The importance of good copy cannot be understated. Whether you're writing copy for your website, an email newsletter or offline marketing materials, copy can mean the difference between a sale and a lost customer; success and failure.
Yet copy is frequently overlooked and poorly understood. The reason is obvious - not everyone is a skilled writer.
Even for individuals who are, investing the time to write good copy can often be difficult when you have a million other tasks that seem more important.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can make writing good copy a bit easier.
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Wordtracker
Designed specifically for SEO, Wordtracker helps you generate keywords that are relevant to your products and services so that you can optimize the copy you write based on them.
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ScribeJuice
This software program looks at your copy and analyzes it, looking for problems and suggesting areas where there's room for improvement.
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Visual Thesaurus
Using the right words is a crucial aspect of good copywriting. Yet sometimes finding the perfect word is difficult. Visual Thesaurus is a nifty subscription service that takes a word and provides a visual "map" of related words that may be useful.
Unfortunately, there's no software package or service that's going to automatically produce good copy - it's just not possible.
Good copywriting takes time, effort and practice. Here are some online resources that can assist you in becoming a better copywriter:
Investing in good copywriting is an investment for sure but as successful copywriters will tell you, it usally pays off in the end.
Posted 25 September 2008 12:21pm by Patrick Oak with 2 comments
Tags: Software
Topics: Content Management, Online Advertising, Online PR & Social Media, Strategy & Planning
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
3 October 2008 16:10PM
Thank you for the resource info, although the irony is that in your first line, your use of phrasing is incorrect.
The point of that phrase is to emphasise that "x" is SO important that it would be impossible to OVERstate it, NOT that the subject is so important that you are warning whomever against not giving it due attention.
Content consultant at Kath Burke Ltd
5 November 2008 19:04PM
I've tried Wordtracker and found it a bit confusing. I think it takes a while to get your head round it. There's a nice tool by a Brighton seo company Web Positioning Centre.... This tool tells you what keywords are coming up most often in your text - although it doesn't seem to count headings text. See here:
http://www.spidertest.com/
People often write their own web copy - blithely unaware of the trail of typos they're leaving behind (forgive me if I've left one here). Writing for the web is harder than writing for print. That's because it's hard work reading off screen.
Often I will write something and then halve the wordcount through editing the copy.
Paragraph lengths that feel fine for print look insufferably bulky when you're reading on screen.
Here's an article I wrote about how to write differently for the web. It's all pretty basic stuff but worth repeating because people often forget....
http://www.kathburke.com/page.php?id=72
I've also included a link to the articles section of my website, which includes links to other resources around the web that I've found useful as a web copywriter. Hope you do too!