I want to talk a little about my time as a copywriter when I worked for an agency I quickly came to resent. This is a message for copywriters out there who write for the love of it and have an emotional tie to what they produce. Because we all treat our writing pieces as our babies and it hurts when someone does not like it.
I was working for this company, hired as a private contractor, for many years. I worked with the owner, but later he got an assistant. Her background was not in marketing, but she served as the outreach coordinator, which I guess meant marketing in her mind. And boy did she love to tell me what to do.
I was always open to adjusting my writing for those I worked for, but it was also my job to explain why I wrote the way I wrote – with SEO in mind. Again, there’s no such thing as seo content, but you can do seo research and gather enough intel so you can write things people want to know about. You see, writing for business has more to do with giving your client’s audience what they’re looking for in terms of answering a question and also, telling them where to buy what they want.
It’s as easy as that.
To do that, you need to do your research. And if you work for an agency who mentions things like what this seo group is talking about, they probably have the means to gather these analytics for you and keep track of clicks, traffic, and what not. In other words, someone within your team should be looking up keywords and the titles of the articles or webpages visitors are clicking. This will help you figure out what you’re going to write about or how to make things easier for visitors to navigate the site.
This assistant asked me to remove half of the articles I had written over the years. One particularly was about transportation and different ways people can get their disabled clients around… the company was about medical equipment and provided wheelchairs and other tools for transit. This article offered answers to common questions, tips to try at home, and a quick path to purchasing a product.
My article had been published, with periodic updates, for years. It brought in a lot of visitors and leads. In fact, much of what I wrote did that throughout the time working for them, however, the assistant despised this article and wanted it down before she left for work that day.
Why would she want that? Because she was getting tons of calls from people who needed transportation, like an Uber driver. I asked her, “why don’t you offer that kind of service or as a reward for buying customers?” She fired me.
You see? You can vet them, love them for years, but it’s all business. Some are good at it. Some are not. Some just look for an excuse to get rid of you, some just get bored. Just remember this as a copywriter: Don’t get attached to an article or someone you work for.
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