I’m only guessing this, but it seems the phrase “intellectual property” is rarely used in its right sense. Perhaps the only place where the word’s meanings are non-negotiable is the courtroom – but even there it is debatable!
As a blogger and web content creator and publisher, I’d prefer you understand IP law, and how it affects your use of internet sources such as images, from your home (and not the court).
So, I’ve compiled this guide to demystify these two words in combination with blog images and visual content in general. You ask why?
Well, having come across copyright infringement cases I want to pass on my experience, lessons, and research and share it with my blogger community to create more awareness of this complex and haunting topic.
You can also check out this post I’ve written and published on ClickDo’s Blog:
There’s no replacement for reading the entire activity on your own. Tedious; I totally understand.
Nothing you read on the Internet (this guide included) can replace contextual advice from an expert attorney or IP lawyer.
This guide is made to give you some curiosity and direction so that you can then discover the answers to your specific questions.
Given the abysmally low probability of the readership of this article consisting of legal minds, here is the “at a glance” version of UK Copyright and IP law:
Within the UK, Copyrights are automatic in nature, which means that there is no protocol or formality needed to acquire them.
Point number 1 also means that there is no central organization that handles the registration of your Copyrights. In short, if you are the creator of something, its copyrights will automatically rest with you.
For content publishers: as stated above, creators of images and artwork automatically receive copyright protection whether or not they apply for it, and it is also given to them whether or not they use the copyright symbol in their works or not.
[For people who use licensed images]: This translates to increased risks of copyright claims for users if they do not pay meticulous attention to what license their chosen images are billeted under (the safest license under which you can use images for your publications is the creative commons license).
Now, when it comes to creating content, in the UK, you are automatically covered.
How does the Copyright Act apply to Blog Images from the Internet?
Does copyright apply to the Internet-sourced images I use in my content? Short Answer: Yes.
To put it in simple terms, a copyright holder can release his/ her/ their works for public use with certain limitations imposed on how you can use those works.
Each limitation has a keyword, which is described below, including the restrictions it comes with. For example, a “Copying Restriction” prohibits you from copying the work in any form whatsoever, so it is for your personal use only.
The full restriction list can be found here:
#
Imposed Limitation
What this means for you
Additional Reading
1
Copying
The work is for your use only, and both electronic (e.g. scanning) and manual (e.g. tracing) forms of copying the copyrighted work are prohibited,
2
Copying Issues To The Public
You cannot publish the work on any distributable material that you create.
3
Communicating The Work (To The Public)
Basically the same limitation as “Copying Issues To The Public”, but with the add-on of you not being able to use such works with the internet, radio, TV, or other such distributive publications.
4
Performance
You cannot use such protected works for public performance, and specifically for images, they cannot be displayed in exhibitions.
5
Rental, And Lending Restrictions
The thing to note with the terms “renting” and “lending” is that renting is only done for profit. Under this restriction, you cannot rent, nor lend such protected works to anyone, for any reason.
You cannot translate such protected works to another language, or adapt them in any way or form whatsoever. Thus, these works are for your use, “as is”.
Simply, under copyright law, without the owner’s permission, you cannot:
Copy, Distribute, or Lend the work.
Publicly display the work.
Adapt the work.
If you want to find the owner of a copyright, you can check the British Copyright Council, but no copyright owner is obliged to register here so they still own the copyright to their work even if not listed here.
What are the Consequences of Violating the Copyright of Blog Images?
If you are found guilty of copyright infringement in a magistrate’s court, you could be fined up to 50,000 GBP, and could also be slapped with a jail term of up to six months. Yes, you read that right!
If the case reaches a Crown court, the fines are unlimited, and up to ten years in jail. I know, shocking!
Instances, where an entity pursued legal action for copyright in the UK, are:
If someone infringes upon copyrights, the administering organization/individual and/or the owner of the copyright have the right to file and pursue a claim to their copyright through the judiciary in the UK.
This often gets very expensive for the infringers, with them having to pay for the cost of using the image, their own legal fees, and the copyright owner’s legal fees, and all this can quickly amount to much more than the costs of using the image, to begin with.
To boot, infringers may also be asked to remove at their own cost all copies of the pre-licensed version of the copyrighted works from the public domain.
Exceptions To Copyright Law Protection
Under copyright law, without the owner’s permission, you can to a certain degree use the copyrighted material for
Study (Private and/ or research) purposes.
