Talented Hacks in “Cracking Linkbait” Shocker

Buy cheap, buy twice. That was my old man’s advice on battered Ford Fiestas. But the same rule applies to content writers (hear me out).

Dan Horton at DaveN’s blog asks some questions about sourcing web content:

• Do you get what you pay for?
• How far should the content writers job go?
• Who outsources their content and who writes it in-house?
• How much is too much to pay?

Like any professional service, you get what you pay for with writers.

A good accountant recoups their yearly fees pronto. A talented lawyer knows when to tell a rival to stick their Cease-and-Desist-letter in their pipe and smoke it. A decent SEO recites the seven secrets of SEO success as a bedtime prayer.

Likewise, a talented writer knows how to:

• Produce provocative headlines (AKA Diggbait)
• Captivate readers (AKA sticky content)
• Create a strong call to action (AKA turn tyrekickers into buyers)

Hire a mediocre writer and you get passable, filler copy. Hire a talented writer, and you’ve the potential for highly linkable, solid gold content. The kind of web content that bloggers link to, bored office workers forward to their friends and Diggers pass idle judgement on.

What SEOs dub linkbait is really nothing more than ‘quality content’ + ‘creative marketing’.

PS. For a copywriting crash course, I recommend the Copywriting 101 tutorial at CopyBlogger.