Recently I bought a new netbook, so today I was browsing the Internet looking for a new netbook case.  Quite frankly, I was appalled by what I found — not the selection or lack thereof, but the lack of professionalism on many of the sales pages I found.  The vast majority of them contained not only unsightly spelling errors, but also some serious grammar errors.

Now, I don’t know if all of these sellers did the writing themselves, or if they simply hired poor writers — or left the writing to an incompetent employee to do.  But my experience demonstrates why it is so important to hire a writer.

Let’s talk theoretically for a moment.  Say you wanted to sell Echo1 airsoft online, but knew nothing about website design or shopping cart programming.  Most likely you would hire someone to design a professional-looking website and install a shopping cart system for you, leaving you to handle the airsoft side of the business.  Or say you had a doctor’s office, and the bathroom was out of order.  You’d hire a plumber, wouldn’t you, rather than tackling a job you didn’t know how to do?

Somehow, though, many businesses seem to think it’s okay to write their own website copy.  And maybe it is okay, if they know what they are doing.  But there are a lot — and I mean A LOT — of sole proprietors who think they are good writers when they aren’t, or think they are hiring good writers when they aren’t.  The result is a lot of really bad business websites.

Think of it this way.  There are two factors that are the first things your customers see when they arrive at your website.  One is the design of the website — whether the layout looks professional.  The other is the text — and bad copy will either make visitors doubt your professionalism or make them lose interest altogether.  These are the things that create a potential customer’s first impressions, and bad web design OR bad copy could send them scurrying right back to the search engines and, ultimately, to one of your competitors.

So don’t be cheap — hire a copywriter, and a GOOD one.  Trust me — from what I saw today, if you do this one thing, you will immediately beat out at least 75 percent of the competition!

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