Freelance Internet Copywriting

January 24, 2009 By 2 Comments

Today, freelance copywriters are offering more options to potential clients than ever before. The Internet has become one of the largest medians freelance copywriters can use. Since barriers and boundaries do not exist, more and more copywriters use the Internet as a new avenue for freelance copywriting work.

As the copywriting industry continues to grow, freelance copywriters can now reach new markets on a global scale. Furthermore, clients are beginning to prefer freelance copywriters because they’re more creative and productive than other copywriters.

If you own a business and you want to see an increase in revenue, you may want to look into hiring a freelance copywriter to bolster your marketing strategies. Because there are a lot of copywriters offering different services, you should be able to find exactly what you want. Just surf the Internet and look for freelance copywriters, you shouldn’t have a problem finding someone who is perfect for your business.

You should narrow your choices and compare different copywriters to each other in order to find the perfect copywriter for you. Copywriters can do almost anything to help your product be more successful. They can write sales letters, create your websites, and design new marketing strategies. It really depends on what you want and how much money you’re willing to spend on good marketing. Don’t fall into the same trap as so many companies that cut the advertising budget in hard times. Spending less money on advertising will result in weaker sales; so don’t be afraid to spend the money on a good copywriter.

FREELANCE COPYWRITING ADVANTAGES

You probably already know that words are powerful. If you want to improve the quality of your advertising, then you should hire a freelance copywriter. Freelance copywriters will use sales strategies that are proven to help increase the sales of your product.

If you’re considering hiring a freelance copywriter, then you should search the Internet for “freelance copywriter” and examine your options. But don’t go for the first copywriter you come across, you will want to visit multiple sites before hiring someone. This will help you get a good copywriter at a reasonable price.

In fact, there are many well-organized websites that make it possible for freelancers and clients to interact. Elance.com is an example of such a site. These sites can help you find copywriters who are perfect for what you need in order to make your product more successful.

Freelance copywriters can also use these same sites to find clients. They allow you to bid on projects, create a profile with samples of your best work, and they can email you jobs that you may want to pursue.

Hopefully this article has shown you the benefits of freelance copywriting. If you’re interested in learning more, then just search the Internet for “copywriting tutorials” or read some books by the experts. Freelancing can be a very rewarding career, so you should consider researching it further.

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Online publishers need new heroes in the battle for community relevance

November 7, 2008 By 3 Comments

Picking up from my piece on Wednesday….

The Obama campaign did not build its social network in isolation. In many communities, it built upon an existing “netroots” of progressives that had developed over the past several years. That network, in turn, developed in frustration with both the Bush administration, as well as the new media coverage (or lack thereof) of that administration and its Congressional allies.

Markos Moulitsas, a j-school graduate with a law degree and an Army stint behind him, bootstrapped what might be the most influential of all progressive netroots websites, DailyKos. His new book, “Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era” offers a blueprint for political activists, one that well complements the Obama strategies I wrote about on Wednesday.

But Moulitsas’ book teaches important lessons to would-be journalist entrepreneurs as well. Remember, Kos (hey, calling him by his last name just seems weird. Everyone else online calls him “Kos,” so I’ll do the same) got his start in journalism school, at Northern Illinois University, and he’s worked in the newspaper field. At its heart, DailyKos is a publishing enterprise, a 21st century version of the old-fasioned partisan press. And Kos has enjoyed phenomenal financial success with it.

A “seven-figure operation,” as Kos described it, DailyKos is just one site in a wide-ranging publishing network that the Berkeley, California resident founded. Within the past month, another Kos property, SportsBlog Nation, announced a multi-million dollar round of venture capital funding.

The guy knows how to attract eyeballs, exert influence and make money online. I e-mailed Kos and asked him what he thought “Taking on the System” could teach journalists.

“I think the key lesson in Taking on the System to media entrepreneurs is that they no longer are beholden to the old journalistic establishment. They don’t have to get anyone’s permission to start up a new journalistic venture — no editors, no publishers, no producers, no anyone else.

“Of course, without the old media machines to back them up and fund them, it’s a difficult world. But for anyone who believes that people aren’t being properly served by the old media institutions, this is their chance to deliver what people want. Daily Kos is an example of that. And while these entrepreneurs are less financially secure, they can also use technology to accomplish far more at very little cost. I started Daily Kos — now a seven-figure operation — with a free blog account and an $8.95 domain. Sure, it also sucked up a great deal of my time, but it’s amazing how much technology allows you to accomplish so much for so little.

“Finally, it’s critical that these entrepreneurs have a well-defined niche. It helps if it’s an underserved niche, which is what motivated me to start my SportsBlogs Nation network of team-specific blogs (now up to 160 sites). Once you have a niche, it’s almost impossible to not tell a story. But the more compelling it is, the more drama you provide, the more exciting the payoff, the more people will arrive and stick around day after day.”

