The Art of the Landing Page

Most people use landing pages for sales websites, leading customers into the websites via advertising and then using the landing page as  “reception area” to move customers around and turn leads into conversions ( or whatever the sales talk is) I don’t sell anything , but I understand very well what the purpose of  a landing page is and how important it is to be clean and direct with the person who has landed on your website.

I have a q whole section on landing pages in one of the modules in the Writing for the Web course I teach for SA Writers College.

People don’t read on the Web. Study after study has shown that less content on a landing page leads to higher the conversion rates. Ruthlessly edit your text down to simple headlines and short bullet lists. Cut out the self-promoting marketing speak that people will not read anyway. Detailed information can be linked to on supporting pages.

These words by Tim Ash in his excellent article The Art of the Landing Page create a bit of a dilemma for us writers because it just about breaks our hearts to know that people don’t really read on the Web, doesn’t it?

But think about it – the smart thing to do is to distribute your writing tactically on the website – that’s all.

Filed under: Writing , karen lotter, landing page, SA writers College, the art of the, Websites, Writing for the Web

Good Places for Freelance Web Writers to Earn Money

Once you have learned the basics of SEO writing , then it is really just a matter of practice. You need to get a job at a contents site like Suite101.com or Orato. com and write and write. Both these “magazine type” websites work to a high level, offer training material  and guidance and have editors available to keep the standard of the contents pretty high and also uniform.

One also learns a lot from the other writers you work with on the forums the sites usually provide.

Both these sites are difficult (not impossible) for South African writers, because they pay via PayPal. The South African Government, for some bizarre reason will not allow its citizens to be paid this way, but it is possible to arrange with a friend overseas to keep your money.

One of my colleagues from Suite 101, Angela England has written a great Squidoo lens (that’s what they call a page) about this very subject. Websites that Pay Freelance Writers

I think the most important thing to know about web-writing, like this is that is a a long game. You are not going to rich over night, but if you are persistent and work at it and keep on building up your volume of work, you can make a decent income.

Filed under: Writing , Angela England, Freelancers, Orato.com, Squidoo, Suite101.com, Websites

Keywords – Not Easy to Write a Good SEO Blog Post

When one starts writing for the web, the thing you worry about most is keywords. At first it seems so easy. Then it seems virtually impossible to find the right keyword or keyword phrases that are going to make the  the search engines happy and bring readers to your pages in droves.

I recently told a student that learning how keywords and key phrases work is not really something one can explain – you can show someone how they work and then the other person just has to keep on doing it till they get it right.

It’s Like Learning to Ride a Bicycle

It really is like learning to ride a bicycle. I can explain to you theoretically how to ride a bicycle, but you have to actually get one and learn to hold on and balance and fall off and get back up and practice over and over again.

Learning how to use keywords effectively is a matter of practice. We can read the deluge of stuff on the Web, and we will only know maybe 20 percent – the rest is a matter of trial and error.  Making mistakes and doing better next time is the only way to learn. And  then just as you think you know the rules, they change.

But don’t worry too much,  SEO and keywords aren’t everything  -  good writing is… well, good writing and that’s what will keep people coming back for more.

Educate, Entertain, Engage and Enrich Lives

I found a great post by Patsy Krakoff   7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords.

Patsy has very good advice:  “Step #6 is the most important to keep in mind. Do this over and over again. Educate, entertain, engage and enrich lives and your blog posts will come up in the search engine results. If you’re doing that, and your keywords are where they’re supposed to be, you’ll be successful in getting found online.”

Filed under: Blogging, Keywords, Writing , blog posts, keyphrases, Keywords, SEO, Writing for the Web

Printable Blogs from PrintFriendly

Now this is a great idea – printable blogs.

I have so often wished I could just print out a blog post so that it looks like a real document, without the sidebars and all the other goodies on the page.

The fact is that so many online sites are not really print friendly. What usually happens, depending on how the page is constructed, is that you end up with a few pages with bits and pieces of the page.

PrintFriendly helps you save money, frustration and the environment. All you have to do is enter an URL of a webpage and you get printable version.

I found out about it via Mashable. Pete Cashmore says: “If you want, you can go one step further and remove the images from the post. You can also download the content as a PDF. Neat!”

Filed under: Blogging, Uncategorized , Mashable, printable blogs, PrintFriendly

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac

* Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

* Submissive to everything, open, listening

* Try never get drunk outside your own house

* Be in love with your life

* Something that you feel will find its own form

* Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

* Blow as deep as you want to blow

* Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

* The unspeakable visions of the individual

* No time for poetry but exactly what is

* Visionary tics shivering in the chest

* In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

* Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

* Like Proust be an old teahead of time

* Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

* The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

* Write in recollection and amazement for yrself

* Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

* Accept loss forever

* Believe in the holy contour of life

* Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

* Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better

* Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

* No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

* Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

* Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

* In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

* Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

* You’re a Genius all the time

* Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. His famous novel, ‘On The Road’ was finally published in 1957. Read more about Jack Kerouac.

Filed under: Writers, Writing , Jack Kerouac, Modern Prose, Writing

Facebook Manners and You

Sometimes it’s an issue of lack of technical know-how that causes people to behave badly on social media sites like Facebook; other times it’s cultural stuff – what is ok in one culture is taboo in another. But there are also just people who have no manners, on Facebook or in real life. I

I was delighted when I found this little video Facebook Manners and You – a 50′s style mini-movie about foolish Timmy and vengeful Alice and how their  (mis) behaviour on Facebook led to tragic consequences.

