Day 3 of my MarketingSherpa “Marketing Wisdom for 2010” freelance copywriter insights...

Ah, content. What a lovely word. :-) Today's favorite topic from the Marketing Wisdom report is about budgeting for content creation. I didn't pick it because I'm a content copywriter. I picked it because content often gets the short end of the marketing stick. All kinds of attention goes to design, but quite often not enough to the copywriting.

John Miller of Marketo gets it. He understands the importance of content, especially in the age of social media. He even says, in this report, "...marketers should take some of the budget that you would normally allocate to trade shows and list purchases and allocate it to writers that can generate great content and the efforts to promote it." 

Thank you, John Miller! 

Content will always be king. Therefore, a content copywriter will always be needed.

Have you made your investment in the best copywriter possible? 

As a copy writer, I try to be and push authentic. By push, I mean encouraging those clients hiring me as their content copywriter to tell a true story. I also try to push delivering the message the right way. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you say as a freelance copywriter if you say it via a channel or at a time unappealing to your audience.

So Pepsi just got kudos from me on two counts by announcing they're skipping the Super Bowl ad frenzy this year. And they give two reasons that make perfect sense to me as a professional copywriter who preaches talk to your customer not at them: 

1) They are spending $20M on social causes. They would be hypocrites to spend another $12M on Super Bowl ads. That is authentic.

2) They recognize what they would be marketing, this from-the-ground-up campaign of Pepsi Refresh, wouldn't fit with the spirit of the typical Super Bowl ad. (And they could fall flat on their face as a result.) That is about delivering the message the right way...and the Super Bowl ain't it, not for this message.

I'm just a lowly freelance copy writer trying to stay true to her principles as I do my work. How validating to have a company like Pepsi validate two of those principles in such a public way! 

Revising my own keywords as a professional copywriter who writes a blog, I was struck by how easy it might be to use keywords that don't attract your target audience...quite the opposite.

As I revised my freelance copywriter blog keywords this past week, there were several suggested to me that I knew wouldn't work. Anything with "wanted" in the term was another freelance copywriter looking for work, not a potential client. And search terms that used simply "writer" and not "copywriter" meant people with smaller budgets. (Clients that can afford to hire a professional copywriter will search using the term copywriter, not writer. Anyone who found my blog and therefore Website using the search term "writer" is therefore not a good lead for me, in my experience.) 

Better yet are specific terms like web copywriters, blog copywriter, content copywriter, email copywriting...even if those are competitive search terms that I'll have trouble winning through blogging for SEO, I'd rather fight harder for search terms that I know will help qualified copywriting prospects to find me, rather than use search terms that I could easily win...but then instead of making money as a professional copywriter, I'd be spending time trying to explain to someone why I'm not the kind of writer they are trying to hire. And I definitely don't want to spend time fielding emails and phone calls from freelance writers looking for work, those using words like "wanted" in their searches.

Just because a search term uses a word you want to be found for doesn't mean it's a search term you should focus on in your blog. Be clear who is using those terms and why, rather than investing precious time in blogging using keywords that might generate traffic but won't generate clients or sales!