Two chapters from the book stood out to me for lessons that would apply to news start-ups. In chapter 3, “Set the Narrative,” Kos laid out the importance of story-telling in animating a cause.

“The most arresting narratives revolve around a well-defined hero and villain fighting it out over something uniquely important to the time and place,” he wrote in the book. “When it comes to activism, this usually means that core respected values need to be at stake in order to grab attention and spur action.”

Not just for activism, but for journalism, too. Among the damage that a misapplied desire for “objectivity” has done to journalism is too strain all the emotion from too many news stories. Stuff that reads like a lab report doesn’t excite anyone.

Kos’ six steps toward better narrative?

  • Target your villain
  • Craft your hero
  • Exploit the [villains'] weaknesses
  • Reinforce the narrative
  • Aim for the gut, not for the brain
  • Own the story

    “There’s a big difference between traditional stories and the stories we craft,” he wrote. “Our stories have yet to end. And so as we engage the audience, we give them a chance to help write that happy ending. It’s an empowering effect, giving the audience the emotional investment in the story, and then offering them an active and engaged role in shaping its conclusion.”

    I hadn’t read anyone else make that point before, but I believe it to be the most powerful argument in favor of news organizations embracing interactivity. Yes, our stories, inherently, frustrate the reader with their open-ended nature. But interactivity allows us to overcome that emotional weakness in journalism, and, in doing so, connect our audience to our narratives for the stories in their communities.

    In chapter 6, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” Kos warned of the challenges and mistakes that derail so many activists, as well as journalists.

    His advice?

  • Work your niche (“When you live in a media-saturated world,” he wrote, “it takes clarity of message and specialization to cut through the clutter. If you find a niche that resonates with a wider audience, a niche where you find yourself being effective, exploit that niche.”)
  • Guard your credibility
  • Factor reality into your plans

    “One of the things that I’ve always loved about blogging and the netroots culture is that there’s virtually no danger of living in a bubble surrounded by sycophants,” Kos wrote. “Every time I write anything on my own site, I have dozens of people telling me what an idiot I am. And that’s a wonderful thing. Even if I disagree with them, I’m forced to face the fact on an hourly basis that there are people who vigorously disagree with me and don’t think I’m beyond reproach.”

    Journalists fail themselves, and their audiences, when they retreat into a sealed, insiders-only world of self-analysis. Many of us are well aware of getting outside that bubble, and engaging with people outside of the worlds of journalism and “professional” news sources to get feedback on our work. But many of us also forget the importance of looking outside journalism for guidance on the practice of our craft. Especially at a time when journalism offers so few working models for online publishing success.

    Please do not mistake my enthusiasm for Kos’ advice as an endorsement for making all press partisan. One need not apply the entire blueprint to learn some valuable techniques from Kos’ approach. His advice on emotional storytelling, audience engagement and strictness in record-keeping and documentation will serve well any news website.

    Kos also offered another warning to start-up publishers in his e-mails to me:

    “The biggest mistakes web publishers make is to seek a hit from a bigger blog or site, but that does little to build long-term audiences. You can’t hook people on a story with a one-day spike in traffic. You need to build it organically, over time, by crafting those villains and heroes, and getting people invested not just in the storyline, but in the outcome.”

    We’re not going to learn to become leaders online by repeating the same techniques and listening to the same leaders who created the media landscape that so many of our readers now have fled. We need new heroes to fight the battle of getting people engaged in their communities.

    • Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With: , , ,

    From astroturf to sock puppets: an online news glossary

    January 16, 2007 By 4 Comments

    Last week I met with a graduate student who was seeking advice about her dissertation, which would examine the online news business. One of the first things I told her was to make sure that the people she interviewed meant the same thing as she did when they started talking online jargon.

    “Sometime two people can seem to be disagreeing about something when they really don’t,” I told her. “The only disagreement they’re really having is over vocabulary.”

    As I mentioned in my top mistakes pice last month, publishers and advertisers can mislead each other by using confusing terminology for measuring a website’s traffic. Newspaper website staff can lose newsroom managers they are trying to build a relationship with when they start dropping terms like “open source” and “sock puppetry” in their conversations. And let’s not even get back into the once-raging debate over the definition of the word “blog.”

    So, in an effort to define a common vocabulary for those of us in the news business, I’m taking the advice I gave that student and starting an OJR wiki for an online news glossary.

    Here’s the link: http://www.www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/glossary/.

    As with all OJR wikis, any registered OJR reader may add to or edit the page. So if there’s a term I’ve missed that you’d like to see added to the glossary, please do it. And if you’ve got a better way of defining some of these terms, go ahead and make the change.

    Thanks, in advance, to those who take a few moments to add to the wiki. And, to everyone else reading, I hope that you find this glossary useful in improving your communication with others in the news business.

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