Or lower...

3) Build a swipe database

All good copywriters keep a swipe file. Some have entire rooms full of old ads, mail packages, and sales letters that worked in past. And once in awhile they package them up and sell them for a nice profit...

With Internet it's easy to just save good copy to your hard drive or a folder in your email program. When you run across something that catches your eye save it immediately before you do anything else. Otherwise you might suddenly find yourself immersed in other matters and forget about sales letter you just read.

As so often happens in cyberland...

I kick myself sometimes because I forget to save a hot letter. And later on. when I go back to try to find it, it turns out they've already taken it down because product sold out.

You also need to get on email lists of people doing marketing in your niche(s) so you can get their mailings. Some very good sales copy is written specifically for email.

The more material you have to work with better. There just might be one little idea in that ocean of material that makes difference in whether your copy succeeds or fails...that makes difference between small profits and large profits.

So start a virtual swipe database. If you run out of room on your hard drive burn it onto CD's. It'll take a while to fill a room with CD's full of swipe material!

By way, nowadays on Internet there are several "swipe file" products available for purchase, but you need to be careful. These collections of "winning" sales letters are often of very poor quality. So do your due diligence before you buy them.

In direct mail industry quality control is much more stringent. There are several excellent collections published in book form and most good copywriters, online or off, keep a couple of them on their shelves.

Some examples of these great works are Hodgson's "The Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters of All Time", Denny Hatch's "Million Dollar Mailings", and Herschel Lewis and Carol Nelson's "World's Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters". Hodgson's book is available in PDF form from www.twipress.com , a great website for marketing books in general.

Oh, and don't forget that your own past successful efforts are also good candidates for a swipe or two...

4) Integrate Smoothly

It goes without saying that you should smoothly blend material you swipe into your own copy so that it looks like it belongs there. But it's amazing how often people fail to do this.

Make sure to put copy you borrow into your own voice so it reads as if it were something you wrote. Novice marketing is often easy to spot because of discrepancy between less-than-experienced voice of marketer and confident voice of good copywriter or copywriters he or she has borrowed elements from.

When you've got conflicting voices within a sales letter people pick up on it.

While most buyers don't care about good grammar, they will notice, even if it's on a sub-conscious level, when your copy is out of balance. They'll know that something "just isn't right". And that's all it takes for them to click out.

So make sure you put what you borrow into your own words. Authenticity is a genuine key to direct marketing. Customers identify with a perceived personality behind words, not with letters on page.

You can borrow headlines, sub-headlines, bullets, stories, offers... Even ideas. The list goes on. But make them a part of you! Not just a cut-and-paste job that stands out like a sore thumb.

As long as you retain your own USP (Unique Selling Proposition) throughout your copy, you will maintain your offer's consistency. And within that context you can then borrow copy ideas to your heart's content. But blend borrowed copy in smoothly. Spend a good amount of time with this. It's definitely worth it.

Swiping is a part of everyday life in copywriting world. And once you get hang of it, only hard-core copywriting students will pick up on what you've done.

Which is perfectly alright. You may even get a congratulatory note from them.

So go forth and boldly swipe. Because sometimes good enough is indeed * good enough *!

6) Agree on word count per page

Always make sure your SEO copywriter gives you an indication of number of words they expect to write per web page. While it’s necessary to have a decent body of words on most of your web pages, you certainly shouldn’t have too many. What “too many” is all depends on your industry, objective of page, and needs of your audience. It’s always a delicate balance, but it’s certainly possible to rank highly with only 100-200 words per page. So don’t be fooled into paying for copy you don’t need!

7) Density targets & measure

SEO of a web page is NOT guess-work. A good SEO copywriter will talk about density measures. This is a measure of number of time keyword phrase appears on page. It’s expressed as a percentage of total word count of page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%. As a rule of thumb, your SEO copywriter should be aiming for a density of approximately 5% for your primary keyword phrase and 3-5% for your secondary keyword phrase. If your density measures are much higher than this, readability will be reduced, and you’ll risk being perceived as spam by search engines. Make sure your SEO copywriter understands keyword density, is prepared to state target density for each keyword phrase, and is also happy to be measured by that standard (should you decide to measure).

8) Where to place keywords

The question of keyword placement has been subject of much debate amongst SEO copywriters. While it is still unclear how much impact placement has, there is a general consensus that it has SOME impact. Be sure that your copywriter is aware of this impact. Popular opinion has it that keywords are more effective if they appear in headings, bolded text, links, and generally toward beginning of page.

9) Some comment on structure & links

Websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse entire site using text links. This means your SEO copywriter should be linking each page to every other page using text links. If your site is complex, this may be impractical, so your SEO copywriter will need to create a hierarchical structure for your site. First, they should break your subject material down into categories. Then for each category, they should write a summary page. These summary pages should be accessible from higher level pages via text links. They should also be accessible from each other. Each summary page should link – using text links – to a number of pages discussing finer details of category. And each detail page in a particular category should link to every other detail page in that category (once again, using text links). This way spiders are able to travel from top of your hierarchy to bottom, and from left to right across any level.

10) Don’t believe grand promises

SEO copywriters can play a significant role in increasing your search engine ranking. But they can’t do it overnight. By optimizing your site for your target keyword phrases, an SEO copywriter is simply declaring relevance of your site. If you engage an SEO copywriter to write helpful articles containing a byline with a link back to your site, you can then submit these articles for publication on Internet, and this will steadily increase your ranking. But if an SEO copywriter tells you they can dramatically increase your ranking in a matter of hours or days, be wary. NOTE: Your SEO copywriter should be able to submit your articles to various submit sites on Internet. These sites are closely watched by hundreds of thousands of publishers of e-newsletters and article pages from all around world. High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. And each time your article is published, you’ve got another link back to your site, thus increasing importance of your site (to search engines). If you’d like to submit your own articles, your SEO copywriter should be able to sell you a list of 50 or more submit sites for as little as USD$99.

Conclusion

An SEO copywriter is a valuable addition to your marketing function. But you need to make sure you choose wisely. When you know what questions to ask, battle is half won.

Happy hunting!

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.