Tag Archives: Content Writing

How I handle repetitive revision requests from content writing clients

I normally don’t charge extra from my clients for multiple revisions. Whenever I undertake a new content writing assignment I let it be known to my clients that although I charge an hourly rate, once I have submitted a document in its complete form from my side, I stop tracking the time and afterwards, if there are some revisions, I don’t charge for that time.

This can be a bit tricky and counterproductive and you have to draw a line somewhere. Why in the first place a document needs to be revised?

  • It carries lots of errors in terms of wrong data, misspelled words, typos and grammar mistakes
  • The brief sent by the client is not fully used or is completely ignored
  • Something more needs to be added to the initial brief sent by the client
  • Some features need to be added or removed as the client has had a rethink
  • The copy doesn’t carry the needed punch and the client thinks that it won’t make the desired impact

Most of the reasons mentioned above are not unusual and they happen (first reason being an aberration rather than a reason in its true sense) with almost every content writing and copywriting project. It’s fair enough. It rarely happens that the first draft itself is accepted by the client.

The problem arises when, just because I’m not charging, the client thinks that revisions can go on and on and he or she wants to change the document every second day simply because he or she cannot make up his or her mind. This means the client neither respects his or her own time nor mine. Even if you have to change a single word, 5 minutes is the minimum amount of time it takes to make sense of what the client is trying to convey, open the document, make appropriate changes and then send the revised document again to the client. I don’t charge because I assume that if a document needs to be revised, something goes wrong on my side and hence, I shouldn’t charge.

When do I charge for revising the document?

I normally charge for revisions when a document is completely changed. For instance, I have prepared a document according to the brief sent by the client. I have submitted the document for review and while reviewing the document, the client thinks that he or she sent me wrong information and this was not what he or she intended to say. It means I may have to rewrite the document from scratch. I charge for that time.

I also charge if I need to do extra research. Sometimes the clients says, “simply look up the information on the Internet,” but often it is not as easy as it may sound (or conveniently assumed). Searching the right, verifiable information can take up lots of time. That is why, if the client cannot provide me the right information and I have to look it up myself, I charge for that time, and I convey this to my client.

When do I put a stop?

I have been providing content writing services since 2004 so I have enough experience to know whether a client is non-serious or not. You are not gaining anything by making me revise the document again and again. It either means that you have lots of time on your hand or you are not clear about exactly what you want to communicate, and this is not my problem. You provide me information and according to that information I write your content. If there are some writing mistakes, if the content is not compelling enough, point that out and I will try to rectify it to my utmost capacity. But if you’re simply making me change and revise because you want to view things from different angles, then sorry, it takes lots of my time and I need to put a stop.

Have I ever lost a project because I refused to revise multiple times? I don’t remember actually. I rarely work with senseless clients. I will be frank. The most senseless clients I have encountered are the ones I worked for when I used to develop and design websites. Big time wasters.

Content writing clients are more professional. Maybe this is because it is a newly-emerging field and people who want to hire content writers are anyway serious about their business. They know exactly what they want.

Anyway, would I abandon a project midway just because I don’t want to revise again and again and again? Yes, I would. Instead of wasting my time, I prefer to lose money.

Does your business need a regular dose of content writing and content marketing?

Should you regularly write and publish content on your website just for the sake of content marketing? Joost de Valk mulls over this question in his recent blog post.

Being a content writer who makes a living off encouraging people to publish as much content as possible I would say yes. Otherwise, I would say, it depends.

I repeatedly write on my website as well as on my blog that don’t write content merely for generating traffic, unless you earn revenue from advertisements (even then relevancy is very important). But I slightly disagree with Joost, and his friend whose post he has referred to. These guys get good traffic on their websites, and they have done their share of content marketing before they can coolly say, “Oh I hate terms like content marketing and content publishing!”

This is precisely the reason I tell my clients not to take rampant advise on the Internet too seriously, and literally. If you need traffic, you need content, and you keep on writing and publishing content until you have traffic, and then, if you think you have had enough content (on your own website as well as other websites) to get web traffic for a couple of years, may be you too one day can say, “Please spare me your ‘content’.”

Fundamentally I’m not disagreeing with the central theme these two gentlemen are talking about. Useless content is, well, useless. Write something meaningful, and if you are really involved in your work, when you really confront problems and work on solutions, you have something or the other to write about.

So does your business need regular content writing to keep the engine of your content marketing running, or at least humming? In order to understand this you have to understand why you need regular content writing for your website in the first place?

