5 Ways to Write Content on a Shoe-String Budget

My Web Writers 

As a business owner you are faced with challenging decisions every day, if not several times throughout the day. Everything from your focus and vision to your marketing plan, each requires significant attention to detail and countless hours of envisioning, business mapping, and collecting data to support the strategic planning that you put into place to live out your company goals and mission.

One of the most challenging decisions that you, as a business owner, might make is how to effectively develop your company’s web site content to increase your business presence, reach your target audience, and boost your business’ performance while maintaining your “shoestring budget.” You know, it comes as no surprise, neither marketing nor advertising come without cost. Lucky for you, however, we’ve come up with five ways to help you write content on a shoe-string budget.

In-house writers: If your company is fortunate to have a marketing department, albeit large or small, using in-house writers can provide you with good, quality content. As a department, your company should identify the goals it would like to accomplish through the use of its content. Will your content be used primarily online, in print, through various direct mail, email or telemarketing campaigns? Once you’ve hit on the logistics, get your team involved. Creating unique and interesting content doesn’t come easier than to involve a lot of different people. Help your team to understand the company’s vision and then let them be the voice of the company. Each person will come with several different and unique approaches to your company’s marketing strategy.  Whichever strategy your team is tackling, monitor and track how successful your company’s outreach is and develop your future plans accordingly. It will help you to respond to the strengths and weaknesses of the department and meet the needs of your company’s target audience.

Contracted writers: In some cases, companies don’t have the staffing to maintain the necessary presence on the web to satisfy their marketing team’s departmental goals or in-house writers don’t quite have a full understanding of SEO.  If that sounds like your company, consider partnering with a content writing agency to supplement or manage your online presence.  Think about your overall space, administrative, and time costs saved when putting together your budget.  You will get what you pay for, so be realistic.  Look for content quotes that are reasonable to the parameters and demands of the project.

For a smaller budget, your in-house writers can begin their script and merely use contracted writers to edit or spruce up content. However, for slightly larger budgets or needs, freelance writers can take the joys of a blank page, use the mastery of their word-smithing capabilities, and turn your would-be dreams into a reality. And all the better, hiring contracted writers frees you and your staff of their highly valued time (especially if you’re likely to struggle at the stroke of the keys).

Content Management Software and Systems: Allow your company to tap into the ready-waiting success of content management software and systems just waiting to be utilized. If you’re not familiar with Hootsuite, let me give you the quickest, easiest one-two facts about it: It’s an A-MAZING must have. Hootsuite allows you the ability to manage and measure your social media networks all in one suite location. You can monitor and schedule social media messages, posts, and tweets for multiple accounts, while tracking any of your company mentions, all with the luxury of analyzing social media traffic. Sticking to your online schedule is simple when you schedule posts through Hootsuite. In fact, when the thought strikes you, schedule your post to appear in days, weeks, or months from the date you actually jot down your noteworthy thought. It’s a business-saver. And while you’re at it, sign up for an easy-to-use, online visibility account that keeps you in the news with PRWeb. Yep, it’s simple. Your writers can produce press releases about newsworthy happenings within your company and then share them with the rest of the world. Anything from a new employee, event, or product can now make headlines with the ease of online viewership. If you haven’t tried them, you should. Content management software and systems make distributing content affordable and easy, and they will make you seem like a genius!

High School and College Intern: Networking with local high schools, colleges and universities can be one of the most advantageous methods for developing content on a shoe-string budget. At most schools and colleges, student interns are nearing graduation and are experienced junior or senior level undergraduate students. In addition to having the benefit of hardworking students, desiring a position to give them hands-on, transferrable skills to carry over into the workforce upon graduation, employers can work closely with student interns to mentor them and provide them with the skills they desire in an employee on a trial-run basis, so to speak. It’s a win-win; students earn college credit and employers have good quality content written typically at no – or a low – cost.

Social Media: It should come without saying, plugging into social media is one of the wisest moves a company can make. Millions of individuals, nationally and internationally, visit social media sites daily. By maximizing your presence in various social media platforms, your company will successfully share your message, content, and company mission with the online world. And while you are building your platform, network, network, network. The more contact you make with the online world, the better you will be at getting your brand out to the world.

Marketing can be a tough hill to climb, but it doesn’t have to be. Utilizing the various marketing measures available to your company can help you take your business to the next level. ~Leah

What is Google Authorship and What Do Writers Need to Know About It?

