If you realise that your website text isn’t up to scratch, but cannot afford the services of a professional copywriter, you have two choices:
1. Outsource (offshore) the job to someone willing to work for a couple of dollars
There are plenty of freelance websites that will put you in touch with workers offering their services for around $2 per 1000 words. Put the morality of using such a service to one side for a second though and check the quality of the language used on their freelancer profile. If the profile is full of poor spelling and dodgy grammar (it will be), you know what to expect for your $2.
Instead, you should put that cash in a charity collection box where it may actually do some good.
2. Do it yourself
Having rejected the next-to-nothing approach (if you are still considering offshoring, you need to know that your website is in serious trouble), the only alternative is to try and set some time aside to write new content yourself. It’s the “free but not really once you put a price on your time” approach.
HERE’S SOME FREE COPYWRITING ADVICE
As a professional copywriter, giving away free advice is like taking the food from my children’s mouths. But I am also someone who started a business on a shoestring; I fully understand how important cutting costs really is.
So here is a free tip that will help you create website content that is of a higher quality:
Use your spellchecker.
Shocker right? Or maybe you feel cheated by that advice. But the fact is that those wiggly red and green lines are a sign that something is wrong with your text. That something needs fixing before you put it live on your website. That if you ignore those lines, your website is still going to look crappy.
Those wiggly lines exist to highlight mistakes. Mistakes you can correct before looking silly on the global stage.
Poor spelling, bad grammar and misplaced apostrophes make your website look amateurish. And on the international stage afforded by your company website, looking like an amateur could be fatal.
If your web content is rubbish, potential customers will wonder if your products are equally poor.
Amazingly, hundreds of website owners continue to ignore this most basic, and precious, piece of advice. Grammar nazis and copywriters sneer at their incompetence.
And shoppers go elsewhere, looking for a site that does adhere to the basic principles of the English language.
Well you would say that
As a peddler of words, you might think I have a vested interest in encouraging you to hire a professional copywriter. And you would be right.
But how about this from BBC News:
Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group, says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after a spelling error was corrected.
“If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes,” he said.
Millions of pounds lost due to avoidable spelling mistakes.
So if you are still saying to yourself “I can’t afford a copywriter”, please at least pay attention to your spellchecker*. Otherwise drop me a line and I’ll give you my most reasonable copywriting rate.
* NB: Spellcheckers are still not as good as humans when it comes to identifying poor spelling, so here’s a bonus tip – have someone else check your text too.
