Ralph Greco Jr. | Write Sex

I Need Good Writers

Mar 292012

‘Well, who’d want to hire a crappy writer’, I want to scream at these ads I read on freelancer.com or craigslist, on just about everywhere else. Like you I search the boards, get email updates for writing work, I am out and about hustling my freelancing ass to the far corners of the globe trying to find decent paying gigs (or even just gigs that pay) as I live the dream of being a writer. And I don’t care if you are penning SEO content (which I do a lot of the time) or writing anything else for hire, you want to be paid a decent wage, doncha?

But I see jobs for ridiculously low pay on highly respected writing boards all the time! And all anybody ever wants is to hire a good writer, someone well-versed in exactly the kind of writing an employer needs, but that employer is not willing to pay the right amount of money, they expect samples (and we all know what that means…they cull a bunch of free samples from a bunch of writers, gather all the content they need and never hire a writer) and they don’t understand why they have to keep posting!

Here’s my quick and easy take: You went and hired whomever you hired or at the very least took the time to create your website (and granted that can be done easily these days in wordpress and the like) but still it cost you time, effort and consideration, right? Why cheap-out and pay so little for a writer to create content (SEO or otherwise) that could literally make or break your website. And I double dog guarantee you if you do cheap-out you are going to get what you pay for as most writers worth anything know what they are worth (give or take) and will charge accordingly and will work with a client to bring in quality work for a budget. Our work is our resume after all and we want to do lots of it, well, but get paid a fair wage.

So, while you might be a good writer and clients might be looking for good writers beware….not so many are ready to pay a good price for good writing.

So why are we being priced so low?

Ralph Greco Jr. No Responses »

Jan 192012

Low and behold, writers’ work is being undervalued. What a surprise!

Unfortunately from the ads I read on Freelancers Marketplace and in Craig’s List (God knows why I am still looking for work on Craig’s List, I should be looking for killers, right?) the prices for what we do have not increased, if anything they seem to be going into the toilet. Attempting to stay humble in the SEO writing I do, trying to consider myself as well as the work as simply work and nothing to get my panties all in a twist about (and if it’s a Tuesday you probably can catch me in panties) I really don’t ever gauge anybody with the prices I ask and if anything seriously all jobs that come my way, since being a freelancer you really don’t have much of a choice.

But some of these salaries,$3 per a 500 word blog, for instance? Are we kidding? There is a fine line between selling yourself and selling yourself short. I know we all need the work, I know lots of people claim they can shoot out weekly blogs, review and renew existing SEO copy or create new, but let me assure my little droogies, not everybody can do this work and those of us who can should not be treated as if we are just like everybody else, treated like it didn’t take a while to nurture these skills we have, treated like it doesn’t much matter if we work for slave wages because, let’s face it, we’re just lowly writers.

The web is the great wasteland kids, though it might make us some money and see us manage a one-handed chat or two. Everybody comes on, every puts their band’s music up on Facebook and every thinks they can write or at the very least can hire just any ole writer to do any ole job…and pay nothing for it. You don’t have to think you are ‘all that’ to demand a decent day’s pay for your work and you certainly don’t have to accept pay that undervalues you.

Press The Press

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex No Responses »

Nov 172011

I don’t know how to say this without just coming out and saying it…you don’t need a website anymore.

What I mean specifically is, if your client is spending tons of cash on a site builder, enlisting the opinion (and paying for that opinion) of a site designer and he is including you in on the budget for some SEO copy, that’s all well and good, but really all any of us need these days is a WordPress, Typad or Drupal site or something comparable. And if your client goes this way-a much cheaper way of creating a web presence-it will only benefit you in the end.

So I guess what I am saying is, if your opinion matters in the process of a client’s budget or concerns know that he will be better served by going the easier, cheaper way.

Why is this better for you, the master SEO scribe?

Basically the client is the master of his or her domain with W.P., Typad, etc.He can change or allow you access to change content and update at will, he will not be at the mercy of the site’s developer and therefore neither will you. This is especially helpful if you are blogging for somebody (or a few somebody’s) on a regular basis, as you can just pop on a site, do what you need to and pop off, leaving you to your weekly missives, articles, options that you been hired to write.

