Copywriters and Niche Website Owners: It’s Time To Get Offline Business
One of the reasons I’ve always been interested in online business is that you can flit from project to project as your mood dictates. If I want to create a website about psychology one week or write a book about politics the next, I can do that as a writer. I couldn’t do that as someone working in the corporate world quite so easily.
There’s one problem with concentrating on online business though: it’s easy to get caught up in the field of online marketing and online business itself, and you lose a sense of what real offline business is like. I’m not saying this because I want you to feel wistful about brick and mortar shops. I’m writing this because when you stop looking at your favourite online marketing blogs and start looking into what brick and mortar companies do, you realise one thing:
Your service is more valuable than you realise.
Online Businesses
We’ve (probably) all done this: Gotten caught up in analytics, social media, buzzwords, infographics and online demographics. Been lured in by a “make money online” secret that talks about conversion rates and “hacking traffic.” And we’ve all convinced ourselves that our website needs that one extra popup or some cool interface for your customers to log into. We’ve all tried to game SEO stuff.
Most online marketing companies try and sell you SEO services or social media optimisation. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing wrong with an immaculately designed website or a great web presence. But those things don’t make a business, (Unless, of course, your business sells SEO and social media optimisation as a service.)
If you concentrate your reading and research on the latest technological wizardry, you’ll forget something really important: Most people aren’t tech wizards, and most companies struggle with even the most basic of online things.
Case Study
Earlier on today, I had a spontaneous brainwave. In fact, using my niche website structure, this brainwave had me creating a book, side business and authority website which hit the target market and (obviously) turned me from some weird writing guy into business tycoon overnight.
I exaggerate a little, but the idea was pretty good. So naturally I decided to see if anyone was doing what I planned on doing. (I know I’m being vague here and talking around said market. Let’s just say it’s in one of the big three lucrative niches for copywriters.)
Bear in mind that this is an industry where some copywriters get paid £100 an hour or more, what I found was pretty disturbing. The websites were terrible in that they were barely navigable. The articles on the websites sometimes had nothing to do with the service they were selling. Sometimes these articles didn’t even mention a) the topic or b) the prospective client. There were basic copywriting errors and even writing errors in general on the top ranked site for the field.
The (presumed) success of these websites and companies flies in the face of everything that internet marketing gurus tell you about what it takes to be successful in business in [the current year].
Jamie, Why Are You Writing This?
My point isn’t to insult random, nameless copywriting sites. It’s to call everyone who is stuck in the online guru maze to action and help them realise that you don’t have to be the next Zuckerberg to offer a great service that’s of value to your clients. Nor do you need a massive budget to start a copywriting company that deals with high-end offline business clients: you just need to be able to provide a better service than the competition.
At my local doctor’s surgery, there’s a doctor who I’ve seen a few times. He’s a great doctor. But whenever he has to input anything into a computer, it’s more painful than the ailment you’re in the room for. He types with a couple of index fingers. He can’t control the mouse. Getting a prescription printed out takes him longer than diagnosing your illness. I don’t blame him – he qualified as a doctor long before there were desktop computers, and he’s probably never sent an email in his life.
An online guru will tell you that you need their $99 optimisation plugin to ensure you get the quickest page loading times and you’ll then rank number one on Google. You could choose to believe that and jump on the guru treadmill. Or, you could focus on delivering a high quality offline business service to guys like the doctor I visit. He’s never sent an email; he’s hardly going to learn how to write a blog post or a sales letter. Plenty of professional companies are in exactly the same boat.
Final Thoughts
Today’s topic is a quick and philosophical one as opposed to a how-to.
There are two avenues you can pursue when you’re a copywriter: highly tech-and-trend focused approaches to writing where you’re a hamster on a hedonic treadmill, constantly looking over your shoulder worried that your service will go out of style and you’ll be replaced by another hamster, or you can create a valuable offline business service that you can charge a premium for to people who actually need it and also be thankful for it.