Forum Moderators: not2easy
A good place would be here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I suspect that a lot of the members here are professional copy writers.
Good luck,
Ivana
[edited by: paynt at 8:54 pm (utc) on Mar. 27, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry no direct requests [/edit]
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[edited by: paynt at 8:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 27, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry, no url's [/edit]
I know exactly what you're asking for byepolar, we can all benefit from more folks with these skills. What would help is if more of these talented people would start posting here, not with self promotion but with information.
Posting is a way for people with these skills to let us know they have them.
Content writing is not necessarily that much of a specialty - but writing copy that converts is worth a lot. Three years ago, $150 an hour was not uncommon for a copy writer who was experienced in technical marketing on the web. So even in our post-dot-com-bust era, $100 sounds like a good price to me.
I have been doing seo for an attorney whose site was crammed with tons of legalese and dull long droning paragraphs. He insists on maintaining these pages, and they do have a value for the visitor who wants the facts on this particular kind of law, but I have added pages which are "come on" pages - designed for the short attention span and to get them to request more info. These link to the longer more detailed pages. My web logs show the long dull pages have far less visitors!
-webwoman
I also think that, ideally, someone who is a web-savvy writer should know a bit of HTML and CSS. They will know what kinds of things can be done to make their content more scannable and more modular on the rendered page. A cross-disciplined writer can be a big asset.
For instance, knowing how the visitor's eye will be drawn to more prominent features on a page, a good web writer may well suggest how to make certain lines promionent -- a hanging indent or a run-in head for an important and interesting point. They may suggest that entire blocks of text be indented, or given a subtle background color, and so on.
There's another area that comes up in writing for the web, and that is the more frequent use of nouns, rather than pronouns. Because web visitors are often skimming and not reading, when their eye does get captured by something they may well not have read all the earlier material on the page.
So the reader may not know at first what "it, this, that, she, they" refer to. Sure, a motivated reader can back up to find out. But it's often a good idea to use the actual noun -- especially in the first sentence of a paragraph.
This is a kind of redundancy that a print-oriented writer might avoid. However, it not only helps the reader, it can also help the search engines.
I don't need a professional copywriter. I need someone that can write for the web.
This is simultaneously vague and derogatory. Your statement is similar to saying, "I want someone with the skills of a chef but at the price of a french-fry dunking teenager."
I find that is generally the problem when you write for the web -that people who hire you don't appreciate your skills!
They are quite happy to admit that they can't do it themselves, but at the same time paradoxically their attitude is something like "it can't be that difficult, why charge for this service and why does it take more than 5 minutes."
Someone I know once said that people outside the web-industri think that working on the web is like flipping burgers in McDonald's.
Ivana
The part about bulleted lists, paragraphs, etc., is referring to being able to format the text so that it's easily readable for the web, which is different from print.
But for style and specialty, there may be two different kinds of writing being referred to here. We generally think of copywriters as writing advertising copy meant to sell, but there's also writing that's more informational in intent. For presenting technical, medical, or product information specifications, that might be in the realm of article writing, which is more expository, rather than copywriting in the sense of writing sales copy for marketing.
Either has to be formatted because people read differently on the web, which is the technical and aesthetic side of it, the physical presentation part, but that's different from what the goal of the writing might be.
Expository writing for articles - just presenting information - and marketing copywriting are different disciplines with a different skill set and a different type of pay scale. I've seen one site where someone who writes copy designed to sell charges $1,500 per page - and gets it. An article writer with more of a journalistic or informational bent wouldn't get that much.
Hmmm...Makes sense. I have recently been hired to write webpages for an insurance company who wants to beat out one particular competitor so is re-designing and re-writing his entire site. His site is nowhere on the engines (white PR Google bar) and I must admit that he doesn't seem to have a clue as to what he actually wants the new text to do. This thread has given me some ammunition to clear that up with him.
I guess I should educate him on seo - but he's not my client, and the person who hired me is marking up my copywriting and selling a whole package that he has to farm out, my writing being one small part (He's the guy's network geek).
-webwoman
Here is an example of how someone managed to get a lot of text on one page and make it readable:
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The only difference from the above and what I need is that I would want to separate out the pages if it were that long, and I would want the writer to fill it with all the facts/research I send him/her. He/she would put (#) after sentences and paragraphs and put a "References" at the bottom.
So I am looking for ways to translate a lot of heavy, documented research to a web-readable article.
<snip>
[edited by: engine at 3:45 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2003]
[edit reason] no urls, thanks. [/edit]
Fundamentally I don't think there's any difference in the types of "web writing". Remember, the Internet, despite its marketing/eCommerce uses, is still used to relay information between users.
In form, all the various types of "web writing" are the same since they all have to overcome the same limitation: being read on a computer screen.
Some of you have talked about web content's scanability, and even though the content's owner might have a greater objective of getting visitors to actually read longer content, the scanable text must contain relevant information or site visitors will not find the website useful.
As for the cost difference between web marcom and editorial content, I think that's due to the content owner being able to use the marketing copy to make money.
Editorial content doesn't make money in and of itself. Even in the print world magazine and newspaper publishers make the bulk of their money from advertising, not from subscriptions.
Just a few thoughts . . .
-jlr1001