  • You need search engine traffic that actually converts
  • You need to establish your expertise
  • You need to engage with your audience
  • You want people to link to your content

There can be umpteen reasons why you may require regular content writing (just as some people and business may not require this much regularity). The unavoidable truth is, if your business doesn’t enjoy a strong presence on the web (search engine and social media) you need to publish regularly. You need to write content for recognition, in order to cover all your keywords, in order to generate longtail traffic and if nothing else, then just to keep your visitors engaged with fresh, thought-provoking content. If you say your business doesn’t require content, so be it. There are some businesses that don’t require the Internet and websites.

Search Engine Optimization with Better Content Writing

search engine optimization and content writing

Yesterday Business2Community posted my blog post, “Search Engine Optimization with Content Writing” in which I talk about how you can organically improve your search engine rankings by creating better, useful content rather than resorting to unreliable, the so-called, “SEO tactics”. Although there is nothing wrong in making your website SEO-friendly in terms of layout and source code, eventually it is your content writing, at least right now and in the foreseeable future, it is your textual content that ultimately impacts your search engine optimization results.

Should you write content merely for search engine optimization?

Why not? And not necessarily. There is nothing wrong in writing content that helps you improve your search engine rankings. The problem arises when you’re creating content merely for that purpose. That’s when things begin to go wrong. Then you lose your priority and you end up alienating your core audience. Search engine optimization and consequently, rankings become more important to you than providing the right, useful information to your visitors. Getting massive traffic from search engines doesn’t help you much if there is very low or no conversion rate. This, whether you realize it sooner or later, negatively affects your search engine rankings. This is because…

  • You need people to link back to you
  • You need to establish your authority
  • People should feel encouraged to share your content on their social media and social networking timelines

Since all these are voluntary acts, they won’t happen unless you create quality content. Why would people link to you (unless you pay them, and this no longer works) unless they find your information useful and unless it adds value to their own website or blog?

Similarly, you establish your authority by sharing expert advice people can actually use to take their businesses, their personal lives, and even their experiences, to the next level. Building your personal brand these days is a big part of search engine optimization and this can only happen with sustained content writing. Now, when I mention “sharing expert advice” it doesn’t mean that you metamorphose into an expert overnight. It is an ongoing process. You gain knowledge and you grow intellectually as you share more and more with your readers. It doesn’t always have to be advice, you just need to remain in touch, and whenever inspiration hits you, you share something worthy with your readers.

Regarding content writing for search engine optimization, aside from being useful, it helps if you organize your content structure in such a manner that it is easier for the search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms to figure out what you are talking about. It entails using your keywords – both your main keywords as well as longtail keywords – strategically, at proper locations. As I have mentioned in the guest blog post, your primary keyword should appear in the title of your webpage or blog post. If possible, it should also appear in the first paragraph and within the headline tags. If you can manage, while writing content, you can also use your primary keywords as well as longtail keywords in a bulleted list.

Anyway, you can head to the Business2Community link to read my blog post over there and don’t forget to share it.

Why you can’t ignore content marketing as an SEO expert

The title of this blog post comes with a touch of irony. I address you as an SEO expert and then I try to explain why you cannot ignore content marketing. But it is not a complete irony – I still come across well-meaning SEO professionals who think that content is important, but it is optional and good search engine rankings don’t necessarily depend on good content. So this blog post is for them.

You may also like to read Why SEO companies are putting more stress on content writing?.

What exactly is SEO? Is it merely getting good search engine rankings? I remember once a client came to my office and requested me to set his website as my homepage so that every time I loaded my browser, it would increase his visitors count. I asked him what he was trying to achieve by that, and he said, it would instill confidence in his other visitors. When I asked him what effect a higher visitor count had made to his business, he flatly said, “None.” SEO hadn’t become a buzzword back then and nobody on this planet had heard of social media.

Why your SEO needs a healthy dose of content marketing?

I’m not an SEO expert but over the past 12 years that I have spent eking out a living on the Internet I have found out that there are 4 things that decide your search engine rankings

  • The quality of your content
  • General well-being of your website
  • The quality of your incoming links
  • The level of competition you face

The recent addition, the fifth thing that has an impact on your search engine rankings, is your author rank – how much social relevance your name enjoys on the Internet.

The relation between content marketing and SEO

What are people doing when they are using the search engines? They are looking for content in the form of information or entertainment. They seek information to keep them aware, to educate themselves, for researching, to find product or service they need, and to make good buying decisions.

