I feel your pain. Starting out is hard work – and you’re often working for little or no pay. That’s hard.

You may consider trying to find a copywriting “niche” and marketing yourself to end clients. For instance, a small business may have slightly more money to spend – and could provide ongoing work. From there, you can gather testimonials and clips and target larger customers. It takes some time to get there, but you will get there – the key is figuring out “your perfect client” and how to target them.

Thanks!

I despise selling my services so cheaply and know that doing so reduces the value of the good quality work of professionals…but what can you do when you are just starting out? I look forward to earning what I am worth, but right now I just stuff keywords and look to the future. Good post.

Thanks for your post, Michael!

I totally agree about all the “tail chasing” with SEO – and that’s been around since SEO has been in existence. It’s like people who want to lose weight will sometimes look at everything *outside* of diet and exercise to make it happen. The “fad diet chasing” seems more worthwhile and sexier than doing what we know works…

Adding keywords to content makes a huge difference – you’re right. But to your point, the writing has to be good to grab someone’s attention. It’s not enough to write “women’s shoes, women’s shoes, women’s shoes.” You have to *sell* those shoes. And that “sales” aspect – the art of communicating with the customer – is unfortunately absent on many sites.

Thanks again for your post! It’s nice to hear that someone else believes that SEO copywriting is not dead – and writing *good* copy is important.

I’ve tweeted this!

Thanx fot that great point of view.

Another myth I would like to bust, Google does not use the time spent on a page as a factor in determining relevancy of a page by how long someone spends on it because if you do not have Google’s little code hidden in your HTML they can not track your activity. I have some websites that do not have a tracking code and Google has no information on those sites other than links to them. I see so much tail chasing in the SEO world it is astonishing. If Google starts using time spent on a page and you want sticky content, then make it X rated and you will rank #1.

People give Google way to much credit. If you look at search results they are FILLED with useless content. If they had this figured out, that content would not be there. Why is it there? It is there because of keywords and links. If links were not so effective you would not have all the “hey great article” posts in blogs. All these comments are is people dropping links for the sake of SEO…

SEO copywriting is not dead. It is essential to being found in results and that is what it purpose is. If you want to profit from being found you need something more. That is when you mix a little ad copy in with your seo copy and hopefully you come up with the right mix that leads to conversions.

You need to remember, a lot of people just scan websites, they dont read them. Karon’s example in the after column makes me think, ok get to the point… I dont have time for that over-done emotional fluff.

I am on the site because of keywords. You have 20 seconds to “tell” me what I want to hear and why I need to buy your product or I am gone.

How are you going to do that? you have 50 words to engage me or I am out of here. Karon’s page did not work, I did not buy a book.

You need to be really good at writing SEO copy to be found… and you need to be really good at mixing ad copy with it… If you provide a service be it lawn mowing or copy writing there is only so much you can say that people want to hear. I hate to say it, but content does NOT sell, it bores people that have better things to do. Blogs were invented to add content to web sites so you have a way of competing for search placement. That is why you do it, and that is why people reply to it.

When it comes to selling…

When a woman sees an awesome pair of shoes on a web page all she cares about is how much they cost, are they on sale, and wouldn’t they look cute with this outfit… They don’t care if they are made out of pigs, cows, snakes or spandex. They look great, she thinks they will look great on her, boom you have a sale.

A guy wants to hear in 50 words or less that this new wrench will not only fix everything on the car, it also has a flashlight, a radio, a gps, and you can find it in the dark. Boom you have a sale.

You are not going to have a sale if you can not be found in search results. Save the art of writing for novels, get people to your site with SEO copywriting, toss in a little ad copy to get the sale. Save the content for a blog so you can pad your site with links to help your placement in search results.