In making SEO easier, it is sometimes not just how you write what you write and the tools of the trade I can impress upon you but also the logistics of taking the easy way over the hard if you can.

Press the press my fellow droogs, press the press.

Ralph Greco Presents – Weighing Your Options

Ralph Greco Jr. No Responses »

Sep 222011

If you get in the lucky position where you have too many paying writing gigs on your plate, you’re going to have to manage your time and stick to the gigs that either pay the most or the ones you really love (hopefully these can sometimes be the same job). When it comes to SEO writing, unlike other writing gigs, you really do have to allot a lot of time to the blogs or articles you are writing.

Now don’t come down on me for saying (which I’m not) that other writing gigs are not as hard as SEO writing, I’m just relating from my experience-which lately has been mainly SEO writing-that out of all the time-intensive SEO writing you are attempting you have to push to the forefront those that pay you the most for your time, or that you love (hopefully these can be the same job…where have I heard that before?)

If you are given specific keywords by a client this writing job will probably easier then if you got to go search for or think-up keywords yourself (I have told you before you should figure these two alternatives into your overall price when first determining the job), but the job that’s easier might pay you less, if your client is a savvy guy or girl. Really, do yourself a favor and weigh your options here.

I sometimes have clients come to me with a promise to send a goodly sum to my paypal to begin some seo blogging for the month and while the am’t seems large at the time we need to project into the future how much time this writing is going to take us and if the am’t you are promised is worth that time and if this job is worth you maybe putting others on the back burner. If you are a writer you’re probably not great in math (I suck at math) but really try to figure these jobs out by how many hours it’s going to take you to do them then see what you’re making an hour.

If you do this you’ll be able to weigh your options (if you have them) and say no or maybe later, to jobs that simply don’t pay you enough or take up too much of your time.

KEEPING IT CURRENT

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex No Responses »

Jul 282011

This time I want to get into blogs.

OK, not into them all the way, maybe just a bit.

It’s a huge subject and I have covered some of it before in regard to SEO and it may or may not have come across how I feel about blogging in general. It’s more or less a necessary evil these day I feel and if you’re going to do it to increase traffic to your site-which it does-or you hire one of us to do it-which we will, for a price-then there are a few tips for anyone of you out there writing blogs with SEO in mind, and you really should never write a blog, at least for business purposes, without SEO in mind.

But this not a column about how to write the blog, how to put the keywords in, ad the tags; I can and might get into that some other time if I haven’t already (sorry it’s prematurely hot here in Jersey and my mind is kind of like oatmeal more then usual). But what I did want to get into, hammer home, make sure you remember, if you remember nothing else from what your wize old uncle Ralphie tells you here, is that you need to be keeping those blogs current.

Not just germane to the site you are writing for…and yes that’s important. Not just including the keywords…and yes, you need to do this to. But current, up-to-date, concerning the here-and-now and what’s doing in the world. Not every blog you write will have a take on current events or be about what’s happening in the news, but the more you can relate your blogs to what is happening in the world presently the more people might find it or want to read about it.

Don’t ask me how it came to pass that any one of our opinions could be worth a monkey’s dung heap to anyone else, but somewhere along the line it became a cause-we-can-we-should mentality to writing on the web, to twittering and twatting and Facebook cum-shots on the wall. So people expect up-to-the-minute opining; believe me if you let them they certainly are going to tell you how they feel!

So write the blogs for yourself or your clients and if you want to get people to read them, a little current events worked in from time to time doesn’t hurt.

PRO

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex No Responses »

Jun 102011

So, guess who is a professional playwright now?

I got into the one-act thang a bit late. Having been penning and publishing short stories first and foremost in my illustrious career (it’s only illustrious to me, believe me) it didn’t take all that much time to be able to claim being a pro writer and seeing the coin from it (jingly change though it was). It had less to do with how wonderful my writing was then the fact that I really began all this stuff in earnest penning 800 # pre-recorded phone-sex scripts and being paid for them from the get go. I did spend the requisite time in the trenches sending out my sci-fi short stories, essays, etc. (and still do in fact) but for the most part when I began writing sex (and that was pretty damn early in my writing career) I got paid for it relatively quickly, so I was a pro none too long into the effort.

