nick usborne's blog

Sign up for Copywriting Success Summit 2009

In a few weeks Michael Stelzner is hosting his second Copywriting Success Summit, and I'm one of the presenters.

This is an online conference, with a very impressive line-up of speakers, and takes place live over the course of a few days. (Recorded too, so you can watch the presentations you are unable to see live.)

Copywriting Success Summit 2009 is the largest online event dedicated to helping writers and copywriters generate better-quality leads, win higher-caliber clients and earn more. 

In addition to myself, presenters include bestselling authors and copywriting experts such as Peter Bowerman (Well-Fed Writer author), Steve Slaunwhite (Start & Run a Copywriting Business author), Michael Stelzner (Writing White Papers author), Marcia Yudkin (Persuading on Paper author), Chris Garrett (Problogger author), Casey Hibbard (Stories That Sell author), Chris Marlow (the original copywriter's coach), Pete Savage and Ed Gandia.

Here are some of the sessions:

* Write Marketing: How to Attract Opportunity by Shining the Spotlight on Others

* Using Social Media to Grow Your Writing Business

* Maximizing the Income Potential of Your Freelance Writing Business (** This is the session I will be doing.)

* How to Turn More Prospects Into Clients

* How to Win Copywriting Clients With Direct Marketing

* Painlessly Mastering the Process of Prospecting

* How to Get Customers Coming Back for More

* Attracting Prospects With Blogging

* The Faster, Safer Way to Make the Leap to a Full-Time Copywriting Business

If you have a freelance business, or plan to start one soon, this will be an excellent way to soak up the expertise of a very experienced group of freelance professionals.

At last year's summit, 98 percent of attendees said they'd recommend the event to a friend AND attend again.

Register now and you’ll save $200 with the earlybird discount.

Learn more and register here...

If you can’t build wealth by buying property, how can you do it?

For the last few decades the American middle class has been building wealth by buying and selling property.

In your twenties you would buy an apartment and wait for its value to rise. After a few years the value of the apartment would have gone up and you would use the extra money to buy a small house. And so on.

Middle class professionals would use their salaries to pay the bills, and use their homes to build wealth and an asset.

But those days of building wealth with property are now over.

According to CNN, a recent Deutsche Bank analysis of the housing and mortgage markets estimates that 25 million borrowers, representing 48% of all Americans with mortgage loans, will plunge underwater before home prices are expected to stabilize some time in 2011.

"If our home-price forecast is correct, roughly one in two mortgage borrowers and one in three homeowners will owe more than their home is worth," said Karen Weaver, one of the researchers who authored the report. "That's a dramatic shift from the past several decades when housing was the foundation of middle class wealth."

Scary figures. Yes, housing was the foundation of middle class wealth. But not any more.

That’s one of the reasons I have been building wealth not through my home, but through my own websites.

If a website generates a reasonable income you can usually sell it, if you want, for two or three times its net annual revenues.

My CoffeeDetective.com website will make me about $50,000 in net revenues this year. So I could sell it for somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000. I won’t, but I could.

And that is just one of my sites.

I can’t think of a better, more reliable and safer way to build wealth at a time when buying property is no longer a viable wealth-building option.

If you want to build wealth for your own family in this way, learn more about my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

Should you write all the content for your money-making websites? Or can you outsource the writing?

Yes and no.  But mainly, yes.

Let’s start with the yes.

Yes, you should write your own content rather than outsource it to someone else. Why? Because one of the key elements of your website will be the authenticity of your voice.

Readers will notice whether you have written your content yourself. They will feel your expertise and enthusiasm. They will sense that you want your content to be helpful.

If you outsource your content to someone else, maybe a content-creation service operating out of India or Eastern Europe, the language might be grammatically correct, and it may contain the right information, but your personal touch will be missing.

I’m not saying that your average reader will look at one of your pages and declare, “He outsourced that page!” But after reading a few pages many readers will intuitively recognize the absence of voice and personality. They’ll find the facts, but they won’t find you.

In my own experience, it is essential to write your own content if you want to engage your readers.

But...

You don’t have to write every page on your site. CoffeeDetective.com has about 700 pages. 0 pages were written through outsourcing. About 400 were written by me, over a three year period. And about 300 were written, wholly or in part, by my readers.

Your own writing is authentic, and so is that of your readers. Reader-generated content is just as valuable as your own content. Not only does it add value to your site, but it also adds breadth, because your readers will touch on topics you hadn’t thought to mention.

Remember, people will choose your site not because it has more information than some big media site, but because it is written in the voice of an individual, an expert next door.

To retain that advantage over big media, you need to honor that difference and avoid outsourcing. Keep it personal.

For more information on this, check out my program, How to Write Your own Money-Making Websites.