Ted Bendixson, Freelance Copywriter and Shred Advocate

Gotcha! I made you question your self-esteem, and now you’re stuck here reading an article about headlines. When it comes to creating content that people will want to read, the actual subject matter is only half the battle. If you can’t hook people with headlines that make them want to learn more, they won’t bother to read your content in the first place. Here’s how you do it.

Appeal To Their Self-Interest

Countless studies show that the most effective headlines are the ones that appeal to a deep and personal want or need. Use this to your advantage by creating headlines that tell your readers how you can solve their problems. This is the reason why you see so many headlines that read something like this:

“The Top 5 Reasons You Should Use Top 5 Lists In Your Articles”
“Are You Doing Enough To Stop These 10 Common Causes Of Failure?”
“You’re Pretty Sure He’s Running Around. How Can You Tell If He’s Going To Desert You?”
“My Grandmother’s 1 Weird Tip For Getting Men To Pay Attention To My Midsection”

You get the idea. All of these headlines play with your reader’s personal wants and needs. You can take it one step further by embedding an accusation of some sort, just like I did with the headline for this article. Whenever you find an opportunity to inject an emotional trigger into a headline, use it.

Why The Secret I Am About To Reveal Will Make Your Headlines More Interesting

Sometimes it’s what you don’t say that makes your audience want to read a little more. If you can find a way to add the element of mystery to your headlines without taking away the appeal to your readers’ self-interest, you might just have yourself a winning formula. Here are a few examples:

“What She Isn’t Telling You About The Size Of Your Worst Insecurity”
“The Secret To Creating Mysterious Headlines Finally Revealed!”
“Companies Like To Keep This Policy Quiet. Find Out How You Can Exploit It.”
“This Thing That I Won’t Name Right Now Changed The World. It’s Back, And It’s Better Than Ever.”

You will notice that many of the examples from the first section also use the element of mystery. I always chuckle when I see these “1 Weird Tip” ads on websites. They have to be doing well because I keep seeing more of them. It’s just interesting that something as simple as saying you have a “weird tip” could be so effective.

Sometimes You Need To Consider A Design Change

It doesn’t matter how well written your headlines are if you don’t have a site design that shows them off. Do your articles have clear and visible headlines? Are Your Headlines Written In Large Bold Text With Capital Letters At The Beginning Of Every Word? I don’t mean to toot my own horn here, but this website is a great example of a design that’s created for the purpose of presenting content. It has large bright red headlines that stand out, sub-headlines that break up the articles, and the occasional picture or video to attract even more interest.

Be willing to face some hard realities. You may have just put down a bunch of money for an expensive Flash website when something much simpler would have done the job. You might also have a design that’s outdated. If you aren’t using some kind of content management system like WordPress or Drupal, it’s time to get in on it now.

I have a little secret for you. I only had to pay $200 to get this site designed. Here’s what I did. I bought the server space and domain, installed WordPress, picked a theme I like, and then I hired somebody on Elance to modify the theme to something that suits me a little more. If you think high end design is out of your price range, think again. There are plenty of ways to make it very affordable.

Don’t be afraid to spend a lot of time thinking about the headlines you write. If you can’t come up with something interesting right away, wait on it. There’s no point in publishing an article that won’t get read just because you need to meet a deadline. Write the headline first, and the content will practically write itself.

Ever since I got my GoPro HD camera, I’ve been filming every day and totally loving it. This video is a taste of what’s to come this snowboarding season. As I write this, they’ve just finished pushing snow for the big jump, and we’re looking at seeing the rest of the slopestyle line complete within just a few days. It’s time to put on your stompin’ shoes. This is gonna be epic!

Cardona Teaser Ted Bendixson from Ted Bendixson on Vimeo.

It’s a story you hear all too often on the bidding sites. Freelancers complain about never being able to find high paying clients while employers complain about the lack of qualified employees with excellent communication skills. Have you ever posted a project on one of the bidding sites and taken it down because you couldn’t get a single decent candidate to bid on it? If so, the advice I am about to give is for you.

