How much is that web copywriter in the window?

On Friday, a prospective client contacted me through a freelance listings website. She wanted to know my daily and hourly rate. I obliged, but mentioned that the rates are really irrelevant. What most clients want is a price for the job, not a price per unit of time. Otherwise, they end up paying for the web copywriter's inefficiency.

Anyhow, I got an email back saying I was too expensive. Hi-ho. However, I emailed the prospective client again, explaining that because I've been doing this for around 11 years, I'm actually pretty quick.

She kindly relented, and promised to send me some material which I can use to start putting a quote together. The moral? If you're a web copywriter, make sure prospective clients understand how much the job will cost - not how expensive your day rate is.

Usability, web copywriting and the real world

I was out visiting a prospective client yesterday, and the team were happy to share the results of some recent usability studies on their current website.

I'd already had a look at their site before the meeting, and there were no real surprises in the report. All the usual suspects were there:

• people didn't know where a link would take them
• tone of voice was dull and partonising in parts
• content was arranged by type, not subject
• content was about policy and background, as opposed to real world information

Anyway, it was incredibly interesting to see people comment on the tone of voice, and describe how they'd struggled to find the information they needed. Priceless stuff.

It then struck me that most clients don't involve their web copywriter in this way. OK, maybe that's because most new websites aren't built on the back thorough usability testing - but it was great to see everything being done properly.

Usability - what the web does well
All this got me to thinking about usability in the car journey back to my office. The thing is, most big websites these days are ridiculously easy to use. It seems the efforts of Jakob Nielsen and the User Interface Engineering people have had a real effect.

OK - so we all still happen upon appalling website. For example, my 68 year old step-father recently asked me to book a couple of holidays for him. These were very expensive trips, and yet there was no summary if the itinerary on the "make a payment" page. In other words, there was no way of telling if we'd made a mistake entering the trip dates, and were perhaps about to pay thousands for the wrong holiday.

Result? We had to start the whole process again - V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y.

Web usability vs. real world usability
I've often trumpeted the claim that it's easier to accomplish some tasks by talking to a person over the phone or turning up in person - as opposed to using a website. Take filing my UK tax return for example. For me, it's easier to hand everything to my accountant. The alternative is to request security PIN numbers, create accounts and all sorts of other nonsense.

Real world=easier.

I'm sure this will change. And don't get me wrong - the web is fantastic for some tasks, like comparing car insurance quotations, buying airline flights (gotta love BA.com) and even comparing the price of new cars.

Some products are a pig to use
Hang on a minute. It's not just the web that has problems. Some real world products are horribly difficult to use.

Petrol usability horrors
Want an example? I pulled into a petrol station today, waiting a good while to get a pump on the same side as my petrol cap. The customer in front of me couldn't get the first pump to work, so he edged his car forward to the next one. I moved forward too, then got out of the car to ask him if the pump was faulty. He said it wasn't pumping any petrol - but it looked like the second pump was proving just as reluctant.

Then I noticed a sign on both these pumps: "PRE-PAY PUMPS ONLY. MAKE PAYMENT BEFORE PUMPING FUEL"... or words to that bureaucratic effect. By this time, the first customer has given up. I go into the petrol station and speak to the cashier. I ask how this works. She tells me I have to pay in advance (buying, say, £30 of petrol...)

"Oh", I say, "does it just stop pumping when I've reached £30, then?". Some chance. In fact, you have to pump the precise amount that you've paid for - and we all know how tricky that is. Go under the amount and you've paid too much. Go over and you have to hot-foot it back to the cashier to settle the balance.

Bonkers.

How on earth is that good for the customer? First of all, the sign on the pump didn't include clear instructions - and it wasn't flagged-up at all when I joined the queue of cars. Thinking about the web, it's a bit like not showing where a link will take you - then confusing the heck out of the customer with an unfamiliar procedure.

Toshiba Gigabeat
I bought a Toshiba Gigabeat MP3 player last summer - after years of resisting an iPod.

I liked the fact that it had a large hard drive, colour screen and neat design. The sound quality is fabulous too.

Oh, and I was really keen on downloading tracks from Napster using Napster-to-go. This is a subscription service: for around £15 per month, you can download as much legal music as your hard drive can carry. The only downside (and it's a big one) is that you can only listen to this music if you keep paying the subscription.

