Questions A Freelance Writer Should Ask Prospective Clients
Whether you’re dealing with a ghostwriter, an SEO writer, a LSI article writer, press release writer or white paper writer, there are some things you should be asked. When you are choosing a writer for your business, there are some vital pieces of info that writer needs to know in order to do his or her job well.
For a client, being asked the right questions will illustrate that the writer you’ve chosen is working to understand your needs and help you sell your product or service.
What might you be asked? And, why?
Target Audience: A writer should know who they’re writing to. Writing style will differ for varying audiences. Knowing who will read the written work produced by your writer is something every writer should ask if it’s not very clearly evident by information you provide. If you are not aware yet of who your target is, you should spend time defining this. If you are targeting more than one demographic, you might need to take several marketing phases and approaches, doing one at a time.
Where The Written Work Will Live: A writer needs to know whether someone is publishing articles on their web, on a mini site pointing to their site, in a sales letter, on an article directory or in a blog. This knowledge helps determine the right tone and style of the work as well as helps a writer determine what content is appropriate.
Other items that might be discussed include whether the information needs to be timeless or not. If you don’t plan to update that information in the near future, you want the writer to provide information that is evergreen.
It’s also a good idea to tell your writer about your short and long term goals for the project. A writer can be an extended member of your team and very likely has a solid foundation of knowledge in your industry and / or with the business problems you are facing.
If you have any website analytics reports you’d like to share with your writer regarding keywords and traffic statistics, this information might also help your writer utilize specific SEO strategies when completing your work.
When you work with a freelance writer, the more information you provide, the better chances you’ll have of getting what you want the first time with little or no rewrites required.
If you are in need of a writer to help you sell more goods or get more website traffic, contact me. I’m Dana Prince, a web content writer who would love to hear from you.
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This post was inspired by James of the Men With Pens blog who writes a useful blog that helps writers and online entrepreneurs. I regularly ask clients the information contained in this blog when talking to them and James’ post illustrates why it’s so important for clients and writers to understand why sharing some information is so vital. Communication is definitely key in the writer / client relationship.
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Should You Invest In PLR Articles?
Many people getting into e-commerce and Internet marketing are looking for content for their websites, articles for bum marketing and looking for ways to increase their visibility on the web.
Find out the PLR article terms and conditions before buying
As a writer, I’ve done my share of rewriting on private label rights articles and I can tell you that when I do that, the rewritten articles are virtually unique and practically unrecognizable compared to the original but not all writers can do this. Some writers will take main ideas from these articles and expand on them. Other writers will take the article and rewrite it with different words that mean the very same thing. Which is better for you? It all depends on your needs.
In my somewhat expert opinion (whatever the worth of it) if you are going to buy PLR articles, be sure that you have them changed so that they barely resemble the originals. If you aren’t sure if you even want PLR articles, you might elect to hire a writer to write unique articles for you. If you have found a great source for PLR, chances are that the writer who wrote them is willing to write unique articles for you as well. If not, feel free to contact me for a writing work quote.
What Kind of Article Writing Do I Need For My Online Business?
Looking at SEO and articles? Different article writing can help your business in many different ways and can be used for different purposes. Some articles serve many purposes for you and the more content you have out there in cyberspace, the more success you can have in online business. You may want some of the following or you might have your own idea of what your business needs are.
SEO articles are used for article directories and placed online. SEO articles often have a few to several of your targeted keywords in them but they don’t talk specifically about your company. They provide information to an interested user and a section where the viewer can click to learn more. This will include a link to your website and can do two things for you. It can bring visitors to your website and it can also increase your search engine rankings because it creates links pointing to your website with relevant content that applies to your business. These articles generally are not sales pitches but can pique interest enough to get you some visitors and even if they don’t, they work for you out in cyberspace to create more links to your website which translates to better rankings.
Content articles generally live on your website and talk specifically about you as a company and / or the products you sell. They are often informational articles that exist on your website that tell people more about what you do or more about your products. If you have a health site for instance that sells a specific health product, you might have several of these content articles on your site that talk about various aspects of your product. These provide content for your website which can help not only your search engine traffic but can help you as part of your efforts to keep people on your website longer. If your information provides value to them, there’s a great chance they’ll buy from you and be back for more.
Some articles have a bit of a blend to be used as both an seo article and a content article. They talk about your products and / or services without generally talking about you. These articles are general overviews in terms of content but multifunctional. They can be placed on your website and in directories but often provide general overviews without explicit detail.
These articles are used to persuade people to buy your products. Many websites use a long sales article as their landing page. The sales article will provide your users with a sales pitch, talk extensively about how your product or service can benefit them and it will often be filled with testimonials, answers to objections and a call to action at the end.
Press releases are very basic but very effective. They announce something to the world in a way that follows newspaper articles with:
Who, what, where, when, why and interview type questions and answers. Press releases can be very effective for SEO and for getting interest in a big announcement.
This is not an exhaustive list of types of copy and content that you can use online to help you but is a great start in terms of types of articles you can have written to help your business grow. Whether you choose one of these approaches or a multi-level approach with several types of articles, getting familiar with SEO strategies and working continuously to not only get higher rankings but to keep them is an important online business strategy.
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I’m Dana Prince, a professional article writer. I focus in many areas in my freelance writing career but spend quite a vast amount of my time focused on article writing for clients and SEO companies.
