the $1 article writers understand this and how many think in these terms. So, write for the living and not for the dead (bots, crawlers or spiders, whatever you call them). Oops, wrong word – “dead” arises a morose feeling in your mind, doesn’t it, I should have used “non-living” instead. I am sure you are getting the drift.

b.      Understanding a little psychology could be an advantage. For example, if someone is trying to “quit smoking”, he or she knows and understands why they should do so. When I write an article that says “10 advantages of quitting smoking”, most of the target audience will not read it although many an internet marketer would say that it is a great title. But if I say “Are you struggling to quit smoking, a few tips”, it may not sound like a great title to the marketers but most people would read it. And if it has the right tone and the right content, you have a guaranteed visitor. If you look at this from a writer’s point of view, the first topic would be very easy to write, the second would be time consuming and would need a lot more research. No wonder then, the first article is a $1 article and the second one is a $10 article.

c.       A little pun and using metaphors keeps the reader interested and hence, it is important that an article is embellished with 1 or 2 of them. A good copywriter is also a good storyteller. So, telling a story (a short one) convincingly is a good technique to attract more readers to the website. A little humor is a requirement to keep the visitor in the right mood to make sure that the reader visits and buys. Once this happens, it would only benefit your bottom-lines (as in business). However, do not use too many metaphors and make sure that you keep the line of action for the reader simple and straight.

d.      Do not use too much jargon in your articles. There is no guarantee that he or she would understand all of it. Let us consider the following sentence… (I read this on the internet, somewhere..!)

“As per statistics it has been established that 54% of oral cancers, 50% of oesophagal cancers and 70% of larynx related cancers are caused due to smoking. So are 30% of penis cancers and 40% of stomach cancers”. 

A good line and quite informative, I would say. But, reading this does cause a negative psychological effect (too much cancer and too much of disease). And, how many of us what or where the larynx is, compared to the number of us who know what a penis is..! So, use jargon as necessary but do not overdo it. I would rather write that as

“Smoking causes over 50% of cancers that effect many critical parts of our body.”

Simple, effective and conveys the message. A writer may ask here, how can I make up for the word count, that would be a $1 writer, isn’t it? Quality of content and easy readability are more important than the word count, when would internet marketers realize this? Fill up the words with content, not air or keywords..!

Coming to the closing stages of this article, it is not my intention to put down writers or internet marketers. The intention is make sure that the direction they take is proper and effective without wasting time and resources.

All my fellow writers and other internet marketers are welcome to share their comments with me, I would be glad to stand corrected for any mistakes I may have put in here. And, tell me, in fact, make sure you tell me after you read this, would you visit my profile and my websites or not? That would be evidence enough. Remember, this article is completely naked, I have not used any of my website’s keywords here in this article. So, no links, back-links or SEO here, just written with the reader in mind. All the best and do let me know….! This could be the only chance I have to mend my ways J.

SEO Copywriting SEO articles and SEO by SEO Copywriting Online in Calcutta, India

SEO Copywriting SEO articles and SEO by SEO Copywriting Online in Calcutta, India

What makes a good copywriter…

A good copywriter is not born but made…

Yes, copywriting, especially the excellent kind is a developed skill and not an inborn one. It is not necessary that an individual who has a post-graduate degree in English or any other language is a good copywriter and the other side of the coin is that a good or excellent copywriter doesn’t need much of linguistic education to be successful. In short, the attributes that make a good copywriter are his understanding of the niche, understanding of the targeted readers and his life’s experience as a whole. Let us look at these aspects in greater detail…

Understanding of the niche: If one is writing a copy about a particular niche, say the oil industry, the copywriter needs to understand the niche either by experience or by virtue of detailed research. A professional copywriter is not expected to have experience in every niche, so the latter holds good. In essence, he or she needs to have absolutely excellent research skills and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge… The more exposure a copywriter gets to the niche, the better his copy will be.

Understanding of targeted readers: Readers may be traditional as in newspapers or magazines or modern as in internet based publishing. Whatever the category of readers, a good copywriter needs to have a good understanding of his reader base and attune his linguistic as well as expression skills to cater to their tastes and readability. Using niche oriented jargon would help but keeping that to a lower level is advisable. As in the above example, an oil niche professional would understand “slick” differently than a person outside the niche. So, a good copywriter needs to understand his target readers and adjust his style to make the copy look “slick” and make it stick where it should.

