A piece of web content refers to an article, a blog, or another text-based material which can be used to increase a company’s online visibility and reputation. It can also function as a channel of communication between business owners and their prospective clients. If we may use the famous idiom, it does have the power to make or break a company. Naturally, a good content yields good result while a bad one does otherwise.

If you are a business owner, there are two major ways on how to get content for your site:

Hire freelance content writers

The basic advantage of hiring freelance writers directly is you are given the chance to know the writers personally. While you may not be able to see them face-to-face (because many of them will be from other parts of the globe), communicating with them directly can give you a more “personal” feeling. You can establish a relationship with them which can grow as time goes by and this can— in one way or another– benefit your business.

Another advantage of hiring freelancers is you only pay them when you need their services. This gives you flexibility when it comes to allotting budget, time, and efforts in marketing your business through other means.

Perhaps the only drawback in hiring freelance writers is not all of them are versatile. Some may not be able to help you with the other aspects of site building such as utilization of SEO techniques and conversion tactics.

Hire an agency

An agency for web content is a company which has a pool of writers working in-house to provide content and other services for different clients. They can usually handle short deadlines because there are writers who can divide the labor and get the job done on the time.

The primary advantage of hiring a web content writing agency is it can offer a wider array of services related to web content creation such as keyword analyses and video script writing.

Another good thing is that a web content writing agency is likely to produce more professional articles because they can route copies through other writers (or even editors) for further feedbacks or revisions. The only thing is because they produce high-quality articles, they tend to charge more too.

I’m sharing some of my mistakes here and perhaps you might learn a thing or two from them. Keep in mind that these are my opinions and suggestions and none of those listed here can be considered general truth.

1. Save some money first before doing the plunge.

I did do this, I saved about 2 months of funds for my food, bills, and other expenses. The only problem was I should have saved more! I didn’t start to earn a decent regularly income until after my 6th month of freelance writing. Unless you are rich or you have a spouse who has a regular work, consider saving for 6 months worth of what you are currently getting from your job.

2. Consider every preparation that you do as an investment on a business.

I told you about saving funds, right now I already consider it as capital for your business, not just savings. What’s the difference? When you start thinking of your money as capital, you are treating your freelance writing as a business. And it is really a business and you wil do everything to keep it afloat.

3. Start to scrimp on the first few months.

This is the stage in your life when being a cheapskate is a really good thing. During my first few months of being a freelance copywriter, I spent money as if I had a regular job with a regular, scheduled pay. I kept subscribing on Dofus (my favorite online multiplayer game), eat at fast food chains, bought accessories to my car, and other unnecessary spending. It quickly depleted my freelance writing earnings until my girlfriend (wife now) thought me how to put a stopper on my spending ways.

4. Fix your writing rates before going on full-time freelance.

This is one tip that I would always give to anyone who is thinking of becoming a freelance copywriter. You should have a list of your rates so that each time you get an inquiry for your services, you can easily and quickly respond. What I used to do back then was when someone first asked about my sales letter writing rate, that’s just the time when I started doing research on the going rates for such a service. The same thing happened when some asked for me to write a whole article marketing campaign for him.

5. Invest in quality equipment.

Before I went full-time freelance, I bought a laptop whose brand does not really hold a good reputation when it comes to quality. And true enough it went down in less than a year of usage. And all that I worked on that laptop was my writing jobs and online research. Now I have Acer and Asus laptops and a Samsung desktop.

Becoming a freelance copywriter is easy, earning a good income from it is a different matter. You can make your jump into the freelancing world a success if you are more prepared than I did. I wish you all the luck and I hope to hear from your own freelancing story.

A web content writer creates blog entries, reviews, articles, and other text-based content to make the subject of your site more searchable in the web. This procedure requires identifying appropriate keywords and using them several times in an article so that when someone types the same words in the search engine box, the articles will come high on top.

These days, online business owners usually employ the service of web content writers to generate traffic to their site. These writers use traditional writing methods with some twists to create original and informative content. “Twists” means nothing radical though, it simply means using writing styles, voices, and grammar in a way that’s more appealing to online readers. See, people who search the internet aren’t usually the type who would love to read novel-like articles. They want something brief, straight-to-the-point, and very personal— as if the writer were just talking right in front of them. Nothing too formal, serious, or technical.

Now, while an SEO content writer is expected to direct his or her efforts in making a certain website more visible online, he or she is still expected to do nothing less than what a good writer does. This means that an original, informative, meaningful, and rich content is always of highest priority. The writer must never let the keywords or phrases get in the way in coming up with quality reads. His or her works must always provide what the readers are looking for. Otherwise, the sweat would be for nothing.

If you’re an online entrepreneur and looking for ways to make your business known to a wider range of audience, you should definitely give hiring an SEO content writer a thought. While employing one may cost some, it can prove to be a profitable investment because if you end up working with a reliable writer, he or she can do wonders to your online visibility. This will not only increase sales probability but also allow you to enjoy the feeling of not carrying the entire marketing legwork on your own.

Google is where we go now to look for anything that we want, although the Yellow Pages might be preferred by some because their searches would be made easier because everything was categorized.

I am a social addict indeed.

1. Facebook
I don’t play the games on Facebook, I just find it fun to read my friends’ updates about almost anything that’s happening to them and making a comment or two.

2. Mitsulancerph.net
I drive a Mitsubishi Lancer and love that car. That’s why I frequent this Lancer-specific forum because of all the great tips and recommendations that the members give to each other. I’m not yet an official member because to do so I have to attend a number of meet-ups which I can’t fit in my schedule for now. Nevertheless, if you own a Lancer you will greatly benefit by becoming a member of this site.