Over the years, the online job market has come to represent the real job market in a variety of ways. The social media revolution has created a kind of real world responsibility that is fairly new to the web. What you do, as an employee and as an employer, is more visible than ever. Every action counts.

I don’t mean to scare you, but here is the new reality. If you want to attract talent online, you need to do the same things you would do to attract talent offline. You need to convince your potential employees that your project is worth the time and effort it takes for them to put a proposal together. You also need to look like you can follow a project through to its finish.

As a person who searches through the bidding sites for work, I value employers with a solid reputation who know what they’re doing. When you convey this image in your job posting, you will get more of the right people to bid on your projects. Here’s how you do it.

Don’t Ruin Your Reputation!

It doesn’t matter if you are hiring on Elance, Odesk, Vworker, or any of the over 20 different sources of online workers, reputation is the most important thing to consider when you post your job. Every time you post a project and don’t follow it through, your reputation suffers. The more your reputation tanks, the more difficult it will be to attract rockstar talent.

Before you post any project, think it through. Do you really want to do this? More importantly, do you really need to do this? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve posted a project and decided minutes later that I would just do the project myself. It’s this kind of self-destructive behavior that will ruin your reputation very quickly. Don’t do it!

Be 100% certain that you have the resources to devote to the project and that it is something you cannot do on your own. That is the only way to guarantee you won’t give up on hiring someone. My most successful hires were in areas where I knew absolutely nothing and desperately needed the help. My employees did a great job, and my online reputation improved.

Start Small And Work Your Way Up

As an experienced freelancer, I am past the point of considering employers who don’t have at least one project under their belt. I wish I could, but It’s simply too much risk to assume on my part. I would guess that most experienced freelancers are in a similar situation. We don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t have any experience hiring people online.

How can you get past this? It’s simple. Start with a quick little project and use it to build up your reputation. There are a lot of small scale projects you can do, and they shouldn’t cost you that much. How about taking care of a long-neglected but relatively tiny website tweak?

A single project as small as this will help you establish yourself as a high paying client who is worth pursuing. When I look through a potential client’s history and see that the client was willing to pay between $20 to $40 per hour for copywriting skills, I pursue that client. Do as much as you can to make it look like you will pay well for any services you purchase.

Don’t Look For Quick And Cheap Solutions. Look For Longterm Business Relationships.

I have a guy who will make tiny changes to my website whenever I need it done, and I can talk to him whenever he’s on Skype. He charges a very reasonable price for his services, and he saves me a ton of time. How did I manage to get him to work for me?

Very simply put, I never tried to fleece him. I posted the project on Vworker.com, accepted his bid, and after the project was finished, I just asked him to quote me what he thought was a reasonable price for the work. Most people aren’t trying to scam you. They know what you can afford, and they know how long it takes them to complete the work. Their quotes usually reflect their efforts.

Trust needs to be the cornerstone of all of your business relationships. If your employee tells you she is working overtime to complete your project, take that as a hint that your initial time estimate was wrong, and she deserves to be paid more. Give her a nice bonus, and she’ll happily stay on Skype to help you when it’s urgent.

The clients I have chosen not to keep are usually the ones who are trying to get an amazing bargain out of hiring an online freelancer. They think they’re playing the system, but we can smell them a mile away. After a single a project with one of these clients, I promptly delete their contact information and move on.

Be reasonable and generous from day one, and you will keep us interested and willing to continue working with you. The old adage is true, both online and offline. You get what you pay for. When you’re willing to spend a little more, you will attract many more qualified candidates. Just because you’re hiring online doesn’t mean you should take the hiring process any less seriously.

Now get out there and find the freelancer of your dreams!

Gregory Salonen and Janky Films are at it again in Colorado with Beetle Kill, an epic adventure in Summit County Shredding. This film has some star talent, especially that Seth Dobson kid who’s ridiculous on the rails. You can check out the rest of the Janky crew’s films on their website or by searching “Janky Films” on Vimeo. Thanks again to Greg for filming this. The minor concussion I sustained erased my memory of the events that occurred just after the video cuts out.