By My Web Writers

What is Authorship?

Google Authorship can basically be thought of as your online, digital signature that directly corresponds with your Google+ profile, where Google would like you to store your manicured and verifiable online identity. Just a quick search on the internet for “Google Authorship” provides a flood of results explaining Google Authorship as well as how to and why you should use it.

Why is it so important, though?

The simple answer, as well as the most accurate, is that Authorship is important because Google really, really wants it to be. Google decided and decreed its importance and has helped proliferate the internet with what appear to be incredibly compelling reasons, particularly for writers, to use Google+ Authorship.

When you sign up, Google provides a “rel=author” mark up to include on your writing, which then ties back to your G+ profile. This, ostensibly, is to increase quality web content, increase authority and build trust for quality writers as well as protecting your original content and increasing ranking on SERPs and improving CTRs.

Authorship can be thought of us Google’s reward for writers who are willing to put their name and reputation at the forefront for content that they created. It is marketed as a natural continuation of the Panda update that swept through the search engine results and came down heavy on a lot of bad content companies that were heavy on links and light on unique, engaging content that web users were interested in. These articles were most often ghost written by anonymous content writers, so there was no accountability for terrible content and no reward for greatness.

So, as a writer, what do I need to know about Google Authorship?

Remember that web search for the phrase “Google Authorship”?  Ask yourself why the only results you’ll find are ones promoting and extolling Authorship. There are countless SERPs populated with digital-age John the Baptists crying out, “Prepare Ye the Way for Author Rank with your Diligent Use of Authorship!”

The benefits of Authorship are seemingly numerous for many fairly established writers and bloggers. Here is a visual representation of the glory of Google Authorship.

However, what if you are a writer who sells content to a publisher and ghost writes copy for clients?  Those industry-typical publishing companies own your writing and often play a part in editing and promoting your writing (Read My Conversation with Matt Cutts).  At this time, Google doesn’t acknowledge authorship for publisher or business G+ pages.

Reputable content publishers compensate writers for the content at fair wages that intrinsically reward quality insights and creative material (what Google claims you need Authorship for).  If you, oh Writer, happen to earn a living this way, Google Authorship would require you to sign up for a G+ account to use authorship.

Is this truly a “reward” for writers who produce professional and unique content, or a way to promote G+ accounts with the promise of increased SERPs ranking backed by the echo of Eric Schmidt’s ominous remarks at 2013 SMX West:

“The truest cost of remaining anonymous… might be irrelevance.” While unnerving, writers need to be able to question not only the truth of that statement, but any other assertions encountered time and time again both in life on-line as well as off. Without questioning assertions and providing unique perspectives that often challenge the status quo, writers face the danger of falling in line with the current dotcom doctrine, when in reality, no matter how big Google is (and how awesome many of their products and features actually are), they aren’t the boss of the internet – but sometimes we let them think they are.

For more information on Google Authorship, check out a few of our posts (and others) to make up your own mind about how effective Google Authorship will be for your writing and work.

~Sara

What Would History Say About Google Authorship?

How Should My Business Use Google+?

Google Authorship: How to Show Your Author Photo in Google Search Results

Google Authorship for Multiple Authors

Famous Dead Authors’ Secrets for Writing Success

By Sara, My Web Writers Intern

It has been said that writers are born, not made. Some take that to mean that you are either born with talent, or you may as well not try. That’s probably bunk. If writers are born, they are born out of the sweat and tears of determination and practice. Whether you are drumming up SEO content or working on the next great American novel, writing well and employing the habits of effective writing are essential.

First, it’s important to practice.

Practice keeps you in the habit of writing and thinking about writing. Nineteenth century author C.S. Lewis, most famous for The Chronicles of Narnia, says that “what you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write… so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.”

Another prolific writer, recently deceased Saul Bellow, observed that “somewhere in his journals Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig away long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous.” When you practice the craft of writing and pay diligence to it, you grow. Even if you write tweets for a business firm, you are bound to come up with more unique, interesting, and creative content when you practice. Imagine an athlete who only played her sport at game time — she wouldn’t be good at it and would not be long rewarded for her “efforts.” So practice, practice, practice. Start now. Call it writers’ Spring Training.

Having some “filler” in your drafts is o.k.