Performance of, copying, or lending the work for educational purposes.
Reporting in the news (not for images though), and criticism.
Recordings of any form of broadcast for consumption at a time more convenient to you. This entire process is formally known per pro as “Time Shifting”.
Producing a backup or a copy for personal use (in terms of computer programs)
The doctrine of fair use by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free
Where Can You Get Copyright-Free Legal Images?
This is the key question for all content creators, publishers, and bloggers and let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you think.
Read on!
Stock Image Websites
Where can you get copyright-free legal images online? The most obvious answer is – stock-photo websites. But you’ll soon find out that you’re still exposed to copyright-violation lawsuits, even for using images from a stock photo website.
What are stock photo websites?
These websites are an online library of images across various genres that can be sorted via keywords and tags. Most of them have been uploaded by photographers and graphic designers.
There is a huge collection of these images online, but you may be required to pay if you exceed a certain number of free images, etc.
Some websites are 100% free, while others require you to pay per image, or for unlimited use on a time-period basis.
Stock image websites mention what their images are licensed under usually in their policies. However, there are often exceptions and it is not always easy for users to determine the copyrights on the image and the restrictions, and where and how they are applicable.
These policies are often written in legal terms and are difficult to understand. It’s therefore best to only use platforms that clearly label each image they offer for free downloads with the copyright symbols which I’ve listed further down in this post.
Always check every single image’s licensing first before using it.
Having gone through many stock image website policies, I have found that these are the clearest in their licensing:
Some licensed images on stock websites (most of them actually), will require attribution to the creator/owner of the image and it will say this where required in the license.
Note: I’ll cover different license types later in this guide.
Make your own legal Blog Images [Tool: Canva]
Seeing that copyright can become a true minefield for any blogger and content creator and publisher, I suggest creating copyright-free visuals using design tools yourself.
The prime example of such a tool would be Canva, a design tool for which all you need is a web browser and an internet connection.
You can use the design you create on Canva without worrying about copyright infringements on your published blog content, provided of course that you have not used copyrighted images or parts of copyrighted images in the design process, to begin with.
Note: This is a simplistic version of the answer to your question – whether you can use Canva’s library of free multimedia to create visuals that are copyright law-compliant. For a more detailed answer, refer to the official policy statement.
Generate legal Blog Images with AI [Tool: DALL·E 2]
You can also use Open AI’s DALL·E 2 to have artificial intelligence generate images for you.
Note: images made with DALL·E 2 are still the property of their parent company Open AI, but you are free to use (and sell) any images that you create with DALL·E 2 and keep the profits for yourself.
However, you should note that DALL·E 2 and open AI retain the rights to such images, and they may themselves choose to sell the images that you have asked the tool to create.
That said, any profit that you make from DALL·E 2, is yours to keep, without repercussion. Do check their policies, however, to be on the safe side.
Stock Photo Websites for Blog Images: Things To Remember
Which licenses let you use stock images for commercial purposes, with complete compliance with copyright laws? The answer is – a CC0 license.
Ideally, what you are looking for is a Creative Commons license, specifically a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
Quite literally, CC0 licenses allow you to do whatever you want with the images, whenever you want and as frequently as you want.
You can usually get “attribution required, free to use” or CC0-licensed images from stock websites.
Even if the use of an image is allowed to the public, you really want to read the fine print of the license that it falls under.
For example, “Free for non-profit” licenses are just that: free use only for nonprofit organizations.
Here is the “at a glance” information that you should know when using stock images.
If you look at the subsections under their “information” tabs, most stock websites state that they absolve themselves from any copyright claims against images that you have gotten from their website in the first place, which is why it is super important to research the usage limitations and restrictions for photos posted on these websites. Again, it is best to look for CC0 or other creative commons licenses.
You can also use stock images with the CC0 license to create images of your own with design tools. Just ensure you do not use copyrighted images (for which you do not have usage rights) in the designs.
This section will quickly bring you up to speed on the language of copyright – it is really easy to get lost in the mix of copyright terms.
Here is a table that should help us decode the corporate jargon:
#
Label
Symbol
Particulars of Label
1
Copyright
This means that the owner or holder of the copyright will reserve all rights of the copyrighted work(s) under copyright law(s) and that the copyrighted work is free for fair use.
2
Creative Commons
These works will have certain rights under copyright law(s) withheld, and these will be clearly communicated. These works frequently appear with the tag of “Some rights reserved”, and always require attribution to the creator. It is important to note that such licensed works can have their usage rights changed after you use the image.