Coloarado Collaboration: Beetle Kill Teaser from JANKY 2.0 on Vimeo.

As a freelance writer who frequents the bidding sites, I am painfully aware of what the laissez-faire approach has done to the job market. There are almost no restrictions on which jobs get posted or who posts them on these sites. As result, the online freelance market is flooded with subpar jobs that are a huge waste of your time.

If you want your freelance business to be successful, you need to find the diamonds in the rough. There are a number of red flags that I pay attention to when I’m looking through Elance, Odesk, or Vworker to find new writing gigs. As soon as I see one of them, I skip past the job posting and read something else. I advise you do the same.

Never Read A Post That Says “Articles Required”

It’s gotten to the point where just seeing the word “article” makes me cringe. There are usually at least three of these kinds of postings on every page of job listings, and almost all of them are a complete waste of your time. The buyers are usually looking for bulk content at a very low price with no regard to the quality of the content you create.

Don’t allow yourself to take part in this online sweatshop! The writers who make the big bucks are the ones who promote their skills, not the ones who can feverishly spin spam at an exhausting pace. Respect yourself, learn to write like a badass, and you will be praised for your creativity.

Don’t Bid On Any Projects That Don’t Have A Specific Job Description

There is no better way to know your potential client is totally clueless than to see a vague project description. If your client doesn’t even bother to write a lengthy job description with all the details of the work you will be doing, he probably isn’t too serious about the project.

Whenever I see descriptions that are vague or lacking in content, I assume one of two things. The buyer will either cancel the project or she will be the worst person to work with once she accepts your bid. It’s a sad reality that most projects on the bidding sites will never see the light of day. Don’t waste your time on the ones that are destined for the rubbish bin.

Don’t Work With Buyers Who Have No Payment History

This leads me to my next point. The bidding sites are a giant hub of activity. New buyers and providers are constantly coming and going. Because anybody can create a profile and suffer no consequences for canceling a project, most first-time projects never make it to the funding stage.

This is tough advice to give because I want to encourage new buyers to sign up and look for the freelancer who is an ideal match for them. Unfortunately, trust should never be assumed. It has to be earned. If you are a new buyer, it is best to start with a small project and leverage its successful completion for bigger and better projects in the future.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. I will sometimes bid on a project from a new buyer if the buyer has taken the time to create a detailed description of what I will be doing. This shows me that the buyer cares about quality and is serious enough to think the project through.

Don’t Work With Buyers Who Haven’t Paid Well In The Past

One nice thing about the bidding sites is their transparency. If your buyer has a project history, I advise you to look through it. Try to find projects that are similar to the one in the job description. Buyers often purchase the same services more than once, so this is fairly likely. If you see that the buyer didn’t pay his writer a decent hourly rate on the last project, chances are he won’t be willing to cough up more money for your services the second time around.

There is an added advantage to doing this kind of research. Once you find your ideal client, you will know exactly how much to bid on the project! People like familiarity. When you market yourself as the person who can pick up where the last provider left off, you will win more projects.

In an ideal world, we would go online and legions of like-minded people would approach us with as many job opportunities as we need. Sadly, this is not so. Just like we screen out potential friends, we should screen out potential clients. Don’t waste your time with people who are unorganized and don’t respect your work. If you do, you will miss out on all of the higher paying opportunities.

I purchased my first digital SLR two years ago to this date. It was raining in Oregon, and nobody had a thing to do. I figured it was a great time to learn a new hobby and get some awesome snowboarding shots. Ever since then, I’ve gotten more and more into photography, and I’m loving every moment. The following photos are from the last two years of snowboarding. It was good times all around, and I hope we can get some even better shots in the years to come. I’ve got my eyes set on the new park at Cardrona combined with the classic New Zealand inversion layer.

Oh, before I forget. Here’s a quick shout out to all of my friends who tolerated the epically long setup times it took for me to get the tripod and everything perfect for the shot. You never gave me up, let me down, ran around, or deserted me. I just wanted to tell you how I’m feeling.

