Tips on Hiring a Freelance Writer for Your Web Content

If you’re building a content site, one of the biggest problems you’ll have is filling it with good, keyword rich content. Even if you’re an expert on a certain subject, it’s difficult to write about that every single day, day in and day out. At some point, you’ll run dry, so to speak. But your need for content doesn’t stop.

One thing you can do to solve this problem is to buy content. There are several ways to do that. You can buy what’s called PLR (private label rights) content, or you can just hire someone to write your content for you. Let’s talk about both of these.

PLR Content

Private Label Rights content is any content that someone else wrote or otherwise made, which you buy. You also buy the rights to put your name on the content and make it look like it’s from you. In a way, this is similar to hiring a ghost writer. The writer writes the content, and you pay them for the right to claim it for your own.

There’s nothing unethical about this. About 80% of the non-fiction books in your neighborhood bookstore are ghostwritten. The writer is doing nothing more than selling a service.

The difference between PLR content and something that’s ghostwritten is the PLR content is sold to more than one buyer. This is kind of like an artist making copies of a print and selling the copies. PLR articles are generally sold to a limited number of buyers, 25, 50, or 100. Something like that.

Buying PLR content is about the cheapest way for you to get content that you don’t have to write. You can buy 10, 500 word articles on most any topic for $4 to $10. Once you purchase the content, you can re-write it, use it as it, cut it up and use it, use it with other content. You can give it away or you can sell it.

Hiring a Freelancer

At the other end of the cost spectrum is hiring a freelance writer to write your blog posts or articles for you. You can do the same things with this content that you can do with PLR content. The only real difference is your content written by a freelancer is unique. It’s not sold to other people.

Of course, there’s a cost difference. At the low end, freelance content should cost you $4 or $5 for 400 to 500 words. At the high end, this could cost upwards of $25. More experienced writers usually charge more. Also, writers from third world countries can charge less.

Either way you go, at some point you’re probably going to have to buy some sort of content in the future. If you’re going to hire a freelancer, then make sure you get an article or two from them so you can see if they can write. Then order your content in small amounts until you’ve established a relationship with the writer.

Outsourcing your content is a great way to save money, and get quality content. Try it! You’re probably going to be pleasantly surprised.

How to Write an Effective Ezine Style Article

Don’t let anyone kid you. Article marketing is one of the most powerful tools there are for traffic generation. What’s even better is that the traffic you get from article marketing is both long-lasting and highly targeted. You get fewer tire kickers from article marketing. Also, when someone clicks through the link on your article to your webpage, you can bet they’re already pre-disposed to be interested in what you’re offering, be it just more information, CPA offers, or even buying an expensive coaching program.

Unfortunately, when it comes to article marketing, a lot of people do it wrong, and it doesn’t work for them. The problem is not with article marketing, however. So that you don’t make these same mistakes, let’s learn how to do article marketing right.

For the purposes of this article, we’re assuming that you’re not writing articles just to get your name in print, or just to entertain or even teach people. We’re assuming that article marketing is part of a money making venture for you. Basically, you’re using it to drive traffic to some sort of web page, be it a squeeze page, sales letter, or a blog.

In other words, you have an action you want your reader to perform when they get to the bottom of the article…click through to your “money site”. Just making this realization should make your article marketing efforts two or three times more effective. You see, an article is not just information. It’s essentially a sales letter. You’re trying to sell your reading on taking action when they’re done.

If you look at an article as if it were a sales letter, then, of course, the most important part is the headline. Right there is where you’re going to hook your readers. Look at the headline of this article, “How to Write an Effective Ezine Style Article.” That headline does several things. One, it weeds out the folks who are not interested in writing these sorts of articles. They’re not going to be interested in clicking through to your website, so who cares about them! Two, it makes a promise, that hopefully the article fulfills. It’s going to teach you how to do something.

“How to” headlines are some of the most effective headlines around. People use the Internet for information. Telling them how to do something they want to do is exactly what your hungry readers are looking for.

Of course, if you’re promising to tell your readers how to do something, hopefully you’ll deliver. At least, you’ll deliver enough so that the reader thinks there’s more to learn, if they click on your link. This is why a lot of your best article marketers never actually nail down the end of their articles with a heavy conclusion. They want the reader to feel a sense of needing something…like clicking on your link in your bio box.

How to Build a Squeeze Page that Works

One of the key skills in internet marketing is knowing how to build a squeeze page that works. In case you don’t know, a squeeze page is a webpage where there’s only one option for the visitor, usually to fill out an opt-in email form. They either do that, or hit the back button and leave. In other words, you give your visitor no option. You “squeeze” them into either “fishing or cutting bait”.

Some marketers feel like squeeze pages are too harsh. They don’t want to offend their potential buyers by saying “either take it or leave it.” Sure, if you don’t know how to build a squeeze page that works, you can offend some of your traffic. But there are two things to say about this.

One: The folks you offend weren’t real customers, anyway. They were just tire kickers. Look at it like this…if someone won’t fill out an opt-in email form, they’re not going to pull out their credit card later on and pay you for one of your products.

Two: This is actually the flip side of One. People who really want the information you’re offering want to give you their email address. For whatever reason they like you and have some degree of trust associated with you. If you know how to build a squeeze page that works well, you can capitalize on this trust and get them to give you their information.

A big part of how to build a squeeze page that works is what you’re offering for your customer’s email address. No one’s going to just fill out your opt-in form and give you their email address just because you asked them. You have to have something they want.