3
Public Domain
The copyright owner has waived all his, or their rights and claims on the image, and you can modify, copy, and even distribute the work to the public domain, even if such use is intended for commercial purposes.
4
Fair Use
This case is exclusive of public domain image libraries, Creative Common licensed images, and stock image websites. Per the 4-factor test (purpose, nature, amount, and effect), you may find yourself able to use such images under the fair use case policy of copyrighted work(s).
Identifying Copyright Holders of Blog Images
In the case where you cannot identify which individual holds a copyright, here are some steps you can take:
A WHOIS search: If the image you are looking at has been posted by the owner of the website where said image appears, then a WHOIS search will reveal the contact data of the website owner, and by extension, of the copyright holder.
You can also right-click the image, and then select “search Google for this image” in the drop-down menu. This will display a results page with all the websites that have the same image on them, possibly helping in tracing the copyright holder for that image. Bear in mind, that the copyright owner is not legally required to mark their images on the internet as copyright protected.
You may also consult a private copyright registry, of which several are named in annex one of this report published by WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Organization).
If you can find the owner of an image, but no contact details for the copyright holder, you could try looking up the following organizations, because there is a good chance that the copyright holder is a part of them:
BAPLA (The British Assn. Of Picture Libraries and Agencies)
If you find an image online for which you have no license information, assume that it is protected under copyright law.
Properly Attributing a Blog Image: A Guide
If you decide to use an image that requires attribution, again, ensure you have the right to use it before you credit the creator/copyright owner. Because they can easily track each image published online that is tagged with their name and identify any copyright infringement easily.
Copy the URL (link) of the image and note the name of the creator/photographer.
Add image attributions to the image title tag itself (wherever you use the image in your blog) as well as to image alt tags.
Also, include the creator’s name as a caption for the image. You can also do this as a note at the end of the blog.
It is always a sound idea to reach out to the copyright owner and tell them how you plan to use their image. You can begin the message by thanking the creator for making the image available under the creative commons license.
To preserve the image quality, try to use embedded codes to display the image.
Terms and Conditions of Legal Images: The Fine Print
DALL·E: The parent company, Open AI reserves the right to have works reviewed by third-party contractors, and if the service is used through labs. open, then credits bought on labs must be used within one year from the date of purchase, or else they will expire.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia has washed its hands of any images that you find on Wikipedia by saying that “They cannot guarantee information validity”. This is why it is imperative to verify the license that even Wikimedia commons images come under before using them.
Creative Commons 2: Even CC2.0 licenses on sites like Flickr redirect you to this page on the CC website, which basically says the images are for non-commercial usage only.
The Snapshot
Exhausted? I know. Welcome to the legal desert that sucks you in and dries you out. But as a content creator, publisher, and blogger, you need to understand what you’re dealing with, especially if you offer your content publishing and digital PR services including images, screenshots, logos, etc. to clients. I hope this guide helps you to not become a victim of copyright infringement claims as they are not pleasant.
In my view, the internet should be a place where we can all share resources that we make publicly available sensibly. Anyone who’s not happy to have their content shared, should not publish it in the first place or ensure that it is clearly labeled or protected from copying. I, therefore, recommend every blogger and content creator create their own images, graphics, and designs where possible to save themselves from such headaches. This will also benefit your branding and make your content more unique, which will help it rank better on search engines.
More Important Resources and Useful Links if you fancy
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
Guest posting can be an excellent tool for all sorts of different businesses trying to build a reputation and brand.
To begin with, it is going to allow you to build up some increased credibility, which is all-important in this competitive world.
At the same time, you should also be able to get some excellent backlinks that you can use to increase your SEO rankings if you ensure effective SEO copywriting in your guest posts.
However, if you are going to be guest posting, it is certainly going to be worth making sure that you are doing it the right way.
There are a few different rules that are going to be worth following closely in this regard and we list some below.
1. Choose the Websites Carefully
No matter whether you are planning on running the guest posting strategy yourself or you are going to be relying on an external guest post service, there is no doubt that the sites should all be chosen in a careful manner.
After all, you want them to lend some of their credibility to what you are doing and not take it away for any reason. At the same time, it is also going to be important that they are lending something positive to you in terms of the overall search engine optimization impact that is achieved.