Rodeo 7 Near Berthoud Pass

February 2010, Berthoud Pass Colorado. We hiked up to the top of Berthoud Pass, strapped to the nines with avy gear and photo equipment. After a good hour and a half jump building session, we got to hit the money booter into two feet of pow. Double flips were learned, and it went off. Many thanks to Jordan Zdanek for capturing this one.

Cab Cork 5 On Freeway

April 2010, Breckenridge Colorado. Just another spring day up in Breckenridge. Brian Locke snapped this one while we were taking laps.

Summertime At MHSSC

June 2009, Mt. Hood Oregon. I love doing this. After a long day of work at Timberline Lodge, we changed out of our server’s clothes and went out for an evening photo shoot up at Mount Hood Summer Ski Camp. The hike up to the top is a pain, but the photos, beers, and all around good times are more than worth it. Photo credit, again, goes to Brian Locke.

August In Oregon

August 2008, Mt. Hood Oregon. Just before taking this one, I almost got destroyed by another snowboarder hitting this rail. The only way to get this photo was to get up close and personal with a telephoto lens, right on the landing of the rail. A guy did a 50-50, landed it perfectly, and I barely missed him as I dove out of the way. In any case, my friends snapped this one, and it’s still one of my favorites.

Keystone Bike Park Awesomeness

January 2009, Keystone Colorado. This was pretty rad. Keystone has a bike park that they keep stashed away in the trees for the summertime. Last year, they decided to keep it open during the snowboarding season and allow us all to go through it. We took a lot of photos on that day and had a lot of nasty falls. Just as I should have expected, the best photos were the ones that required the least risk. Thanks to Curtiss Feltner for getting this shot.

I’m very happy to have just finished a piece on how to balance your dream with your freelance business for Elance’s blog. If you have ever wanted to know how I manage to get everything done while snowboarding almost every day, this article will help you out. It provides tips for staying on top of projects and finding clients who are stoked about your passion!

I want to thank Alex from Elance for making this happen. You guys are great, and your service is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Seriously, you would think we could get over this already. There was once a time when you could put a bunch of keywords at the bottom of your site’s pages and they would jump to the top of the search engine rankings. It was the beginning of the web, a time before the advent of Google when the few people who called themselves webmasters had total dominance over the content delivered to the masses.

It was during these years (1997 to be more exact) when people got the impression that you could play games with the search engines, and you could win. That’s because people did win, and they won big. Sites rose to popularity overnight just because someone knew the next clever trick to play on the search engines. It was a good time to be in the content business because quality didn’t matter. You could produce oodles of SPAM and make lots of money off of it.

The same games don’t work anymore.

And then the elephant named Google walked into the room and changed the game forever. Suddenly, simply having lots of keywords in your content didn’t mean it would reach the top. You actually had to earn links from other sites, and those sites that linked to you had to have a good reputation. SPAM sites practically disappeared overnight, and quality content became king.

The same is true today, much to chagrin of people who are still living in the late ‘90s. As search engines develop more and more advanced programs to examine content and determine if it is legitimate, the prospect of playing games with the search engines becomes ever more grim. Nevertheless, content developers still cling to the notion that they can somehow “crack the code” and get to the top of Google without earning it.

Article Spinning, A Euphemism For Online Sweatshop.

Gone are the days of invisible keywords and illegitimate links. Welcome to the era of article spinning, a time when the online world becomes a content sweatshop that is certain to give carpal tunnel to anyone crazy enough to write at the speed of SPAM. If you aren’t familiar with this practice, it means taking an original article and writing it a dozen different ways to capture all of the possible searches people might enter into Google. As long as each article is different enough from all of the others, Google will accept the article into its index.

Article spinning is the modern equivalent of the shotgun approach. Instead of writing a few high quality articles that are likely to get linked to, you hire people from all over the world to write hundreds of them with the vain hope that a few of them will succeed and become popular. Quality clearly isn’t a concern here. It’s a simple matter of getting the content out there first.

