Copyrighted Words in Copywriting

Today, I got a letter from a customer and was very surprised. The customer is the owner of the online shop, which sells tickets to various events all over the States. In our copies, we very often use the word “hard-to-get”, which is a very strong word and it gets even a stronger meaning in such combination as “hard-to-get tickets” in sentences like: “some company will be happy to provide you with hard-to-get tickets to any event you like”. Today, I got a letter from the customer, in which he asked me not to use the word “hard-to-get” for it is copyrighted by Razorgator.

For your information, Razorgator is also an online ticket vendor and if you google for “hard-to-get tickets” you will see Razorgator taking the first position. Great! How clever it is. Copyright the word so that no one could use it, and your site has all top positions in search engines! In fact, on Razorgator site, this word is featured in the following way Hard-To-Get ^sm

Now, if so, what should other people do if they want to use this word? Pay to Razorgator? Or link this word to Razorgator? This is damn good business then. Why not go and copyright a word “baseball” or “baseball tickets”? Then, anyone wanting to write anything about “baseball tickets” will address me and pay me money. Great!

In fact, the question under discussion is if anyone can copyright any word he/she likes? Secondly, what should other people do if they want to use this word? Very often, they may not even know that this word is copyrighted©. Is it lawful at all to put any usage limitations on neutral words having nothing to do with a trademark, or a brandname or a logo?

To be continued.

Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence?

I’m afraid that this post will have very little to do with copywriting issues, but this is something I have been thinking about for quite a while. I have not heard information about my classmates for ages and I have been wondering how they are doing, how they live, what they do, what they achieved. It’s always interesting to compare how life treats different people, especially the people you know. Someone is rich, someone is poor, someone is happy, someone is miserable, someone is loved, someone is lonely and so on and so forth. Recently I have signed in to odnoklassniki.ru – the service which allows to search for your classmates, college mates, colleagues by the time you finished school, or graduated from college or worked for this or that company.

I was amazed, not to say shocked, to find out that about 95% of my schoolmates now live abroad! The USA, Italy, Germany… and these are mostly people who you would never think of. The girls are married to an American/Italian and already have kids; the guys study at a college or University. It is so interesting… you know these people, spend 11 school years with them and then about 7 years later you find out that they have an absolutely new life so different from ours. You browse the photos that they placed there, and watch their happy faces and gorgeous surroundings and somehow automatically start thinking: “Oh, Gee, why didn’t I do the same?” In my case, it is even more offending, for I was in the States but never stayed there… Why? Who knows… Maybe be I had too much affection to my home country, maybe I didn’t find anything special and lucrative in the life abroad? Maybe something else. It is difficult to say now exactly why I decided to go away and come back to Belarus. But at that time I knew for sure that I did right. And, now, when I see the data about my schoolmates who also went to the States supported by the same Work and Travel Program as I was some time ago, I start thinking what would have happened if I stayed and started a new life away from my family and my home country… Would have something changed for the better? Or not? How would I look like and what would I do?

To some extent, I felt a bit miserable when I found that out. Because I live in Belarus, I have a university degree and quite a well-paid job, I have created a family and everything seems quite rosy for me and it would have seemed so if I didn’t know that there is a better life somewhere and that someone I know lives it. My schoolmates must look down on me now. They are cool and successful.

Maybe I am wrong. But this question freaks me out sometimes. Especially when I see things happening in Belarus, when I start to understand that maybe nothing good awaits either me or my future kids here, and what would they say to me when grow up? Will they blame me that I gave them birth in the country which has no future… ? Terrible… I would appreciate your opinion about that.

Professionalism of a Copywriter – is There Any Way to Estimate it?

Sometimes I think that if I were the owner of a website, and I would have to hire a copywriter to draw to content creation, what qualities should this person have except for an excellent command of the language that the website will be created in.

Ok, to make things simpler, let’s imagine that you are in the process of creating a website in the English language. You have a multibranch navigation and you want to stuck content in every page of the website, because you know that lots of content makes your site 1) more informative for your readers, 2) more spider- and SEO friendly. Maybe you have some idea what and how to write on your home page, but as for all other pages you may be totally lost, because you don’t know how this information is most commonly presented, how to make the text readable and catching, how to attract attention. For this, you will have to hire a copywriter to write for you. But: How to choose an appropriate person? Because you will most probably would not like to proofread and edit the texts after the copywriter. You would prefer to have them written perfectly without misprints, spelling mistakes, punctuation and grammar inaccuracies. Also, you would want to have them written is an appropriate style, with an appropriate structure et cetera.