2. Follow the Rules When Pitching and Writing the Content
While there are some guest posting sites out there that are more than happy to accept any type of content that comes their way, there are others that are going to expect you to make a proper pitch.
Ultimately, when you are putting in your outreach pitch, you should be taking the time to read and follow all the different rules that have been set out for you. At the same time, you should take extra care to write content that is good enough. Otherwise, it is going to be more than likely that you will simply not be allowed back again.
3. Choose an Interesting Topic
The choice of topic needs to be a highly interesting one for a couple of major reasons. In the first place, you are going to want to make sure that you are impressing the guest blog and writing something that has not already been previously covered in one way or another.
At the same time, you are also going to want to attract some clicks and shares in your own right, which leads readers to want to read more from you.
4. Write a Strong Bio
If people have liked what they have read, it is often the bio that they will then be scrolling down to. You should certainly take the opportunity to make sure that you have written a strong one that reflects your own business and what it is trying to accomplish while including your website links.
This way, you may well be able to get some more followers to come to your website directly rather than via a third-party website in the first place.
Conclusion
Following all these different rules of guest posting will make it more likely that you will do it in the right way the first time around, making every single guest post count to establish yourself on the web.
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
For copywriter cubs finding their way in an online jungle filled with competitors with fiercely ferocious appetites for digital notoriety, fear not!
In this post, I will guide you through the intricate ins and outs of resume or CV portfolio websites and how to not only create a copywriter website portfolio that brings pride to your profession. But also, how to formulate its highly optimisable appeal as a digital framework for imprinting the journey of your professional prowess much to the delight of prospective recruiters or online service seekers.
My copywriter website portfolio insights invite you to explore the purpose and value of resume portfolio and CV websites while shedding light on social media strategies you can adopt to vitalise your virtual visibility for eager online onlookers.
Are you a copywriter looking to build your online resume portfolio and CV website repertoire?
You’ve come to the right place!
From steps to purchasing an affordable website domain to helpful hints about sourcing an effective content management system to carry your portfolio website content for showcasing, my copywriter website portfolio tips are your go-to guide to online CV and portfolio perfection.
Furthermore, to help boost your online persona and optimise your marketability potential, I will share valuable resources and tactful SEO and digital PR tips you can use to improve platform performance for your copywriter website portfolio.
Traditional Portfolios/CVs & Their Digital Transition
As a direct result of the technological strides reached since the dawn of the digital revolution, the digital door to producing a prospective online persona through your online portfolio swings wide open to meet your professional objectives.
By identifying and isolating the key characteristics encompassing the general nature of traditional portfolios and their intended purpose, copywriters can swiftly accommodate the shift towards meeting the digitised demand for resume portfolios and CV websites.
What is an Online Portfolio or CV Website?
As a career-facing framework fashioned to support the contextual composition of a CV, a portfolio is a collection of information and material that gives visual examples of a person’s professional skills and experience through website links, illustrations, photographs, &/or videos as proof of their professional capabilities.
Generally giving employers an idea of the quality of a person’s work and interests, portfolios are a substantially effective means of showcasing someone’s professional abilities and skills rather than merely describing them.
As such, coining on their credibility, it’s common practice for experienced professionals and creatives to consistently keep their portfolios updated with the latest career-building exemplars of their skills and masterpieces, which is best done online via a website.
In contrast to the outdated hard-copy printed portfolios of the past, nowadays, professionals from across the board (i.e., copywriters, architects, photographers, artists, designers, developers, etc.) use online portfolios and CVs when digitally displaying their skills and proven experience.
In my case, you can often find new blog posts about new aspects of my work as an online media and PR strategist and content writer. This way I keep my readers and anyone potentially looking for my services up to date about my expertise, work projects, and knowledge.
Furthermore, in curbing their insatiable quench for first-hand exemplifications of your excellence, recruiters and corporate collaborators now place higher demands for resume portfolio websites as professional accompaniments to digital resumes.
The Significance of Digitising Your Traditional Portfolio or CV
Fine-tuned to appeal to your career-climbing potential in the field of copywriting, the intended purpose of resume portfolio and CV websites is to virtually eternalise your work accomplishments and develop your professional online persona in perfectly presented ways. As a result, to the delight of hiring managers, online visitors getting a glimpse at your copywriter website portfolio can join the technological trail tracing your masterful movements from the onset of your career journey.
According to statistical resume research findings from Careerbuilder, 16% of recruiters look for links to personal blogs, portfolios, or websites, making the online resume route more accommodating in meeting this digital demand.