From an actual SEO standpoint, this is suicide. Almost none of these articles are even readable. Nobody links to them because they’re very poorly written, and they don’t offer any unique or new information. To make things worse, even when some of these pages do get a few links, the links they get are distributed across the all of the pages. Instead of having one page that competes with the top contenders, you now have a bunch of pages that can’t compete with anyone. You have become the jack of all trades and master of none.

Even if you win the battle today, you will lose the war tomorrow. Google will find a way to penalize article spinners, and when they do, you will see a drop in your rankings. It is always best to align your goals with the goals of the major search engines. They run the show. When they decide that your spam-filled site isn’t helping their users get the content they want, they will happily pull the plug.

People thrive on emotions. If you want to keep your visitors interested in what you have to say, you need make your content more emotional. This is a piece of advice that many copywriters will give you, but they will almost never tell you how to go about doing it.

How do you effectively use emotional triggers to create content that makes your readers want to learn more about you? Some emotions can be tough to latch onto, but if you try out these five techniques, you’ll be on your way to getting your visitors to feel what you feel in no time.

1.) Address Your Visitors Directly

You may have noticed by now that I’m talking directly to you. I’m using a lot of “you’s,” and this makes you feel like I care a lot about you. I do.

When you address your visitors directly, you are in a better position to guide your visitors’ emotions. You can tell your visitor to remember something, or to STOP!

Do you see what I’m saying? You have to get in close if you want your visitors to feel something. Address your visitors directly. Use a lot of “you’s.”

2.) Use the senses

The senses are the gateway to the mind. If you’re selling candles, talk about the scents your visitors will smell whey they purchase your product. Be very specific. Describe an experience by saying something like, “…when you walk into your home and smell the aroma of a fresh apple pie baking in the oven.”

By doing this, you are guiding your visitors through the experience and awakening their memory of the smell. This then activates all of the other feelings that go along with the scent of the apple pie. Just like that, your words have made your visitors feel something.

3.) Tell a personal story

You would be surprised at how much we all have in common. I found myself enthralled with a sales letter about a bartender’s MP3 course because the author told a personal story that resonated with a few of my past experiences. If you tailor your personal story to common emotions we all feel, you’ll have your readers hooked with minimal effort.

Don’t limit yourself to the positive emotions. Feelings of embarrassment and fear have motivated people to take action since the dawn of advertising. If your story is genuine, your emotions will go straight to your reader’s heart.

4.) Be concise and keep it simple

You’ll kill any emotion in your copy the second your visitors stumble on a single word. Keep your message short and to the point. Use smaller sentences, and break up whatever you can. The more time your visitors spend thinking, the less time they spend feeling.

5.) Try to get into your visitor’s head

You might not know exactly what your visitors are thinking, but you probably have an idea. You know, for example, that a person who stumbles upon a site selling a holiday cookie recipe ebook probably has a soft spot for holiday memories. The same person probably wants to impress family members and keep his kids occupied. Were this not so, he wouldn’t be interested enough to have made it to your page.

Investigate these motivations for being on your page. Take them and find emotionally hard hitting content that will get your site visitors even more involved. Use the senses. Tell a story. Remember how proud you felt when you entertained your family over the holidays for the first time. Remember the twinkle in your kids’ eyes when they put the sprinkles on the sugar cookies. Don’t think of it like it’s a game. Find a genuine emotion that you feel and communicate it with your content.

People are masters of mimicry. When we see another person feeling a strong emotion, we start feeling it too.

I’ll tell you a story about a friend of mine who got injured snowboarding in the terrain park. As he lied down on the snow, screaming in pain while the paramedics got him onto the stretcher, I couldn’t help but feel some of that pain too. No, I didn’t feel his physical pain. I felt his emotional anguish at the fact that he’ll have to spend the season in a wheelchair. I realized what he realized.

You already have your visitors’ attention. You just have to describe the emotions you feel, and they’ll start feeling them too. It is human nature to empathize and mimic one another. Take this fact and use it to keep people interested in you and what you’re saying.