As marketers, salesmen, and webmasters will tell you, writing copy can be one of the most arduous, time-consuming tasks. So much so that the loath for this activity has created a demand for short cuts to writing good standard content.
The reason for this lies in training. Writing text/copy/content is in fact a precision technology with many rules and ramifications, and requires considerable training and practice to reach a level of skill. However in business since ‘everyone knows’ how to write copy, few people are ever trained in it, and so we have the blind leading the blind. This has caused strange solutions to emerge for writing content. Let’s discuss some of those strange solutions so you can avoid them
Taking snippets of content from pages
This is the process of scanning through a number of related web pages to find relevant text to your page, and taking a paragraph or two from each, resulting in a full page of text for you. The result is often ineffective (marketing-wise) as you are copying text from others who don’t know how to write text. Additionally this technique is ethically questionable. Lastly, it may be grounds for penalization from Google for duplicate content.
Taking pages of content and re-writing them
While its never wrong to read other’s work to get inspiration for your own, if one begins to take the others work line by line and just paraphrase it into his own words the outcome may be diluted or the wrong ‘message’ for your page, as their text was written from a particular view with a particular message.
Taking content from books/brochures/fliers
This method is blatant plagiarism and should be avoided. Even if you discover that the text you are taking does not exist on the web (and therefore Google would credit you with authorship), it is still an unethical path. However if you are given promotional materials by a company you represent/partner with, and they give you permission to use them on your website then by all means use them.
Using programming (PHP) to dynamically change keywords
You could have one hundred pages and all that would vary on them would be a few keywords which are swapped out by the use of programming. At the end of the day this isn’t even content, and Google treats it as such. It is far better to have actual unique text for all one hundred pages.
Conclusion
At the end of the day the purpose of text/content/copy is not to just fill space on a web page or promo piece. The purpose is to sell the product/service your company offers. And that can only be achieved by exacting and highly engineered text. So if you want to increase sales then it well behooves you to have one of your staff trained in the science of copy-writing.
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