Furthermore, with 71.6% of resume errors coming from the miscommunication of skills on a resume, having an online portfolio or CV in contrast to a traditional hard-copy variant allows you to make quick corrections to any oversights or errors on your site from the get-go.
The potential at this point for positioning you towards your next big gig or collaborative freelance project is more partial to your opting for an online portfolio platform over a more traditional version. This digital practice gives you swifter editorial control and more creative freedom for quick fixes and occasional updates, regardless of the modification scope.
5 Benefits of Creating a Resume Portfolio Website
The very nature of online portfolios and CVs and their prosperous professional positioning completely dispels the notion that they’re industry specific. Open to varying fields of networks and niches nowadays, resume portfolio websites have fast become exceedingly important in the ever-expanding corporate sector than ever before.
Using the potential to increase your visibility and online presence to your advantage, creating a copywriter portfolio or CV website will digitally showcase your work to captivate the interest of companies you’d like to work for, making accessibility for them quick and convenient.
1. Exemplifying the Experience and Skills Listed in your Digital Resume/CV:
As an authentically comprehensive and original reflection of your personality and creativity, an online portfolio digitally showcases individualised demonstrations of your copywriting consistency in different dynamic and impactful ways.
2. Freedom of Flexibility:
With just a simple click, creating an online portfolio or CV to showcase your copywriting material has never been this easy! Allowing you to quickly and conveniently carry out effortless edits and updates at any given time, having a digital portfolio as your online canvas also gives you the freedom to track your site visitors and views via popular web analytics tools like Google Analytics (which can be accessed via the SeekaPanel where I host my websites).
Furthermore, once you’ve settled on your chosen design, layout, and added copy, you can showcase visual representations of your proven talents through added media (i.e., images, videos, audio clips, graphs, etc.). While free to constantly create new content and include web link additions on your resume portfolio or CV website, you’re also at liberty to improve its multimedia elements to demonstrate the luminous leaps in your learning process. I recommend adding social media posts related to your work for example, but you can also link to clients for example, if they’re OK with that.
3. Enshrining Your Evolving Professional Body of Work for Visitors to Track:
In contrast to traditional portfolios, digital portfolios offer more creative and innovative ways of instantly showcasing and sharing your unique brand, experience, and expertise with people situated anywhere in the world. Building a copywriter portfolio or CV website will plant a professionally polished seed rooted in sprouting your work history and tracking significant milestones achieved throughout your career.
4. Making First Impressions Count:
When wanting to assess the work you’ve accumulated, targeted companies or industry professionals of interest will more likely click on your portfolio or CV website link in your email signature or on your online resume. As such, when looking to make a lasting impression, it’s not too much of an ask to stunningly feature your work samples &/or links and recommendations in memorable ways to give you that extra edge over your copywriter competitors.
5. Facilitating the Optimisation of Your Visibility and Online Presence:
Covered later in greater detail, search engine optimisation (SEO) is an incrementally advantageous traffic-generating tactic for maximising online searchability and visibility. Adopting well-orchestrated SEO techniques and strategies can increase your online visibility and presence through web searches of your name or professional copywriting brand.
Ready to creatively conjure up an impressive online portfolio capable of taking your personalised professional persona to new heights?
Not so fast! Before setting up your professional copywriter portfolio or CV website, you must first carry out the delicate process of registering a domain in your brand name and selecting a website builder.
Top Tips For Registering a Portfolio or CV Website Domain
A domain name is an address visitors type into their browser address bar to arrive at your website. To make it a lot easier for recruiters to find you, registering a domain name ensures that you reap the benefits of having a professional online presence.
Depending on the chosen domain name extension, HostGator ranges the price of an average domain name between $10-$12 and SeekaHost offers the most popular .com domain extension, which I have chosen for a more international reach, starting from $5.99.
Although there’s always the option of choosing a free domain for your digital CV or portfolio, most professionals prefer to purchase theirs with a trusted registrar to ensure the domain name is registered in their name and can be extended whenever required.
Five Factors to consider before buying your Portfolio or CV Website Domain
Before buying your domain, keep these five core factors in mind:
Carefully Assess Your Domain Structure: Consisting of a prefix (https), a subdomain (www), the website’s name, and an extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.), the structure of your chosen domain name is critical, as it needs to look and sound good. Always make sure you choose the one that best fits your professional persona.
