The copy on your website, blogs and articles submitted to article directories can easily be stolen if you don’t take measures to protect yourself. CopyScape is an online service that allows you to find out whether your content is being duplicated without your permission. It can be a useful tool for your VA business.

1) Check your own copy to ensure originality

If you regularly provide content to clients in the form of web copy, articles or press releases, CopyScape is a valuable tool for double checking your own work. You want to make sure that any copywriting projects your complete for your clients is 100 percent original. Plagiarism can ruin your business.

2) Double check any outsourced work

If you regularly outsource article writing assignments for your own business or your clients, use CopyScape to double check their work before using or submitting it to your clients.

3) Use Copysentry to monitor your website and blog content

Copysentry is a tool powered by CopyScape that helps you monitor the content on your website or blog. It is a paid, automated service that regularly scans the web for any duplicated copy of your blog posts or web pages. It is currently one of the best tools against plagiarism available on the Internet.

It happens all the time: You know what you want to say and how you think you want to say it, but you can’t find the just-right way to get it onto a page and, well, just do it!

When struggling (and we all do), remember:

• Content is crucial.
Powerful – and targeted – copy is what sells your product or service, not pictures or flashy introductions.

• Most people simply scan websites.
Your website content should include clever headlines with stimulating text to grab readers’ interest…focused, concise website content will keep them there.

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I’m no mathematician but I often like to explain copywriting in this way:

No /bad copywriting = Wrong message
Wrong message = Low/less/no sales
Low/less/no = No/bad business
No business = NO BUSINESS!

So it stands to reason that bad copywriting = bad business.

Do you produce, develop or write an e-newsletter for your VA business and/or for your clients’ businesses?

A consistent (both in frequency or publication and in quality of content) e-newsletter can be a phenomenal communications, P.R. and sales tool for your VA business.

Here are just some tips to keep in mind when launching or re-visiting your e-newsletter:

•Know your potential customer so you can give them news they actually care about. Writing directly to your audience – their want, their needs, their interests – is essential (haven’t we heard that somewhere before?).
• Use the 80/20 rule. E-newsletters are meant to inform and advice, not to push and sell. Go with about 80% information and 20% about your services, a new product, a current special – as long as you are being of service and making yourself a valuable resource for the reader, promotion to the right extent is fine. And expected!

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Some more tips on developing or refining taglines – whether for your VA business or for your clients’ businesses:

• Know your target audience. Really know them.
• Define your target response (what do you want them to think and do?).
• Brainstorm… brainstorm… brainstorm, including looking at other taglines, doing your own mini-market-research and asking around to those who would potentially be in your target market.
• Simplify… simplify… simplify: if you can’s easily say it, rewrite it.
• Keep it short, generally three to seven words.
• Make it action- and benefit-oriented.
• Read it aloud. If you can’t say it without skipping a step, then rephrase it.

For VAs and for your clients, the website is the #1 place to start.

There can be no online-based marketing and by extension, no copywriting, without a website. (There may be an exception to this rule, but I haven’t found one.)

One businesses’ website is not another businesses’ website. Some businesses, including VAs and also clients that you as a VA might have, use their blog as a content management system and their blog and website are one in the same.

Regardless of how you have it set up, just make sure it is set up. Of course, just having the website or the blog is not enough. You must, must, must have dynamic, updated, relevant content. So static content or a brochure website that hasn’t changed since 2005 will not be as effective as you need it to be. In fact, it may be worse to have outdated stale content than no content at all.

In my next post, I will discuss copywriting, starting the process and looking at the marketing picture as a whole.