My professional experience of Chief Copywriter made me face lots of people either applying for a copywriter’s position or already having this job. I should say, very few of them can create really good stuff. Why? Because with all its seeming simplicity, the job of a copywriter is a difficult job. This is a creative job, accurate job, sometimes tedious job. This is a job, which requires a talent, a talent of combining separate words into a whole structure of sensible and easy-to-read sentences, which build the whole UNIQUE text, meeting all the requirements of the customer.

Those people I met made different kinds of mistakes. Some of them did not know English very well. Others lacked patience and accuracy producing content with endless misprints and rude mistakes. Someone used inadequate style. Someone used a too formal language appropriate only for a Royal School. Others were far too much selective saying that they could not write about this and would prefer that… Some, having too bright and often “unhealthy” imagination to draw pictures not appropriate to the very topic of the content. Some could not think differently and created content for different websites in absolutely the same way. Others copied and pasted the data from the Internet making very few or no changes to it. Someone used only complex sentences, which made the whole idea of the text a total nonsense. And so on and so on and so on…

There can be many troubles, and, therefore, getting a good copywriter to write content for your website is critical for your marketing campaign. Seek for a person who enjoys writing and who CAN write; to some extent pedantic and self-critical; creative and accurate; knowledgeable, curious and experienced; attentive and considerate. This person should also be able to hear your requirements instead of saying “I will do everything on my own cause I know better” and have a portfolio – websites where his or her content is posted.

Professionalism of a copywriter is combined of many things, including years of experience and professional qualities and talents. Therefore, be always on the alert when hiring a copywriter; ask him or her to write a test page of about 500 words first. If the person is a nub, you will immediately see it from the test page, and do not neglect small details. If you see even small inaccuracies in the text, you don’t need this person. Also, be on the allert when a person describes himself/herself in too colorful words, showing in such a way the signs of megalomania. Remember that a REAL talent is modest ;-)

Good luck!

50 Blogs a Good Promotion Solution?

Imagine that you are the owner, of some business, let's say, you sell vacation packages online, decide to launch 50 different blogs? Not for fun, of course, but to promote your business on the Web with the help of 50 blogs, which you will create using domain names different from each other, but related to the topic of your business. Let’s say, “blablablavacations.com”, “blablablabeaches.com” or “blablablavacationtalks.com” (these domain names have just been randomly invented by me – do not consider them as links to wherever). They say, blog is one of the most readable resources on the Web. If so, why not try deepening into the enormous blogosphere? What will you have to do to succeed?

1) Post the blogs at least once a day (on the initial stage) with unique content;

2) Add a SEO package to the blog to be able to insert meta tags and thus to increase the number of keywords;

3) Add a picture to the post for the same reason;

4) Somewhere on the blog place a reference to your business’s website – your vacation packages online shop for example.

5) Install a statistics plugin to your blog to be able to track the visitors and the traffic coming to your blog. This can be either “wordpress shortstats” if you have a wordpress blog, or Google Analytics, which will give you a more detailed picture of what’s going on with your blog.

Then, you will have to draw some SEO techniques to the promotion campaign. You will at least have to submit the blogs to more than 10 blog catalogues, like http://www.blogcatalog.com/ and http://www.mybloglog.com/, place at least 3 links pointing to each of your blogs on other blogs, and ping, ping, ping each time you said something new on each of your 50 blogs.

This is something I am working on at the moment and I am looking forward to the results. Let's wait and see.

Why Blogging at all?

Welcome to Olive's blog!
I have recently become a member of the blogosphere, and, now, I am going to spread my ideas about blogging, copywriting and Internet Marketing all over the Web :-) This is a joke, of course. In fact, I just want to share my observations and ideas with all those who are concerned about the same issues that I am.
Well, my professional activity at present is very closely connected with content writing, blogging and to some extent search engine optimization. This blog will help me understand how successful can be a SEO campaign if it is implemented through blogging. Hopefully, I will find a distinct answer to the burning qustion if CONTENT is really the king of SEO, and if so, what type of content (structure, keyword density, quality etc) contributes to the greatest Internet marketing sucess. Stay with me, and let's make this research together, the research that will eventually help us answer the question: Why blogging at all?