Apply the KISS Rule of Thumb: Ideally, domain names are short, memorable, and easily spelled. So, in the politest way possible, “Keep It Simple, S”
Keyword Quintessentials: With your shortlist of possible domain names jotted down for you to consider when researching their availability online, always try incorporating consequential keywords in your copywriter brand and domain name for better search engine rankings.
Dire Domain Name Don’ts: As it is, unmemorable underscores used in social media handles are hard enough to recall, and the same principle applies to domain names. So, to effectively manage the recollections of your virtual visitors, by any means necessary, avoid using unusual symbols or hyphens that can easily be incorrectly spelled and fly over someone’s head, as this will limit your domain name searchability potential.
Pay Extra Attention to Your Extension: Ensure that you put considerable thought into your domain name extension, keeping factors like your copywriting brand, purpose/function, and geographical location (i.e., .co.uk for the United Kingdom) top of mind.
Ready to purchase a domain name for your copywriter website portfolio-in-process?
ICANN is a non-profit organisation that oversees the entire system of domain names, allowing outside companies known as domain registrars (i.e., GoDaddy, Bluehost, SeekaHost, and Domain.com) to
Seekahost.app
sell and manage domain names. Once you’ve decided on your chosen domain name, you can undergo standard purchasing protocols facilitated via correspondence with the domain registrar of your choosing.
No matter which domain you end up choosing (.uk, .co.uk, .com, or .net), finding these domains with SeekaHost is fast, easy, and affordable. In Britain, you will only have to invest roughly £4, making SeekaHost’s online offering one of the most cost-effective prices across the UK.
To register your chosen domain name, ICANN requires your contact information, including your name, phone number, physical address, and email address. Having purchased and registered the available domain name of your choosing, you’re now one step closer to crafting the copywriter portfolio or CV of your career dreams.
With a popular content management system (CMS) like WordPress and its quick one-click installer ready to host your professional resume portfolio or CV website, the digital journey to creating your bespoke site has just begun.
How to Create a Resume Portfolio Website With WordPress
An optimal online force to be reckoned with, WordPress has been revered as the fastest-growing CMS platform since 2012.
Holding a majority share in the market, WordPress has substantial stature as a widely-used CMS tool, with various WordPress facts and stats accrediting the popular web hosting platform for powering 64.1% of all sites that use a CMS.
Vital to the success of your professional copywriting platform, following crucial steps to hosting a domain name and creating a WordPress website will jumpstart your journey towards developing an optimisable resume portfolio or CV website of premium quality.
The video below demonstrates just how quick and easy it is to add your domain name to your WordPress hosting via SeekaHost’s WordPress Control Panel:
Selecting an appropriate WordPress theme is also a key component to effectively encapsulating the visually exquisite appeal of your unique copywriter brand via your copywriter website portfolio.
Below are examples of some of the most popular WordPress themes out there today:
When it comes to the necessary copywriting material intended for inclusion on your resume portfolio or CV website, charismatic content plays a crucial part in pairing the principles of your online professional persona with your desired project outcomes.
Why Resume Portfolio Website Content is King
Are you a copywriter with specialised services for companies operating in niche-specific sectors?
Well, you’ll be thrilled to know that you can tailor your copywriter website portfolio content accordingly to meet the interests of potential companies of interest in fields best aligned with your specialised skillset and services.
There are plenty of industry-specific fields with a high demand for copywriters to break into with countless more for you to mirror by modifying your portfolio website content, accordingly, offering your specialised services to targeted company niches of interest.
Do you have active social media accounts with a fair number of followers already viewing your content?
Then why not take your copywriter website portfolio content to the next level of online notoriety by sharing it on your socials to maximise your reach?
Here’s how …
Social Media & Your Copywriter Website Portfolio: A Synchronised Recipe for Success
American businessman Warren Buffet, aka one of the most successful investors in the world, couldn’t have phrased his famously impactful quote any better when he said:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Building a social media following reinforces your online reputation and can influence the social media marketing strategy for your digital copywriting material in substantially expansive ways.
Social media provides a plethora of possibilities in the realm of online networking. Giving you access to key decision-makers and professional peers, most of whom are contactable via popular platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media provides a platform to help expand your resume portfolio website’s reach.
As such, it’s always best to keep a squeaky-clean online image, always remembering to present an admirable, wholesome, and respectable digital persona reflective of your core values and passion for your copywriting craft.
