Content has to be powerful

Newsletter is totally dependent on its content and its relevance. Know what you wish to say, followed by the art of saying it. Know what you wish to convey in a specific month of the year. Suppose you are a restaurant owner and you wish to promote your mocktails during summer, then convey the same in that month’s newsletter. Pick up a topic each month and relate it to your product or service.

Know your audience

Define you target audience before starting with your newsletter. Know demography, psychographic construct of you audience. Knowing more about them will help you to develop content of the newsletter while keeping tone, manner, and mood of the newsletter apt. Suppose you are selling an anti-ageing crème to the middle aged women, you should know how to approach them, what should be your style of communication and the like. You can’t afford to lose their interest because of inappropriate style.

Claims come with research

Don’t make big claims without supporting source of facts. Do ample research before making statements. This way you will not land up into problems too. Include facts, statistics, graphs, expert opinions, quotes supporting your research. Such data always build credibility. But don’t forget to mention the source.

Interesting heading

It’s good headlines which instantly draw attention towards the newsletter. Make sure the headline is extremely hard hitting and catchy, evoking curiosity. To make newsletter easy to read break the content into few paragraphs with sub headings.

Audience friendly lingo

Make sure your newsletter has audience friendly, easily comprehensive language, which people can relate to. Avoid technical jargons, too long sentences.

Proofread is important

A newsletter filled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes is highly avoided. Apart from the writer, ask someone else to do the job. Mistakes show writer’s lack of concern, interest, and unprofessionalism. If a brand is laughed at, it is hardly taken seriously. So avoid this.

Now get started with it.

Master the art of writing for web

Writing for web is remarkably different than writing for print, as the attention span of people on the web is pretty short. You need to write using bullet points, headings, subheadings, images, etc.

Master the art of writing headline

A headline is very important in increasing the open rate of your content. You may get the best ranking for all the keywords, but if you do not have an attractive headline, your article will not get read. You should know how to write killer headlines.

Learn a bit about keywords and SEO

A little knowledge of SEO and keywords is required for all online writers, as keywords are the basis on which the entire web is organized. You should educate yourself on these two.

Prepare a portfolio

Writing is an art, and you are an artist. And an artist who does not have anything to show cannot support his claim of producing a fantastic piece of art. You should, therefore, prepare a portfolio keeping everything that I talked above. This will be your asset that you will need to show your clients.

Write a cover letter

A cover letter is like a direct sales letter. It either persuades your prospective clients to see your portfolio, or it can bore them to death. Many a freelancing assignments are made or broken at this level only. So spend good deal of time in creating a killer cover letter that can literally pull your clients with hands and make them read your sample articles.

You should follow the above given suggestions to start a freelance career. You can add some more items to your preparation, but you should not remove any. Each one of them is important. Very important!

Better Website Copy Writing Tips

• Your copy should not be visually heavy. Make the copy easy to scan. You can do that by dividing copy using sub-headings, and bullet points.
• Keep one eye on the target audience and another on the matter you want to convey. It is necessary to strike a balance between the two.
• Always remember, in writing style is so important that at times style, in itself, becomes substance.
• Add relevant “call to action” at important junctures in your web pages. This will help you increase conversion.
• Do not talk about attributes, talk about benefits.
• Build the story until it reaches to climax in the last line where you should add the ultimate call to action.
• Do not make pages multi-focused.
• Define model target audience of the website before writing copy for them.
• Use short sentences and short and simple paragraphs.
• Keep the content jargon free.
• List the benefit.
• Make the benefit as clear as possible.

Copy is what determines the future of the website. The more time you will invest in creating the copy, better will be the future of your website.

It will not be wrong to say that the online media is more or less an action media from where we gather information and put to our day to day use.  Therefore, the content produced for this media should be different from the content produced for any other media.

Nature of online content

• Instead of reading each word people tend to scan through the material they see on the screen. Hence, the article should be easily scanable. We need to break an article into sub-headings and supply bullet points to make the article easy to read.
• Do not use impersonal pronouns like one, someone, they etc. Use ‘you’ instead of he, she, or one.
• Use conversational language, and do not beat around the bush. Be direct.
• The attention span of individuals surfing net is quite divided; therefore, supply images, tables, and lists to make the article easy to read.
• Holding readers’ attention is the key. And the lighter the article will be to the readers’ eyes the more time they will spend scanning the article.
• You just have ten to fifteen seconds to grab the readers’ attention. So the opening sequence should be powerful.
• The title of your article should build curiosity, which the content of your article should satiate.
• Do not use close- ended assertive questions in your titles which could be answered in ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

The web is a participatory medium. And your article is a way to start a conversation. Do not provide all the answers, leave scope for discussion. The more people will interact with you, the more involved they will become. This is how we build community on the web.

Below, I am giving a handful of writing tips that will help people like me read more on the Internet, by the way, most of the people on the Internet are like me only.

