A Beginner's Guide To Web Writing

Web copy comes in many shapes and sizes, but it always has one overriding goal - user action, or selling.

Often used to refer to the copy a company will have on its website to sell its services and introduce its identity, web copy also includes squeeze pages, sales letters, marketing emails and any other group of words that's published electronically and aimed at getting you to do something.

Glossary Pitstop:

Squeeze page = a short web page designed solely to get visitors to sign up for something free - usually an information product aimed at an ultimate sale.

Sales letters = a.k.a. direct sales letters - the long, single page pitches that are designed to close a deal in one hit, ending with the user signing up (usually purchasing) a service or product.

An often abused media, the finest sales letters are masterpieces, the (many) bad examples are indescribably bad....

Web content is the informer to our web copy's arresting officer. The term web content is mostly applied to material whose primary (apparent) purpose is to inform. Most akin to magazine or newspaper articles, web content is another oft-abused format - while there is much high quality, genuinely interesting, original and informative content out there, the sad fact is that there is even more execrable web content - regurgitated, poorly-written, poorly-conceived and intended only to serve the twin gods of search engine results and contextual advertising.

The reason for this is twofold:

1. SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)

Search engines traditionally look more favourably on sites with plenty of keyword-rich content. Although inbound links are now considered equally important, there has to be something to link to! This is where good quality content comes in - people will naturally link to information that is well-presented, useful and engaging to read. This is good web content.

2. Adsense

Google changed the face of internet advertising with its Adsense contextual advertising program. For the first time, it was possible for publishers to have adverts displayed which automatically detected and matched the subject of the page.

The opportunity to make easy money from Adsense soon became apparent. Made For Adsense (MFA) sites proliferated - their beauty was that however low quality and even illiterate the content was, as long as it had the appropriate sprinkling of keywords, it would result in Adsense displaying adverts that matched the supposed subject of the page.

Being (apparently) content-rich, it was (then) relatively easy to get MFA sites indexed by the search engines, and so visitors would arrive at the site, find content which failed to satisfy, but adverts which promised to, and click out through the adverts - earning the MFA publisher and Google a healthy CPC (Cost-per-click) fee.

MFA sites are much harder to succeed with today, as Google have made a raft of changes aimed at penalising sites and content which do not offer value, but there are still many to be found.

Writers who serve the internet market fall into many categories. Probably inaccurately, and certainly arrogantly, I am going to attempt to boil these down to three:

1. The Star Copywriter

The rarest breed of all, the star copywriter is a true specialist, and has probably spent years honing his copywriting skills. These writers are the film stars and racing car drivers of the copywriting world - they only do one thing, but they do it damn well.

A true star copywriter will be highly in demand and will be able to command a substantial (four or five figure) fee for his work - because his clients know that it will result in a successful sales campaign that will repay the copywriter's fee many times over.

2. The Professional All-rounder

By definition, the pro writer makes most, if not all of their income from writing. This might be for others ("writing for hire"), or might be to serve the needs of his or her own websites - the important thing is that they are good enough writers to make a living from it. They will often describe themselves as freelancers.

However, this type of writer is probably not a specialist, and will be able to turn their hand to most types of writing - sales letters, articles, ebooks, blogs and more - whatever their clients need. As a result, they command reasonably good rates and produce good work.

3. The Non-Professional "Freelance Writer"

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of the need for low-quality content (discussed above) has been a proliferation of low-quality writers to provide it. Their work is usually sold at such low rates that is cannot possibly pay a living wage to its creator - unless they churn it out with no regard to quality and/or live in a country with notably low living costs.

This type of work is usually recognisable by its poor construction and grammar, dull, unoriginal and sometimes incoherent content and general pointlessness. Still - you can always click on a nearby advert to take you away, can't you?

Final Thoughts...

It's a sad but true fact that many legitimate internet business models do not benefit from high quality content when low quality content is available at a much lower price - the Google god must be appeased, and even for decent sites a regular injection of relevant content helps with this. I'm afraid the only thing you, as a reader, can do is to avoid it where possible and hope the next page is better.