3. Yahoo!
I use Yahoo! for two things: email and news reading. But what keeps me distracted most is whenever I feel the need to check on Yahoo! to see if they have any new interesting tidbits there. I find their news selection eclectic but definitely fun to read.

I enjoy doing keyword research (if I am not heavily loaded with other work) and I am using the Google Adwords free keyword tool. I have tried Wordtracker before, but it is not free. So far Google’s tool seems to be working just fine as my clients have nothing against using only that tool.

However, I have just come across a free SEO tool that looks promising. It’s called Traffic Travis. It even got a great rating from Cnet’s Download site. It is not just for keyword research, as it is primarily a good starter all-rounder SEO analysis tool.

I have yet to use it, mainly its keyword research functions. And I might write about it soon whether it could replace Google’s keyword tool as my favorite or it could just be a good complimentary software.

I classify a domain name to be too long when it contains more than 2 keywords in it. Just like this example:

familydentalclinicsaginawmichigan.com

Now that’s not a real domain name. In fact, it’s still available (as of this writing). In my opinion, only those who are completely new into buying domain names, Internet marketing or SEO would use such a long domain name. Anyway, it’s just my opinion and I have this one simple reason:

It’s hard to remember.

A very long domain name is not effective when you are trying to build your brand. It’s harder to memorize and it’s easier to get the letters or the words jumbled up. Just imagine telling someone what your website’s URL is and it takes you a mouthful to say the whole domain name. I bet the other person would easily forget it, unless he would write it down.

I brought this up because one recent client bought a domain name just like that. He’s of a different business and profession but the thing is, his domain name was too long, even longer than my given example. Now just imagine how harder it would get when he put up his new website’s email:

info@familydentalclinicsaginawmichigan.com

I would say, good luck with that.

P.S. I advised him to choose a different, much shorter domain name, but he opted with his first choice.

The following are the top 3 SEO blogs that I recommend to every fellow freelance copywriter:

1. Matt Cutts

He is the head of Google’s web spam team and the unofficial spokesperson when it comes to anything Google and search-related topics. He is always a fun to read, even with his non-SEO blog posts.

2. SEO Book

Aaron Wall published what is considered to be the first ebook authority on search engine optimization, the aptly titled ‘SEO Book’. Just by that name alone he was able to establish a reputation as one of the top SEO experts and has created a successful business around it through consultancy and an exclusive forum only for paying subscribers.

His blog posts are often lengthy but a breeze to read as well as complete with his insights about the SEO topic at hand.

3. SEOmoz

Rand Fishkin and the guys at SEOmoz are among the most unselfish individuals when it comes to sharing their thoughts, opinions, tips, suggestions, and more about anything that is SEO. It is always a treat to read Rand’s entries as he goes all the way creating graphs and doodles, almost anything just to help visualize his ideas.

There are many free word processors, but these top three are what I am currently using. You might ask, why do I need three programs when one would suffice? Well, not in my case. It depends on a lot of things on whether which one I would use, and I have stated my reasons below.

And by the way, although AbiWord and OpenOffice.org Writer each has its own file format, all three word processors are capable of saving in and opening MS Word document files.

1. Jarte

This is what I use when I have a lot of programs opened simultaneously on my computer. Jarte is very light in resources and loads very fast, perhaps because it is based on WordPad.

Another thing that I like about this word processor is that its features are just the basics, the stuff you would often use and none of those that just clutter MS Word.

It also has a nice, and very convenient to use, tabbed feature. You can open a number of documents and each one is on a tab. It will remind you of Google Chrome.

The only important feature that is lacking with its free version is the spell checker. Other than that, this is a great free word processor.

Jarte

2. AbiWord

When I need to write for clients, and therefore I need a more powerful and feature-rich word processor (especially one that has a spell checker), I use AbiWord.

It looks almost exactly like MS Word, that is why there is an easy learning curve. It also loads fast, although a bit slower than Jarte.

If it there’s anything that annoys me, is that whenever I save a document, the first option is always AbiWord’s own doc file format which has a file extension of .abw. I have to do a few mouse movements just to change it to Microsoft Word’s .doc.

AbiWord

3. OpenOffice.org Writer

If what you need is a truly powerful word processor, and one that can match Microsoft Word feature-by-feature, then you are better off using OpenOffice.org Writer.

However, it suffers from one thing that is common with all programs in the OpenOffice.org suite: it takes longer to load. I have read somewhere that it’s because of the big requirement of the suite for the resources of your PC, which actually makes sense because of all the features that you can find in all of the programs.

I use it more whenever I need to create an ebook as I have grown used to its capability to export a document into a PDF. But among the word processors in this list, this is what I use less frequently.

It’s still a great program to have when you have to write more complicated documents.

OpenOffice.org Writer

Freelance writing is indeed a 24/7 job. Why? Because I found myself working even on Christmas day.Well, not the whole day, but for just about a couple of hours as I had to work on an article. When that was done, I rewarded myself with a slice of ham and a nice ube cake.

Yum!

I know you may have noticed that it has been a while since I last posted here. I blame it on my continuous freelance writing work, but more especially, due to my wedding preparations. Now that the wedding is over and I am living a married life, it is time to get back on track with my online activities, particularly my blogging.

So I wish you all a Merry Christmas and may the coming new year be even more blessed for you and your loved ones!

Image courtesy of alicepopkorn