It’s certainly tempting for any writer to stop when we have so-called “writer’s block.” Larry Gelbart, though, says “don’t stop.” He wants us to put something there and keep moving. Recently I wrote an article on decade themed parties and decided to employ Gelbart’s advice. I could have stopped and stared at the computer screen when I was stumped on what to write about a 1970s party that wouldn’t be a tired cliché. Instead, I wrote, “too much Footloose not enough Studio 54,” and moved on to the 1980s. Later, while editing and revising, I realized Footloose wasn’t even set in the ’70s, but I understood where my mind was headed. If I had tried to flush that out in the first draft, I’d still be writing it. Listen to Larry. Use filler and keep writing.

Beware of clichés.

“Beware of clichés…. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought — even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.”

-Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is not dead (here is his website), but this advice was too good not to share. Clichés are death to all that is interesting. I can’t say that clichés are never ok, because writing, like most art, only deals in absolutes for the strict business of breaking them. That being said, clichés are never ok. “It goes without saying” that the “early bird catches the worm” and “curiosity killed the cat” so a true “jack of all trades” would never to “keep up with Joneses” by recycling tired clichés.

If it goes without saying, then please, please, just don’t say it.

Ctrl-F and Delete those Adjectives

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

-Anton Chekhov

Adjectives are not the enemy here (Hint: its clichés). Adjectives can be a crutch, though. I recently read an article about a mama raccoon saving her litter of baby raccoons during a bout of bad weather. It passed through my twitter feed with the phrase, “mother raccoon shields her litter on turnpike from cold,” so of course I read it. I read it and said “awwww… how heartwarming and precious!” If the tweet had falling back on adjective addiction, I probably wouldn’t have clicked on the link following “Heartwarming and precious tale of courage.”

“Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, ‘please, will you do the job for me?’”

-C.S. Lewis

Reflect on What You Wrote

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell claims that a “scrupulous writer” will constantly, even after every sentence (so definitely before sending that tweet), ask him or herself four questions. I leave you with those four questions to take back to your own stack of papers and document files (and practice!):

What am I trying to say?

1. What words will express it?
2. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
3. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Other Articles from My Web Writers:

Tweet for ReTweets- Twitter Tips

My Favorite Writer and Online Marketing Websites and Blogs

What Stephen Covey Knew about Marketing

Tell a Better Story: Tips and Tricks from Mark Twain

Overcoming the Beautiful Little Fool

Party Crashers App Embraces Digital Marketing and the American Dream

Annual Essay Contests You Shouldn’t Miss

Overcoming the Beautiful Little Fool

By My Web Writers

“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”  ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Image courtesy of CNN and Queen Elizabeth Hospital

Fitzgerald’s line has been turning in my mind like a sweaty, little penny.  After all these years, does truth remain in what Daisy said about her daughter in the Great Gatsby?

No.  Of course not, the entrepreneur in me would say.

But then, I read a post by Jane Copland entitled, Women As Entertainment in the SEO Industry and was bothered enough to start a conversation with her on Twitter.  Jane is a speaker, but has had her share of remarks from men who think it’s perfectly okay to be aggressively forward and inappropriate with an attractive, young woman.   Her post was written in 2011.  She says her personal experiences are better today, however, she actually had a guy on a conference floor yell at her for her stances.

A few days after my conversation with Jane, I saw a news story about two men who were recently fired from their jobs for making sexually inappropriate comments at a tech conference.  What seemed unusual was that the woman who called them out by tweeting their pictures to alert conference officials was fired, too.  Wanting to know more I read Courtney Stanton’s post, A Woman Walks Into a Tech Conference, which highlights a slew of recent, inappropriate gender-related incidents.  Stanton reviewed what happened and linked to Adria Richard’s conference story.  While it appears that Richard might have crossed the line with how she reported the incident, placing her as the focus of the problem is off-base. Look it over and read the eye-opening comments below the articles.

And so Fitzgerald remains relevant.  But, he doesn’t have to be.

I’m pulling out a soap box for a moment.  Please listen up.

If you’re a woman- especially feeling alone in a sector like tech, stand strong for yourself and other women.

You can do it.

Don’t let the remarks of the random knucklehead diminish the respect due to good and decent men.  The majority do what’s right or want to do what’s right. But, if something happens that’s illegal or against your company’s policy, call authorities.

Have the courage to look the guy who’s offended you in the eye and say, “I think you’re wrong here” and then seek the grace within yourself to forgive – if not for his sake then for yours.