Experience: A look or an outlook or an insight into people is very important for a good copywriter. Although, it may seem irrelevant to a new copywriter or one who is not a copywriter, a little experience will prove otherwise… A good copywriter is the one who appeals to all readers to some extent or the other, making the required impression amongst the target audience. To make that impression, he or she needs to understand the mental makeup by putting himself into their shoes. This comes only with experience and this experience is the key to becoming a good copywriter.

Therefore, becoming a good and professional copywriter is not really a learned process but a good copywriter becomes better by writing continuously and by gaining experience in different niches and different kinds of target audience.

Any suggestions.. or any disagreements..

Mail me to argue and exchange ideas..!

Article directories - should we help them make money?

I had a real good brainstorm in the morning, thinking about it, a new way of writing articles with SEO, LSI and stuff but in a way that they need not be submitted to article directories, they should attract traffic by themselves, direct to the website and not via the article dumps. In fact this could threaten the existence of article directories... lemme fine tune and i will keep u guyz posted..!

Honesty.... as in Billy Joel

Hey guyz...

Hope ya all are doin' fine...!
Well, i am doing great and have been using my spare time to learn internet marketing and SEO.
One after another, the research has been quite heavy...!

Lovely niche to work on and i have already began....
There is one part though, i do not like...
After gettin' here i see that there is no honesty left in the big bad world..
as Billy says.. "Honesty, is such a lonely word..."
That's what it remains.. a lonely and lovely word and nothing more..!
Well... internet marketing probably has the highest percentage of liars and cheats.. "and everyone is so untrue"..!

It seems that black hat SEO is more prevalent than Whitehat..!
Well.. good luck to those #$%#'s..!

I am Whitehat and will always be so.. since "Honesty is the best Policy"
Thank god, it is still giving out results for me.. and i am sure it will...
I have actually optimized a website quite well for a beginner..!

Pat me on the back guys...!
I need it.. believe me..!

C ya later, time fo' dinner..!

Been away for long... i guess..!

Sorry guys...

Been away too long.

I had met with an accident and broken my tibia... it is healing albeit a little too slowly for my liking... my writing habits have gone for a toss and here i am...

It wasn't so bad after all, i learnt a great deal of HTML and CSS on the way to recovery and also picked up a few SEO nuances...

The good news is that i have put up two websites, one is about me and the other is about my copywriting. Busy adding content there....

If you get the time, please comment on these and i will be very happy to get your suggestions....!

Bye for now, take care..!

Liar .... liar

Well, Jim Carey certainly was at his comic best in there. But looking at the underlying foundation of the whole storyline, seems that he was addicted to lying. He begins lying when he faces the ultimate challenge - coming up in life.... Let me clarify something here. I am no movie critic and am not writing a movie review.. here..!

Whatever be the reasons, lying seems to be little unfair proposition in the whole scheme of a social network enterprise. If everyone lies, as they do most times, the basic underlying trust people live by is lost... Like, I do not know when my wife would cheat on me, or would cut my throat when i am sleeping... We are yet to stop living because of this menace.

Not that I have never lied... it rather comes quite naturally to me..! But, as a principle, I have never lied for my own benefit, in the sense that I have lied to cover up for my friends or colleagues etc etc... I have never lied to protect myself, since it is my firm belief that I have done what I felt was right and it was never necessary to cover it up despite public opinion - friends, teachers, relatives or parents.

Sound like a revolution...? Attitude..? ... nah... it is a revelation. Try it some time, you might face some fireworks initially but they will iron out like they always do and you would have a much clearer conscience..!

Enough for now, c ya later guyz..!

Well.... The sudden impetus in me

Believe me... it is 10PM and is la-la land time for me. I am still in office and cleaning up the server...
When I suddenly remembered this blog and thought I should give it another post. Truly, the files are being copied as I am writing this...

Ah... what the heck... need to concentrate on that..!
C ya later guyz... dont lose me...