It’s business 101: The more services you have, the more markets you can reach and the more value you can derive from each of your clients. It sounds great on paper, but in truth, it’s not easy to expand your service offerings.

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Outsourcing is all about convenience. No matter the job, your outsourced service provider handles all the messy details and provides you with a polished product with minimal effort on your end.

We live by that philosophy at Words by a Pro by tailoring our outsourced writing services to be as hands-off and convenient as possible. But content production is only one part of a suite of white-label blogging services we offer to simplify content marketing for you:

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Web designers—stop us if you’ve heard this one. You pound the pavement and spend weeks marketing yourself to find new clients. You meet some prospects, negotiate rates, and eventually deliver the website build. And after the project is done? Poof—you never see that client again. Is there a secret sauce to keeping these clients around on a monthly basis?

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Blogs are the cornerstone of all content marketing campaigns. They’re short, sweet, and to the point—exactly what you need to capture a reader’s attention. But blogs are just one tool in the marketing utility belt. An effective content marketing strategy relies on structured content creation with each piece of material adding value, and reinforcing the value of the others.

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The basic workflow for web designers is simple.

You work with a client to establish a timetable, you receive the needed website materials (such as content and images), and you wrap it all up in a neat package. But what happens if your client doesn’t deliver those website materials in a timely manner?

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[We want a to give a quick shoutout and thanks to our friends at PR News, where this article originally ran (May 2, 2016 newsletter). You can also find it in the PR News Writer’s Guidebook, vol. 2 (200 pages of invaluable PR professional advice). Want a copy? Get $50 off with coupon code Friendwriters16.]


Keyword-based SEO is a trap.

Most of us know that keyword stuffing is a bad idea, but many of us aren’t aware that most of the effort put into keywords is of low consequence. Keywords shouldn’t be viewed as a primary metric but rather as a natural result of creating quality content that brings value to the target reader. Algorithms are smarter these days, and effective conversion comes from truly understanding the voice needed to reach the ideal target market.

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“Change is good. Let’s all hold hands and celebrate change.” —all of the Internets right around the start of a new year.

Right around the start of a new year, the Internets are abuzz with blogs about change. Myriad blogs, news articles, and social media statuses extoll the virtues of change and how to embrace it. For companies, change is a challenge to the status quo, and even good change—like landing a new client—often comes with its own set of challenges. What does the client want? How do you keep him happy? If I tell him I’m a 49ers fan, will he find someone else?

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Every 365 days or so, people like to reflect on the previous year and extract lessons. From news stories to top 10 lists, it seems late December and early January is a time of reflection and pointing out all that has changed in the past 12 months. And there’s plenty of change to reflect upon since, after all, change is the only certainty in life — well, that and death and taxes. However, while it’s easy to reflect on worldly events, sometimes our own lives take on a more nuanced progression.

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Commodities have been on my mind as of late. I’m not talking about the “Trading Spaces” kind, but rather those that are mistaken for commodities when they’re actually not — especially services. This all came about when a client of mine requested that we chat about a new direction for his company’s blogs. We’d been focusing on some of the graphic design elements of the company’s service offering and hadn’t received much feedback as of late, so when I was contacted to discuss details, I got excited. Feedback and client involvement is a strong component in effective, targeted content.

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Can SEO “stick it to the man?” Google’s betting on it with its latest search algorithm update that rewards secure sites with more ranking points. The move is meant to encourage site owners to update their domains with secure connections (adding the “s” in “https”), and the reason given behind this move is that Google’s tech gurus just want the Web to be more secure. After all, it’s commonplace to read about a data breech these days, with one of the latest citing around 1.2 billion accounts hacked by a Russian criminal group. More security around the net will mean safer browsing, and safer browsing means more confident Internet users who are less cautious about divulging their personal data, be it financial, medical or something else.

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