The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘job boards’

If you’ve ever sought work on job boards like “Elance”, you might have noticed a strange phenomenon: there are people on those job boards pretending to be writers! And getting away with it!

Ok…we can’t stop clients from buying articles from providers who willingly charge $1 for 500 words. But there are plenty of things we can do to improve our own writing.

These five points are so obvious, they’ll make you cringe. But I’ve seen writers make these mistakes. Embarrassingly, I’ve actually made a few of them myself. They bear repeating.

1. Misspelling your own name
It happens. It’s just as bad when you misspell the customer’s or company’s names. Misspells send the message: “I’m sloppy. I lack attention to detail. I don’t care.”

2. Relying on SpellChecker
This handy tool is great, but not always. Use “too” instead of ‘to’ and spellchecker may not catch it. Miss a word that changes the entire meaning of the sentence and you might be in trouble. Spellchecker definitely won’t help you put together proper sentences. (Like this real headline: “Progress Slow in Beating Death.”) Little mistakes like these can add up and chase the customer away.

Not worried about losing one customer? How about the hundreds of potential referrals you might lose over the life of your career? There’s something to worry about.

3. The Use of Slang
Are you using slang without realizing it? Slang is part of our everyday culture, but slang is wrong for your client’s project. For example:

• They all agreed the movie was bad. (intense)
• The little town was the armpit of America. (undesirable)
• He was beat after working hard all day. (tired)
• She drove off the lot in a new Beemer. (BMW)

These slang terms are fine for a novel, but not appropriate for business writing.

4. The Beauty of Word Economy
“I think I’m qualified for this position because of the fact that I am able to write well.” Oy. Let’s apply a little word economy: “My advanced writing skills qualify me for this position.”

Dump phrases like “because of the fact”, “I am able to”, “in order to”, “in regards to”. Check, edit, check and edit again to ensure your document is tight. Get help from someone more experienced if necessary.

5. Sentences That Are So Long, the Reader Doesn’t Remember What You Were Talking About in the First Place, So They Just Skip Ahead to Something Else and, Before You Know It, You’re Scratching Your Head and Wondering Why Your Phone Isn’t Ringing.

Enough said.

Your thoughts?

Have you ever considered using a templated response so you can bid more and faster on the job boards like Elance? Sounds smart on the surface. Bad move when you look more closely. There are a couple of good reasons why.

Imagine a buyer has awarded you a project based on your bid. Now, imagine he’s trolling for a new provider for a new project. He’s delighted to hear from you…until he notices your response sounds eerily familiar. If he was thinking about maybe using your services again, you just changed his mind.

I’ll share an actual response I received from a prospect. He posted a project for web site makeover, and I took quite a bit of time to write to him about how I could help. He wrote back:

“Thanks for taking the time to do a thorough review of the current web site. The comments specific to my website are certainly appreciated vs. the “cut and pasted” sales pitches in most of the other bids.”

I won this bid, at a price tag two times the stated maximum bid. All because I took the time to craft a singular response that spoke to the customer’s needs.

Taking the time to craft a response shows the buyer your keen interest in their project
because it really interests you, not because it’s just another notch on your keyboard.

If your responses are grammatically clean, and you’re responding thoughtfully to each bid, you now have two issues you can cross off the list as reasons why you’re not winning projects.

Of course, no one wants to recreate the wheel for every single bid. Thankfully, there’s a middle ground…using a modified template. It’s a fast, easy and effective way to create what look like a very personal, targeted response to each bid without spending half an hour on each one. And it’s a good way to cut down on potential grammatical errors.

First, you create a core response that never changes, no matter what project you’re bidding on. This would include your general greeting and closing, and basic information about you, your services, terms, etc. Then, add to the core with keywords and phrases that more specifically suit the buyer’s objectives. It makes the whole bidding process much faster and less stressful.

I’d be happy to show you exactly how this is done, and together we’ll craft some templated responses and modifications to help you bid faster and more successfully.