Getting tracks onto the Gigabeat is a grim affair. The Toshiba software is prone to crashing, even on my brand new high-spec PC. And as for transferring the tracks from Napster? Horrible. Slow, painful and inconsistent - it was more trouble than it was worth. I just want to download my music onto the PC and have my MP3 player sync with it automatically. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

And another thing - the Gigabeat's menu system isn't intuitive in the slightest. After a bit of practice I can get it working pretty well, but other family members find it a chore. For me, an MP3 player should be easy to use straight out of the box. Needless to say, the Gigabeat's now on eBay. Once it's sold, I'm buying a video iPod.

Rant over
Maybe the petrol station owner and Toshiba should go on a web usability course. Because just as I don't re-visit poor websites, I won't be using customer-confusing petrol stations or MP3 players again.

Web copywriter - some optimisation lessons

Lots of the pages on my site are optimised for the phrase "web copywriter". Handily enough, this means my main website usually ranks in the top three for the Google search engine results page for this phrase. Sweet.

Clients often ask what they can do to improve their rankings after I've written their search optimised copy. Well, here goes with some thoughts.

Inbound links from relevant sites
The most obvious answer is this: get some good quality (and relevant) sites linking in to yours. In some sectors, it's simply enough to contact friendly site owners and suggest a bit of reciprocal linking. The key here is to choose sites with a high Google PageRank - and which have content really closely related to your sector.

The name of the link text the linking site uses is really important. If you sell amber necklaces , a perfect inbound link to your site would look like this:

Pol Store Amber necklaces

There are other ways of doing it, but the main point here is that the link term you want to optimise for is in the link text itself.

Help the search engines and directories help you
I won't get into the whole "when to submit your site/when not" debate. However, there are a couple of big search engines and directories where you really need to submit your site details. These are:

DMOZ (which forms part of the Google Directory)
Yahoo

Another tool you should consider is the Google Sitemap. This is a brain-free way of sending all the relevant pages in your site to Google, and finding out what Google makes of your site. Very handy. This also contradicts my usual advice to avoid submitting your site to Google. In the past, sites that Google found by itself received a higher ranking than ones people had actively submitted.

Last of all - keep it clean, folks
Lastly, and most obviously, you need to keep working that site in order to climb up the rankings. Remove deadwood; publish fresh news; add new pages - you get the idea.

Obviously there's a whole lot more you should do - like keeping track of the competition and reviewing your search phrases. In fact just the three little projects on this post should keep you busy for days. Just remember to keep things in proportion, and have a little patience while the directories and search engines get to know your site.

The results will be well worth the wait.

Will Google AdSense make you rich?

As you can see, I've decided to bolt some Google AdSense ads onto my blog. The reason? Believe it or not, I'm not just in it for the money. If my experience of selling Amazon titles on my copywriting books page is anything to go by, I can expect a steady trickle of income over the months. That's "trickle", folks - not "unremitting deluge of cash"

Or to put it another way, the Porsche Cayman will just have to wait.

It's really just there as a test, and it gives me a really quick way of seeing how many impressions my blog pages are getting. (I run a proper analytics package on the main Blackad website - and it's nice to get some reliable stats on the blog too)

Let me know what you think. Do the ads detract from the blog?

The ads are about as far as I'm prepared to push the blog. It's main purpose is a way of venting my spleen, and sharing some interesting information I've picked up along the way.

I sure as hell won't start endorsing weird "become a copywriter in four hours" programmes that you see some other web copywriters enmeshed in. No way.

My programme will turn you into a copywriting genius in just two hours.

Search - what's going on?

As as web copywriter, I've been offering search engine optimisation with my regular copywriting for the last couple of years. But it seems to have really taken off in the last few months.

The reasons? From the BBC News website to Time Magazine, search engine optimisation is now a legitimate subject for the mainstream media.

But there's another important reason. As I see it, many clients are going through the process of replacing an old (usually Flash-only) website, and are discovering why they performed so badly on the search engine results pages.

(FACT: one leading Scottish design consultancy doesn't even appear on the results pages for Google - even if you search for their very unusual name, and the city they're based in. Bonkers.)

The result? Almost every client is now asking for at least some search engine optimisation along with their web copywriting. For me, it's as good as it gets: a service where clients don't just get a warm glow, but a measurable result that's down to web copywriting and web copywriting alone.

Of course, I don't pretend to offer some of the more specialist search engine optimisation services - such as link building campaigns, or cleaning HTML code. But if a site's built properly, and the client follows my link building guidelines, the results are almost invariably very good indeed.

Oh, and I get to send a slightly bigger invoice to the client. Yippee.