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...

Moods and Swings… What am I made of…?

Been a long long time since I have written anything… The adrenalin just doesn’t seem to flow…Now that I am back… its time to get to work again… I have been thinking… What makes me tick…!

After careful analysis and rueful internal conflicts over a period of the last few days, I am yet to pinpoint the “tick”…

Money… nah..!

I spend as it comes and never did save a dime.

I always had money problems… didn’t have enough when it mattered…

But really, that never did matter to me… until it suffices in the role of a tool that enables me to do what I want at my whims and fancies…

Success… Partly..

Success being a relative issue with many individual perceptions, success has never driven me far. Yes, being successful as per an average human being’s perception is important… That I am … thought wise, work wise and any wise… but not money wise J

Probably because many of my relatives and friends have branded me a failure in the past has something to do with this… It is my objective to showcase how wrong they were and how mis-perceptive they have been…

Ambition… Yes… That’s it..!

I am an archer and ambitions that I have for myself go very far.. Although my arrows will not travel as far as nuclear warheads… my ambition is to make them surpass the distance.. but not faster.. Slow and steady wins the race…!

Despite all heroics during my teen years, my parents have always encouraged me to commit my own set of mistakes, although the world still criticizes them for it. They have been a very strong driving force behind my partial success and I attribute everything that I have today to their perceptions, encouragement, motivation and the never-say-die attitude they have inculcated in me..

The result is that despite all my failures, I never quit…

Other factors…

Mainly my little kids who look up to me for all their intellectual and physical needs. They are absolute motivation personified for me. I need to set an example for them, as in being a human being first and a successful human being next.

Then is my wife, who has been through all the thick and thin until now… how much more is another ill-quantified question though.. I know she will be around, only if she could cut down on the nagging bit and be a little more supportive… She is more a friend than a wife and I thank myself for it ( I made a wise choice) (a little selfish… egotistic… well I have earned it I guess)…! She needs to shed the negativity and be more positive and she has to come through the customary perceptions and be more open to new concepts and objects in life…

My life is almost complete as I perceive, but there are new horizons to conquer.. My wife needs to come up and encourage me… I am losing my motivation now… What more to live for...?

Well, what’s above is only the current perception, and it changes almost every second… new ideas, new motivations, new objectives….

Whoa… what a car… Rolls…. I want that..?

C ya ltr guys, need to follow that and get one for myself…

Well …. Well, this will appeal to most men of today, not because of inherent personal traits but because of what the world has come to…

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde – who else..!

Blame it on values, blame it on upbringing, blame it on education or blame it on Rio, the sole ideology of being a cynic has its roots in the negative influences that we go through most of our lives.

Believe it or not, despite making all efforts to be positive and optimistic whatever the gurus teach us, the negative influence always takes the cake due to its roots being in the subconscious, all across our lives.

Weed it out..! How? The million dollar question… Cynicism comes from shallow thought process combined with the negative influences in our lives. Instead of weeding it out, we need to outgrow it.

Success begets success, money makes more money and so cynicism breeds more negativity. The vicious cycle needs to be broken through a latent thought process.

No wonder we feel refreshed after a holiday…! On a holiday we may miss work, but we do not miss the environment that we are used to. The subconscious at work, we are refreshed because we get a short reprieve from the negative environment.. nothing else.

Don’t believe, think and let me know if I am wrong…

See you are already growing up…! Don’t get me wrong, I am also a cynic somewhere..

Men and Hypocrisy

Have you heard a drunkard blaming the last drink that did him in?

OR better still

Have you heard a man complain about the impediment his woman creates in his professional path to success?

Well, the drunkard never knew what hit him when he had his last drink, in fact the situation he finds himself in is his own making and fails to realize that drink by drink have cumulatively done him in, not just the last one….!

Success, is thus a combination of many failures and the lessons learnt from them.. Only if, only if men could learn…!

And, coming to the man’s blame game on woman..! How in the world, would a woman impede in his profession, if she does not know what he does. How does she come to know, on the conjugal bed? or in a drunken stupor?

Whatever the sources, men should be responsible for their own actions rather than blaming their woman for their purported failures.

Hypocrisy has become a habit and that too an inherent one, where most people today do not realize that they are practicing it. They do it just because everyone else does it.. blame it on others..! Even here.! Believe me, there is no better source for unhappiness.

Simplicity in thought and action could get one far, far away from hypocrisy, far away from following what has been done by other and of course, far away from the convoluted thought processes that some would like to think their domain. The ideal man is the one who does not follow others but follows his own and then sets the right course for many others.