For all of you 'classic' David Ogilvy-esque copywriters out there, you may be running into today's challenges of form vs. function. Here's a great article about how a balance of fluff and findability is shifting the power towards search and social.
Our favorite section of the article is this below. Click below to read the full article.
At first I was skeptical, borderline insulted. But when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.
Here Are The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This:
1. It has changed the way I write. If a bulleted listicle is proven to perform better than a well-crafted essay, I’m going to write the listicle.
2. My headlines are noticeably less interesting than they used to be. But, as an editor once told me, clever headlines are dead, unless you’re The New York Post.
3. After I publish a story, I spend an hour feeding it to social networks and aggregators when I should be writing the next piece. That doesn’t even count the hours spent composing the perfect social media haikus that serve as the lead-ins to my links. It’s reducing my per-word rate to pennies.
4. I stay up at night worrying about how many people will tweet my as-yet-unpublished story. Add to that the endless perusing of other people’s Twitter streams to see what they’re reading and writing about and where my work can fit into the conversation.
5. I wonder if I’m still a writer, or if I’m a content creator.
Read full article here: The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline, by Alissa Walker from Good Magazine.