The SEO thang and the play writing seemed to have begun for me in earnest at the same time-though one has nothing to do with the other-and having just had a one-act run (or “go up” as we pros call it in the business) in the great city of Portland, OR and been paid for that effort (and my first time being so) I can now say I am a professional playwright. Which now leads me to (after all the bragging) my point for this installment.

Gotta get paid.

It doesn’t always happen and I am not saying only ever do this writing thing for the money, but truly if you want to make a living at this or at least earn some sort of self respect at it and maybe the respect of your peers, nothing emboldens one better then getting coin of the realm for your hard earned efforts. Which brings me to my point about SEO writing (see, you didn’t think I could tie it all in, did you?). As we all know from searching for work, there are plenty of places that are looking for written content and a good many of them on line. Most, if not all, businesses know about or have heard rumblings over what SEO is and want to have some of it on their site. And because this writing is specialized-sorry, but not everybody can do it or do it well-the owners of the sites usually-and that’s usually with a big “ually”-know they must pay for a writer to write SEO. Now what they pay will vary and often they will attempt to low ball you on a price, as mostly everyone these days will for any and all services, so the more you can bring to the table about SEO-knowing what meta-tags are, knowing where to research keywords, how to monitor analytics to assure the client you are doing your job-the more valuable you are and the more you can demanded.

So I guess really this time out I want to impress you with a few things. One, it’s good to get paid for your writing, even if it is just a little bit and secondly, you can get more than just a little bit the more valuable you are to who hires you. My playwriting now, in the beginning stages though it is, is now just a tinge more valuable in the overall objective scheme of things because I have had a few plays produced at this writing and I have been paid now to do so. So getting paid, while not the reason we right, does help put food on the table and some crack into the old pipe.

Go forth and play this stage called life my little droogs with your writing wares and unlimited desire for abuse.

where it all happened, by the way can be seen here:

(Technorati code: ZNG4R4NEH8PA)

SEO A GO GO

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex No Responses »

Apr 212011

So what happened recently, if you haven’t heard, was that Google began cracking down on content houses over their output. Seems that some people were handing back rather shoddy written work for blogs and articles that were to be used on the web. You know, all the stuff I try to tell you not to do; keyword stuffing, blogs that had little or no meaning, just a seeming bunch of paragraphs to drop keywords into, over-all sophomoric content written by people who are not really writers. It is good for us scribes who do this voodoo that we do and consider it a real job, bad news for houses that simply churned out stuff with no care for the quality.

If you were to hold my feet to the fire-and I’m kinda into that, so have at it, just make sure you buy me a soda first-I wouldn’t be able to tell you what is good or bad writing. I am not the grammar police (ever see some of my stuff?) so I really wouldn’t know what’s good or bad, but I do think I know a thing about SEO and SEO as it applies to the adult industry, but an expert I aint’. And in fact, if anybody tells you they are an expert-about anything-take it from your old uncle Ralphie with the charred tootsies, they ain’t an expert either.

What I can tell you about SEO is, the keywords need to relate bro (either the client will provide them or you will be asked to research for some…and for this you damn well better be charging), the keywords need to sit nice and comfy in the article, blog, what-have-you and the article, blog, what-have-you need to be about something and something germane to the site you are writing for…unless your client tells you they do not want it to be germane.

But I can’t sit here and advise you what is good writing or bad, I just know what moves me when I see it and what doesn’t. The actual good or bad part is subjective, even Google’s not cracking down on that part of the writing, they are cracking down on writing that reeks of pure badly placed SEO and rambling content.

But I can tell you this for sure….if you are out there writing SEO content for clients you damn well better step-up your game because the stakes are higher now and big brother-of Google-is watching.

Moving The Goal Posts

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex 2 Responses »

Mar 032011

Kids, if you want to work in the wacky world of SEO writing you need to know the goal posts might be moved on you every so often.

