Published in Marketing on Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Spurred on by this review of GetWebContent.com over at Paul Stamatiou's site, I got to thinking a bit about web content and hiring, defining and measuring good web copywriters.
Near the end of his post, Paul asks:
If you’re going to spend that kind of money [e.g. $89 per post] for professional copy, why not just post something on the 37signals job/gig boards looking for a motivated, experienced copywriter?
My experience has been if you have the amazing luck of finding someone who has experience at writing plus they know how to write web copy and they will keep some SEO in mind when writing, you will also find someone who charges a lot of money for their work. Deservedly so, of course, as what would the web be without findable words that are worth reading?
Even if the person outlined above doesn't do the SEO bit, but they have experience writing successfully on the web they would be worthwhile, in my opinion, as keyword manipulation of text after the fact isn't tough to do.
If you notice above, I said they have experience writing successfully on the web
, so the question is, how is successfully quantified?
The eyetracking study I posted in the resources quantifies good web copy in terms of how quickly the person can find the copy and comprehend it. These seem like good measures, and one would hope that these facts would result in more leads or interest in your clients services - that is, after all, what your client likely wants from their website.
Unfortunately this kind of study is not feasible in most cases, so we are left with testing click thru rates of copy, monitoring the conversion rates on our clients' sites after adding new copy etc.
I suppose the real answer would be a combination of reader comprehension and retention, conversion rate, traffic and maybe to some degree the inbound link count to a given site or piece of copy (or RSS readership).
Whatever the metric, well written web copy is something worth paying for. People shell out for great designs, but what would a great design be without great content?
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Comments and Feedback
I think that well written web copy is something really hard to find even if you are willing to pay good money for it... The main reason is also because as you said unlikely the other domains, it is really difficult to mesure the results for this and it makes a big problem