1. Use Headlines, headings and subheading that make sense. Keep clever lines safe for print.
2. Use simple words. No one like using a dictionary when scanning through the Internet.
3. Use short sentences to convey the idea.
4. Use short paragraphs. Paragraphs that run into 10s of sentences are strict no-no for the web.
5. Write a proper paragraph; one idea per paragraph.
6. Break the articles into small chunks by using headings and subheads.
7. Make your text more scannable by making important keywords bold, italic or by underlining it.
8. Use lists like this one, wherever it is possible. It is easy to go through a list than a 10-sentence paragraph.
9. Use objective language. Do not make your article sound like a promotion material.
10. Link old articles or blog-posts on your domain to retain visitors for long.

Everything written above is important; rather very important, but what is more important than all these things, when writing for web, is SEO, or say keywords to be more precise. (If you need to know about what key word is, and how to find relevant keywords or how to sue them then you should read SEO Simplified: Basics of Keyword.)

More often than not, you will stumble across a client who will ask you to write a keyword rich article, or to write an article using the given keyword, but the keyword density should not exceed 5 percent of the word count. You may also be asked to write a keyword-rich title (headline), headings, sub-headings, and anchor texts, or the client can demand you to write different meta tags as well along with the article. The demand of a client doesn’t end here; some even asks to use keywords twice in the first paragraph, once towards the end of the article while maintaining a keyword density of 4 percent.

The point is, if you are writing for web, you cannot avoid SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You have to know what SEO is, and how to find and use keywords in your articles. This is, when writing for web, as important as a working knowledge of grammar. Some writing experts [so-called] may try to denounce the importance of SEO in writing for the web, by classifying this kind of writing under SEO writing heading, which according to them is just one form of writing for the web. Well, nothing can be as far from the truth as it is. Let me tell you, every kind of writing for the web is SEO writing. No matter what you write, if you want people to read it, you need to optimize it with relevant keywords.

I will suggest you to follow the succeeding link and familiarize yourself with SEO, if you already don’t know about it, by reading SEO Simplified: an Overview. This series is meant for beginners only, and an absolute one for that.

What is your view about the importance of keywords in online copywriting?

Be descriptive, be personal

A descriptive headline builds interest in the article by giving some idea about what to expect. And making it personal helps visitors relate with the headline and the article following it.

Example:

1. Unemployed Mark Found Financial Security.
2. Coward John Defeated Bully Mark.

Learn to…

Learn to… headlines work the same way as do How to… headlines (read How to… headline guide). This type of headline suggests that the article following it will teach the visitors about the topic in question. You can either use a list-like structure for the article or blog post following learn to… headline or split the article or blog post in subsections by introducing appropriate headings.

Example:

1. Learn to Play Guitar.
2. Learn Driving Free.

Step-by-Step Guide to…

Like learn to… you can also use step-by-step guide to… headline to tell the visitors that the article following such headlines will teach certain skills one step at a time. The article following this type of headline should be written in the list format.

Example:

1. Step-by-Step Guide to SEO.
2. Step-by-Step Guide to Protecting Your PC from Virus.

…in Easy Steps

This is another way to write headlines. Unlike the headline writing strategies dealt above, where the signifiers were added at the beginning of the headline, you will need to add “in Easy Steps” at the end of the headline. This strategy is equally effective in pulling visitors to your website. Use list like structure for the article following this type of headlines.

Example:

1. Networking in Easy Steps
2. Learn to Play Piano in Easy Steps

At times we have hundreds of files on our computers that we do not use, just sitting there. We should establish periods that we do a bit of system cleaning on the computer, deleting unnecessary files and organizing folders in an efficient manner that makes them easily found and with the proper file headings.Computers are like cars they need to be maintained!.

If you have experienced a few system hang ups and had to reboot the computer it is worth running scandisk on the computer to detect and fix errors that arise as a result of these system hang ups and the presence of viruses. But what is scandisk you may be asking yourself? Scandisk is a maintenance tool that aims to search and correct bad clusters when a program was prematurely aborted. At the send of the scan a report is produced that informs the user the files scanned and the amount of space scanned.

Always ensure that the signatures of your Anti-Virus is up to date this will curtail the possibility of viruses infesting your computer system. Ensure that you do frequent system checks to detect viruses, spy ware etc.

Never open e-mails if you do not know the user this will be committing system suicide and be suspicious of formal and informal e-mails that may come from friends as well. They usually do not address you personally eg. Hello , we would like you have a look at our pictures thanks bye.

If you use a password(and I recommend you start doing so) to enter your computer, HIDE IT! DO NOT PASTE IN ON A POST IT AND LEAVE IT FOR THE WORLD TO SEE IN OBVIOUS AREAS!.Another useful tip is to scan all Cds, pen drives, floppy disks for viruses before accessing any file on them.For those that are not computer cracks on the matter then every protection can never be enough to protect you as you navigate the worldwide web. Protecting your password can also come in the form of writing a .htacess file that guarantees protection of sensitive information on your system and thus curtailing hackers and possible phishing.

Once you are expanding your computer operations and sense that your system is slowing down, this could be an indication of the necessity of more memory space or virus infections on your system. Installing memory is a simple process that can be done from home if you one is confident enough to do so, or with a qualified person if not.