With internet marketers this “thing” usually takes the form of a report or short e-book that has information your customer wants. Of course, in the body of the squeeze page copy you need to explain this. You need to make it clear that you’re offering them, completely for FREE, a report which will tell them stuff they want to know.

Looked at like this, a squeeze page is basically a short sales letter. The “sale” is your getting the email address. What you’re selling is your giveaway. It’s going to “cost” your visitor their email address to get the report.

There’s no real trick to knowing how to build a squeeze page that works. It’s not magic. You just need to explain (usually through bullet points) what your prospect can get by giving up their email address. If you give them more than they feel like they’re giving up, you’ve got a sale. And another email address to sell stuff to over and over again.

2 Great Tips for Creating Profitable Websites

A lot of internet marketers think that driving traffic to a website is all there is to it. Knowing how to create traffic is critical, but that’s only step one. It’s like you’re playing baseball, and you’ve gotten on base. Better than striking out, but there’s still a lot to do to get the runner home, or in your case to get money in your PayPal account.

Once your visitors get to your site, they have to want to stay there long enough to actually take some sort of action. You want them to either buy something or give you their email address. Although not everyone would agree, visitors who just take a look at a couple of pages then leave are not going to do much for your bottom line.

Don’t depend on people bookmarking your site either. Virtually no one bookmarks sites anymore. That is on their browser. Sure plenty of people participate in social bookmarking, but that’s not really to “remember” a site they liked. It’s more to share their finds with others.

In other words, you really want your visitor to either give you their email address or buy something. If they don’t do that, at least they could leave with the feeling that your site has content they really liked and that they want to come back. Given the number of sites most people are exposed to, though, don’t depend on them ever coming back.

So, here are some tips to help you either make sales or get your visitor’s email address.

Tip 1: Use an opt-in email form with a giveaway

Decide what kind of information your market really wants. If you’re in weight loss, then your market probably wants cutting edge information about losing weight. If you’re in FOREX trading, then it’s got to be about how to trade FOREX. You can find this level of information for free on the Internet. You don’t have to be a “guru” for this. All you need to do is to write a three to five page report that outlines a few tips that your market probably wants to know. Then you put an opt-in email form on your website.

Tip 2: Banners Don’t Work

Of course, you want to sell stuff through your website. And one “action” you want your visitor to take is to buy something, either your product or an affiliate product. Although you see a lot of websites with graphic advertisements (usually called banners), banners don’t work that well. What works much, much better is text links. Whether you’re sending your buyer to an affiliate offer or to your own offer, text links have been proven, time and time again, to be much more effective than banners.

If you follow just these two tips, you can exponentially increase how much you make from your website! What’s even better, is you’ll be collecting email addresses that you can sell to over and over again!

4 Tips for Better Article Marketing Success

Article marketing is hands down on of the best ways to get targeted, ready-to-buy traffic to your website. Not everyone has success with article marketing, however. In this article, we’re going to look at what separates winning article marketing strategies from ones that don’t work out as well. Here are four tips you can use to take your article marketing right to the bank!

Tip 1: Write your articles like sales letters. Now, you don’t want it to sound like a late-night infomercial, but you do need to understand that your article is more than just information. Your goal is to get the reader to click on your link, either in the article body or in your bio box.

Tip 2: Write a headline that arouses curiosity and makes people want to read your article. In general, readers find your articles via a search engine search. In other words, when they decide if they want to read your article, they can’t see the whole thing. They just see a headline and also a description. You want your headline to be a call to action. Something that’s going to interest people.

Tip 3: Make your articles at least 400 words long. If you want to publish your article on a lot of article directories (and you should), it needs to be at least 400 words long. A lot of directories don’t publish articles that are shorter.

This makes total sense. A directory makes money through traffic. They want readers to feel like they learned something, or at least made their lives better, by reading their articles. An article that’s less than 400 words just seems a little unsubstantial.

Tip 4: Make your bio box look like it’s part of the article. At the end of an ezine style article, there’s an author’s bio box. Although you can try to put links back to your website in the body of the article, not all directories allow that. The place to put your link is in the bio box.

Don’t think of the bio box like it’s an afterthought for your reader. Your bio box needs to fulfill the same function that a call to action does on a sales letter. This is so important, let’s spend some more time on it.

This is what you don’t want (but what you usually see).

“Joe Johnson is a career animal lover who has spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of the lives of ferrets.”

Okay, that was meant to be funny. But really. Looked at from your reader’s point of view. They are interested in themselves, not you. Unless you’re the inventor of the South Beach diet or someone with as much authority in your given niche, who you are and what you’ve done is secondary.

What’s primary is this. If you did a good job with your article, your reader should be thinking…”Hmm…I liked that…I wonder what else this gal (or guy) has to say about all of this.”

That’s the kind of response that gets the click. That’s what we call “pre-selling”! And, that’s what article marketing is all about—pre-selling your reader so that they click through to your money page.

A better idea for the bio box would be to make it essentially just the last sentence in the article, with a text link embedded in it. Something like this would be better.

Check out Raising Ferrets for Fun and Profit to learn more about these wonderful critters.

(Where the underlined part is a text link to your site.) If your article directory doesn’t allow text links (and there are still some that don’t), then just include the whole address so that your reader can cut and paste it into their browser window.

There’s certainly more to know about article marketing than just this. But these four tips will make this type of technique start to work like gang busters. Apply these tips and watch the traffic start rolling in!