If you’re a young man who hasn’t been taught that sexual, juvenile, or degrading jokes, comments, and gestures don’t belong in the work place or at conferences then as a piece of advice, from a Mom raising boys – stop.

Really.  You need to stop.

Find a male counselor or mentor to help you process the issues and your feelings.  You’re probably a good guy who’s lost his way, but the encouraging news is that you can change!

Channel your smart and witty thoughts into developing code, creating business solutions, and figuring out how to harness the intellectual and social talents of your female counterparts.  Then, you’ll be a hero.

Sometimes mistakes are made – on both sides.  Read Men vs. Women in the Workplace for a few insights into working with differences.

By the time you get a little older your perspective begins to change and you grow weary of gender tension.  You have a few kids and you realize how beautiful and precious your girls and your boys are and how you wouldn’t want someone hurting either.

I can only imagine how Malala Yousufzai’s mother and father felt when their little girl was shot in the head by the Taliban for writing blog posts about how girls in Pakistan should be educated.

Her $3 million book deal was just signed to educate the world about the importance of being educated.  Malala is not a beautiful, little fool.

Neither are you.

~Jean

How Do I Become a Writer?

By My Web Writers

Photo by Virginia Hammer

Ernest Hemingway allegedly quipped, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Writing is a hard, often frustrating processes. Nonetheless, for those with the talent and the desire to write, there isn’t much more rewarding. To become a writer, you’ll need more than talent and practice, you’ll also need to find your niche, join a community of writers, and train yourself in the craft of selling your writing to editors, publishers, and readers.

Finding Your Voice

If you study the lives of great writers, you’ll find that they all practiced their writing. A lot. Work on your writing every day, even if it’s only for a half an hour. As you produce more work, even if it’s not good, you’ll begin to notice the techniques you’re really good at and those that still need more practice. More importantly, you’ll begin to learn what your voice sounds like as a writer.

What type of writer you want to be will determine how you practice your writing. Different types of writing careers demand different conventions and styles. For example, if you want to write essays and articles for magazines, read the best magazines out there (The New Yorker, TIME, or major titles in your fields of interest) and study what makes a great article. Then practice. Do research, conduct interviews, and commit yourself to writing an article a week. That way you’ll train your voice and produce a solid portfolio of pieces to pitch to possible employers and editors.

If you want to write poems, books, or other literature, keep up with new titles and trends in contemporary publishing. Learn what is selling currently and consider how your unique voice fits in or fills a gap. Produce a poem, short story, or chapter a week and continue to revise.

Blogging can function as a way to practice and train these skills, too. Post new work to your blog at least on a weekly basis (the more frequently the better), network with other bloggers, and get feedback on your work. (Check out our tips about making your blog a brand.) Focus your blog on demonstrating your particular genre or style of writing. That way you can both work on your craft and on making a name for yourself.

Writers’ Communities

An essential part of developing a writing career is an active writers’ community. One of your most valuable resources is the feedback of other people. Other writers will be able to give you better insights than someone who isn’t thinking critically about writing (or someone who loves you, like your mom). Search your area for local workshop groups or find an online writing buddy. For those striving for a literary career, one of the best ways to really develop your writing is to enroll in an M.A. or M.F.A program in creative writing. These days many successful journalists also have a Master’s degree. Whether you’re already in school, or thinking about enrollment, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference is an excellent resource. Their annual conference draws thousands of writers from across the country to network, workshop, and have fun.

Find Your Audience: Writing is a Business Too

Though a lot about writing has changed since Hemingway sat down at his typewriter, the basic skills for turning your creative passion into a publication or a career continue to hinge on your ability to sell your writing. Writing is an art, but it’s also a business. In addition to daily practice of your writing, you’ll need to learn how to write a query letter in order to find an agent or a job. If your aim is a literary career, practice writing queries, synopsis, and sample chapters. Hand them out to writers in your workshop group and ask them if they’d buy the project you’re pitching. The Literary Marketplace is your guide to finding agents and places to publish. If your goal is a freelance or marketing career, check out our list of  Job Sites for Copy Writers. In the meantime, keep up with that blog to maintain your online presence.

To become a writer you’ll need to figure out how your voice contributes to the existing marketplace or field. What makes your writing worth reading? Continue to practice what makes your work unique as well as strengthening the areas where your writing is weak. Developing an awareness of what your writing offers is a key way to selling your writing in query letters and manuscripts. ~Kasey

Good luck!