Social media cannot merely open many windows of opportunity for your career in copywriting. It also allows you to establish and build a professional rapport with people of interest in personable ways. So, wherever possible, always keep your online portfolio content circulating on your socials, especially if you’re no stranger to constant content updates made to your online portfolio.
Now, with your copywriter portfolio or CV website content in full swing on your socials, it’s time to level up your site’s searchability potential through tactful SEO strategies you can quickly adapt to meet your digital PR objectives.
How to Improve Your Resume Portfolio Website’s Performance with SEO
As an online marketing approach used to garner online awareness towards a targeted audience, the prospective principles of digital public relations (digital PR) are not to be overlooked when illuminating your online notoriety agenda.
Digital PR is valuable because it introduces your digital portfolio material to an array of new target audiences via search engine results pages and advertorial placements featured on popular sites relating to your specific copywriting niche.
With modern-day digital PR introducing various methods for measuring site metrics, optimising online searchability for your resume portfolio website has never been this pivotal. So be sure to get your head in the game by learning specialised SEO techniques to drive traffic and measure conversion to your site. SeekaHost University offers you an e-learning platform for honing your digital marketing skills, which will come in handy as you begin to set sail on your site’s SEO success.
To get your creative juices flowing to inspire how you digitally showcase your way with words, I’ve compiled a list of five top-tier digital portfolio or CV websites you can use as proven examples of online excellence.
Hopefully, these examples will help unleash your professional potential when incorporating various elements showcasing your unique style and innovative aesthetic in your copywriter website portfolio.
5 Effective Copywriter Website Portfolio Examples
Given the massive scope of masterful copywriting masterpieces circulating cyberspace, several excellently executed copywriting portfolio examples exist today. Trust me when I say that narrowing down the extensive list to reach my top five copywriter website portfolios was no easy feat.
Basing my selection on a set of criteria involving design, layout, copy material, added media, information accessibility, A-grade client history, optimised searchability, user-friendliness, and navigational ease of effort, below are five exquisite and somewhat unusual examples of prolific online copywriter portfolios to inspire you:
In his digital portfolio homepage, Jose takes both simple and straightforward to the extremes. Jose has the comedic copy to thank, which makes it work.
Jose’s digital portfolio illustrates his personable appeal through the subtle slapstick undertones written in bold white letters against a black background on his homepage. Accompanied by a “scroll down to see blood, sweat and tears” call-to-action accompanied by a sarcastically written button prank featured at the bottom of the page.
Who wouldn’t feel compelled to scroll down further with an icebreaker like that?
Letsseeifthisnameistaken.com
Giving visitors some time to digest his opening statement, they later get to visually discover the wonders of Jose’s work via the eye-catching colors and animated plates featured further down in his digital portfolio.
In contrast to the above example, the copywriter has adopted a different homepage strategy altogether. Rather than showcasing glimpses of his works, Dan shares some personal notes, messages, quotes, and photos in a chaotically cluttered fashion all around the page.
Generally, because of the great sense of humor shared amongst most copywriters, this comical display appeals to the inwardly “all over the place” nature of copywriters and their craft. What’s appealing about Dan’s homepage is that it also speaks to an expanded spectrum of online visitors who can relate to the organised messes we experience from time to time, having the potential to catch the gaze of new prospective clientele.
Perfectly categorising his many projects through the prominent world-class client titles listed on his sidebar, it’s instantly clear that Dan is the real deal. If visitors aren’t convinced, his featured collaborative commercial work with famed Hollywood actor Ben Affleck should do just the trick.
Maneuvering slightly away from merit, nowadays, people prefer to choose everything based on recommendations, which must be the central motivating factor for Aly’s digital copywriter portfolio.
As you land on the homepage, you discover a list of newspapers and websites Aly writes for, including big-time businesses like Forbes and Yahoo! the minimalistic design and color scheme also adds a nice touch to the straightforward structure of Aly’s site.
Digital nomad Davina Van Buren is more than a traveling freelancer. She is a Journalist, Content Marketing Strategist, and Brand Development Partner – you go, girl!
Each of Davina’s occupations has a separate page with links to samples of her work.
There is also an impressive list of clients represented by company logos featured further down on her homepage. The white, grey, and teal accents also support the professional prestige of her online portfolio, adding to the polished look of Davina’s site.