Because what we do in keyword copy writing is about the, say it with me now…keywords as much as it is the copy (really it’s about the keywords, don’t let anyone fool you) you write to the keywords, work copy around the keywords, research what keywords will work with a particular client (research you should be paid for, by the way) or work-in keywords given to you by your client; get it, the emphasis is on, that’s right say it with me…keywords. Therefore don’t be so shocked when a client comes to you and says, ‘hey let’s change up some of those keywords we have been using because they do not earn us a lot of traffic currently’.

Learn to adapt.

It’s the the nature of the beast. This beast is Internet writing a many sullied thing at best, poorly written missives at worst. You see all the bad writing on the net or truncated net-speak that passes for actual sentences. You realize language is being aborted for the brevity of some sort of digispeak. It should not come as a shock to any of us as the language changes-for the worse as far as I’m concerned-and grammar goes out the window (shit, all ya gotta do is read some of my posts to see how bad grammar has effected me!) that the goal posts will be shifted to what a client thinks they need in their copy and this includes what keywords they will use and even how long the copy might be.

So take it from your old uncle Ralphie, be ready for changes even if you have a contract (which, in the end, is not worth dickall really…try hunting someone down on-line to honor what has been agreed upon. Yes I know emails are evidence but unless you hire a lawyer to go get the $600.00 bucks owed you, you can’t enforce a contract from on line, or anywhere else. If you think you can, I have some land in NJ you might like) and agreed upon keywords, it’s all not only subject to change, it pretty much damn well will.

WHY SEO

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex 2 Responses »

Nov 182010

You have a website. You want to bring people to your website. Either you have a blog you feel the world needs to read, a product you’d like to get people to buy or a service you want to hook people into paying for. Maybe you’re a band and want to have your music heard or a beginning film maker who likes to post his short movies and have them watched by untold thousands. Either way you have something, ‘content’ for want of a better word, you want people to see, listen to, experience in some way and you have placed this content, or at least a link to it on a website. You know, as well as I, how many websites there are out there. How do you get the untold and unwashed to your specific website?

This is where SEO comes in. What you do is, you pick whatever niche you happen to be exploring-since this a site about sex writing let’s take a cam site that shows Japanese women smoking cigar VODs-then you write articles, blogs, what-have-you about that very subject and you (or the writer you hire) use keywords related to your subject (and any good SEO copywriter will know how to find those keywords, or at least the ones that garner a lot of hits) get it all nicely meta-tagged (though keywords will show up without meta tagging, but it is a good idea to go this extra step) and away you go. The trick of course is first finding the niche you want to explore, exploring your best keyword options then figuring if you want articles, blogs, reviews, even fiction about your subject (or all four), writing copy that sounds natural and not ‘stuffed’ with keywords (this is called “keyword stuffing”, go figure!) and incorporating the keyword copy in a way it doesn’t take away but instead enhances the smokin’ hot smoking Asian girl cams that you want people to sign-up for.

You want people to come to your site and stay at your site and beyond all the normal advertising you’ll do for a Japanese smoking cam site-posting on boards, running banner ads, affiliate linking-writing about what you do and offer, will rank high on search engines if your copy is written with keywords in mind and well placed.

The actual blogs and articles themselves, fiction even?

Don’t ask me why, this is still something I can’t get my mind around and I do this for a living, but there are people, plenty of people out there that will read someone else’s ruminations about a subject. These ruminations, for want of a better term, are called blogs. Blogs are very popular. If you have a site that is closely related to the blog you blog all’s the better, if you are some sort of noted expert in the field you are blogging about, you’re ahead of the game. If you’re smart enough to hire a writer who does this for a living and can incorporate keywords into your blog, you might just pull people to your site.

Articles are a little bit harder to come by, and write. They require some research and knowledge about the subject. You best know what kind of cigars those smoking girls are smoking, how often the videos are updated, etc. But the same rules apply to the keywords. The copy needs to read smooth, not like one is ‘stuffing’ words such as smoking girls, or girls smoking in every chance one gets with no care for the article making sense.