Suppose you get good rankings for “garden sprinkling system” but when people come to your website they cannot make out what you are trying to do. The content is not convincing. Or it is full of errors. Maybe you haven’t highlighed the greatest benefits of the sprinkling system. Are you merely providing information or you want people to buy from you? And if they should buy from you then why? Just because you have got good search engine rankings or your sprinkling system is actually better than the others? People don’t do business because of your search engine rankings; they buy from you when your written content, your copywriting, is able to engage them and convince them.

This is just one aspect of content marketing. Once you have written credible and convincing content you also need to make it accessible to as many prospective visitors as possible.

The relationship between content marketing and quality incoming links

The days of paid links are gone, or going. Google heavily penalizes websites that aggregate incoming links by either paying for them or through link-exchange schemes. People should link to you for the value you provide, in terms of content or branding. Two legitimate ways of getting quality and reliable incoming links are:

  • Website owners, authors and bloggers voluntarily linking to you
  • You write for other websites and blogs and your link appears in the small bio or profile on the same link as credit

In both the cases you need high-quality content. If people voluntarily link to you then they must find something worth linking to. If you write for other blogs and websites then too, they won’t publish your blog posts and articles unless they are of a certain standard.

So you can see, whether you are focusing on onsite or off-site SEO, ultimately it’s the combination of the quality of your content and a well-coordinated content marketing strategy that decides what sort of search engine rankings you are going to experience.

Link building with content writing

Link building got quite a beating after the first Google Penguin update but it is still considered one of the most effective ways of improving your search engine rankings, especially when it is hinged upon quality content writing and well-meaning content marketing.

Why do you need link building?

In case you have been living inside a cave (nothing wrong or extraordinary about that) Google uses incoming links to your website in order to rank it. The more high-quality incoming links your website or blog has accumulated, the higher are going to be it’s search engine rankings. It’s kind of a validation and that’s why linking needs to take place only for the value you provide and no other purpose (for instance, paying websites and blogs to put your links on them).

Link building and content writing

So how does content writing help you in link building? As Google says, people should link to you based on the value you provide. How do you provide that value? By providing valuable and useful content. Why would people link to you if you publish high-quality content?

Writing comprehensive blog posts and articles isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, nonetheless, people want to maintain blogs and websites and they want to publish content on them for the sake of engagement, link building and better search engine rankings.

There are many content aggregation and curation websites and blogs. They don’t want to write content themselves; they want to link to external blog posts and articles, insert couple of paragraphs of their own, and then publish them on their websites and blogs. This way they don’t constantly have to scramble for new ideas. They don’t even have to hire content writers in order to create original content because instead of having to create content, they are aggregating good quality content from other websites and blogs. They want to become a resource, creating further link building opportunities for themselves.

This can work to your benefit. If you can write content they are looking for, they are definitely going to link to it, creating lots of back links in the process.

Of course regular content writing doesn’t just straightaway lead to back links. For example, you may feel discouraged after publishing 20-30 blog posts or articles without getting any back links. Link building doesn’t just happen; unless people find the content written and published by you, how can they link to it?

Herein comes content marketing. Write enough content and then make it easier for people to find it. One way of achieving this is keep on writing on your own blog and then letting the search engines index your content randomly and then presenting it to their users according to their own judgment. This works in many cases, but it may require lots of writing, even to the extent of creating 300-500 blog posts and articles before people begin to even notice you.

A better option is, aside from creating those 300-500 blog posts, disseminate what you have written and published through as many channels as possible. These days you have Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and various other platforms and channels where you can promote your links so that they begin to get noticed by people and some of them may start linking to them. Even search engines these days list content from social networking websites on their natural search engine result pages. So constant content writing and then sharing your links on social networking platforms can create lots of link building opportunities for you.

One of the most widely used link building methods through content writing is guest blog posting. When you write for other blogs, they include a small bio of yours in which they also include a link to your website, blog or one of the inner pages. Since you should only guest blog for reputed blogs, this can bring you great link building benefits.

In the beginning this may seem a bit difficult because it is upon the sole discretion of the owner of the blog whether he or she wants to publish your blog post or not. It will help you to first understand what sort of content is published on that blog, what sort of language is used and what is the general flow of the content appearing over there. You can also spend some time interacting with the stakeholders of that blog via Twitter or Google Plus because then they will be more eager to publish your blog posts.