Filed under: Social Netwroking , Facebook manners, social media

Searching for and Keeping Track of Comments

In the previous post I talked about keeping track of your contents using Google Alerts,  and this time I want to take it a step further and tell you about Backtype.

To be quite honest I’d never heard about it, but I was lurking on Twitter and saw Paul Jacobson’s post  Be Part of the Distributed Conversation. Now that interested me. Paul is always interesting and I like spreading the word … and being part of it.

Backtype is a search engine for comments. It allows you to  fine tune your settings so that you can receive updates how and when you want to.

“BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you fill out the “Website” or “URL” field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet. If you don’t have a website to use when you fill out comment forms, sign up and use one of ours.”

But if you really want to know more read Paul Jacobson’s great post that explains in detail the working of Backtype and its Twitter sib – Backtweet.

Filed under: Search, Social Netwroking, Twitter

Keeping Track of Your Web Writing Content

When you become a web writer you take a big leap into a world that in many ways resembles the Wild Wild West when it comes to lawlessness. Although many countries have Internet legislation, it doesn’t really have much punch and because the original owners of websites can hide themselves behind layers and layers of routing and rerouting – proving ownership and guilt becomes almost impossible.

Know the Signs When  Your Article Has Been Stolen

So you’re a web writer who writes an article that is well researched and you post it on the web where it is earning money for you via PPC ads that are doing what they’re supposed to do. You watch the pennies come in and suddenly the stream dries up. If you are new to the writing for the web game or you have low self-esteem, you will probably think people have just gone off you or that they don’t like your article anymore.

But those of us who have been around the block a few times immediately suspect that your article has been hijacked – either used by some idiot blogger or website owner who just didn’t think what he/she was doing and thought that if they used your article as it is with a link to you it would be fine.

Or else a thief has stolen it, as sure as he or she breaks in to a house and steals your property.

There are a few things you an do, so I’ll be writing some posts about them.

FairShare and Google Alerts

I’ve just read about a  new app called FairShare, developed by Attributor which offers a free and easy way to find out if anyone is using your content.

It takes just a couple of minutes to register a site with FairShare, and you can add multiple sites and blogs once you’ve registered the first one. Go and check out how it works.

The other one is to get yourself hooked up with Google Alerts.

My colleague at Suite101.com, Mia Carter has written an excellent article How to Use Google Alerts for Web Writers.

All Mia’s Articles on web matters are worth reading – she is also a petcare expert, if you want to know anything about rats or dogs.

Filed under: Writing , content, fairshare, google alerts, web writing

Improve Your Writing on Blogs

When it comes to improving your writing, it isn’t just about good grammar or tenses or imagery or all those things people seem to think make their writing good or interesting.

I found this post on Problogger, one of my favourites – I subscribe to an e-mail newsletter and check out the interesting posts every day.

Anyway, this one immediately caught my eye: Six Very Official Ways to Improve your Writing it said so I had to check it out. The tips were written by Shannon Paul of the Very Official Blog.

Take a look at both of these  blogs  and subscribe. They are excellent and always offer interesting and relevant information for bloggers.

Anyway, back to the issue of improving your writing. Shannon’s advice is great:

1. Stop Trying to Sound Intelligent

You already are smart so stop trying to sound smart. So many people craft elaborate sentences with bigger words than they would ever use in conversation. If you have to use a lot of flower language, jargon or adjectives, you’re trying too hard. Choose your big words wisely. Blogs are not publications, they are conversations. Good writing is simple, but it’s hardly simple to write simply. Unlike speech and other forms of non-verbal communication, writing is a wholly unnatural activity unnecessary to human development or evolution. Give yourself a break and know that good writing is a process that must be practiced to be mastered.

Now read read the other points, apply them to your writing and see the difference.

Filed under: Writing , improve your writing, problogger, Shannon Paul, writing advice

Transition to Writing for The Web isn’t Easy

I think experienced writers sometimes have a harder time learning to write for the Web.

When you have been working as a journalist for many years and have been relatively (to very) successful, it seems like a slap in the face to be told by a 20 year old with bad hear and piercings that your can’t write.

Writing for the Web is Another Story

Ok, I’m exaggerating as usual, but writing for the web is another story, as they say in the say in the boonies.

When you’re writing for the web, you have to work with keywords and linking and mostly you have to really, really know your audience. Then there is the exciting Google Trends, which isn’t much use for South African SEO, but it is compelling enough to keep me messing around with it for a while most days.

Read the article It’s Web 101 for this Experienced Intern in the Los Angeles Times. It tells the story of 55 year old Lois Draegin, who, after being laid off from a six figure media job, took on a job at Woman on the Web (WOW).

“In the past, she hadn’t bothered to learn such skills as writing tags and URLs because she was paid to think globally about the direction of her magazine. Now she had to think globally not only about each topic but about every word she wrote in the URL, headline, subhead, tag and links in the story.”

That’s about it. Ask me, I started writing for the web professionally (that is for money – I blogged relatively succesfully before)  about two and a half years ago.

And I learn more every day.

Filed under: Keywords, SEO, Writing , Google Trends, WOW, Writing for the Web