I am primarily a fiction writer. I am most comfortable making shit up (like the sex life I brag about all the time). What I came to find, most notably when writing for adult toy manufacturers was that a nice three hundred to six hundred word story, with well-placed keywords plugged in, brings people to a site every bit or more so then an article can. For sure this is probably the most specialized writing I ever did and do (next to 800# pre-recorded phone sex scripts…remind me to tell you about that experience sometime) but it is also the most funnest.

Though SEO writing is a very specific type of writing, it’s not impossible to do by any means. But it all requires a certain economy of style-if you will allow me- and certainly some practice and an eye for where commerce meets creativity. This is not ad copy writing-itself a totally different form of writing replete with its own rules, formulas and difficulties-but writing where you have to research keywords that will rank a site high, then piece them into either articles, P.R. blogs what-have-you and like all writing, this takes time, skill and is best handled by a professional (kids don’t try this at home!)

Next time I’ll get into how to do it.

Ralph Greco, Jr.SEO – WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT BE, WHERE IT’S AT

Ralph Greco Jr., Write Sex No Responses »

Sep 302010

I’ve been pondering the question of what SEO is and how to write it, since it looks like I am to be your go-to-guy over this specific aspect of adult writing (and boy, if I’m your go-to-guy you are in trouble big!) but I realize I don’t have much to teach. So, so long and thanks for all the fish (if you know what this is from you get an extra prize in your Kracker Jack bucko), thanks for having me, don’t forget to tip your waitress and please, try the veal.

Ok, I’m joking. I do have some tips, advice, lead-you-down-the-garden-path nudges to nudge you with.

First of all, all SEO mean is search engine optimization, which in turn translates to mean (in our context here) writing copy that has key words in it. Say you have a site where you have Asian hookers displaying themselves on cam (a client I actually did do work for) and you want people (adults) to come to your site, pay a monthly fee and peruse the girls, in order to get people to your site you need to let them know you Asian hooker cam girls exists, right? One of the ways you do this is to hire incredibly talented writers like me (and good looking to, let’s not forget that!) to write press releases, webcopy that will appear on your website, blogs, articles and in the case of this client, short fiction featuring Asian girls. The trick of course was in all of the above writing I had to make sure to include various key words or key word phrases that we knew would ‘tag’ this site when one was scrolling through Google etc, possibly looking for Asian cam girls or any variation on that theme. At that time I was working with my great friend and SEO expert, Lisa W. (Lisa has blogged here before) and Lisa was the one who did the keyword search for our client and later, took my copy to ad Meta Tags (and don’t ask me about Meta Tags, I don’t know how to do them, look them up…you want everything for free here!) The point is, once the keywords are established (in the above case words like ‘Asian’ ‘Oriental’ ‘flower’ ranked high as did all the variations on various Asian ethnicities) I knew what I had to work with. ‘Stuffing’ these words is looked down upon (putting too many phrases or keywords into copy where is reads terribly and obvious, like “The New York Botanical Garden is open year round, which is unusual seeing that no other New York Botanical Garden in New York is open year round, simply because New York’s Botanical Garden’s are at the mercy of New York’s terrible winter weather which can greatly affect Botanical Gardens) as is simply pluralizing the same word over and over. So the trick for me, and a pretty good writing challenge, was to bring this client fiction, articles, etc. with plenty of keywords in it, to be picked up later by search engines, but to make the copy sing.

This is the essence of SEO writing…as far as the writing is concerned. Like I said, dear sweat Lisa, truly the brains of our operation (but not just brains, she’s a cutie too) was the one who took my stuff and added the tags, ran the analytics for the client to keep up on what was working and what not, and generally made what I did, the writing, work so the client got hits.

The specifics of what works and what doesn’t in all this I will save for another piece.

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I Need Good Writers

So why are we being priced so low?

Press The Press

Ralph Greco Presents – Weighing Your Options

KEEPING IT CURRENT

PRO

SEO A GO GO

Moving The Goal Posts

WHY SEO

Ralph Greco, Jr.SEO – WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT BE, WHERE IT’S AT

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