For my online portfolio, I chose the WordPress Theme Divi that I had customized with a visually user-friendly interactive layout fine-tuned for simplistic scrolling, making the platform easy on the eye for any visitor to quickly navigate.
The compassionable photo in the header and the concise opening statement draws visitors in and gives way to seamless scrolling, directing them to their preferred section of interest.
manuelawillbold.com
I present my work with written and visual content and provide links to my work sources so that visitors can explore it all with one click. Additionally, I provide pages that showcase more information about the services I offer. At the tail-end of my online portfolio website, where I’ve shared my contact form, I demonstrate a fundamental factor that converts visitors into customers.
manuelawillbold.com
There’s no point in having a stunning copywriter website portfolio if there’s no way of contacting you. So, detail your contact information and add CTAs to encourage visitors to get in touch with you and build a relationship.
Conclusion
Transitioning from putting together traditional portfolios, nowadays considered an obsolete professional practice, the digital dawning of online portfolios has taken the world of project procurement to soaringly new heights.
Copywriter portfolio and CV websites demonstrate your personality, ingenuity, creativity, brevity, and literacy and can propel your copywriting career status toward colossal online credibility, much like the examples presented above.
Copywriter website portfolios are precious pieces of marketing material in the digital PR landscape and in themselves are a reflection of your copywriter’s work. A copywriter portfolio or CV website detailing your talents and services is a vital prerequisite for gaining trust and creating long-term value by gradually building your online reputation and brand over time, ultimately paving the way for you to land your next big copywriting gig and establishing yourself as an expert in your field.
It’s now easier than ever to find an affordable website domain and web hosting accompanied by reliable marketing resources and helpful WordPress tutorials with SeekaHost and other providers. Through this process, you can quickly and openly distribute content on social media, optimise your site using strategic SEO tactics to increase web traffic, and expand your professional network pool to ensure your career’s longevity.
If you require any further support with your copywriter portfolio or CV website, get in touch with me and I’ll be more than happy to help.
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
The beauty of starting a website or blog is that you often don’t know exactly where the journey takes you. You begin with registering a domain and writing about topics that you’re interested in and over time various categories emerge from your overall web content.
The most popular topics that people find your website for through their searches on search engines or social media, may establish your online presence as an expert niche publication in the industries you mainly cover.
This can attract enquiries from journalists, marketers and event organisers or press departments looking for influencers or digital publishers in their field to cover their events and news.
This is the journey I have been on since I started blogging on various websites, which I will share as examples of my editorial work that has led to such collaborations.
I will show you how I went about the whole process, from the enquiry stage to the execution stage of press and event coverage as I have noticed that there is a high demand in this field.
Consider your websites as web properties that people visit when searching for specific information. The more visitors your website attracts, the better of course as you can offer any content publication a wider audience exposure.
You have the opportunity to write about brands and organisations as well as established experts in your niche, you may also be able to conduct exclusive interviews and network, which is all positive ROI for your website.
Event and news coverage can also establish you as a writer, digital marketer, or influencer, especially if you can utilize your populated social media channels for more online exposure.
You can be creative with how you publish such content, and you’ll need to have guidelines set up that clarify the terms and conditions of your coverage of course. See the services I offer in more detail here:
If people are happy with how their events and news are published on your website, they will come back for more. As you can see, I offer press and news release publications, which I offer in two formats: a free plain-text version and a paid media version. I want to give everyone the opportunity to share their news, however, the more value a publication provides, the more work it requires which cannot be offered for free.
I explain this in more detail in my release enquiry response emails for example, which look like this:
Hi,
Thank you for your submission.
We can publish your release on the following relevant sites:
We offer a free plain text publication without any images/videos/hyperlinks or a paid publication with images/videos/hyperlinks for an admin fee of £40. The main difference is that the branding is much more effective with a media publication, and it offers SEO advantages.
I look forward to hearing back from you so that we can go ahead and publish your release within the next 3 working days.
Kind regards,
This can be a beneficial and lucrative option for a webmaster if they market and rank their website well to offer their clients the intended exposure and ROI.
How to cover Events & News as a Blogger & Publisher?
You will have established yourself as an expert in your niche and will therefore bring the necessary know-how to any news and event coverage in your industry.
Another plus is that you can be quite creative with your coverage on your website as you’re the webmaster and make all the rules. You should be up to date with the latest features your website can offer in terms of plugins for example for WordPress sites to offer the best web design and user experience for your clients and visitors.
If you’re not well-versed in this area, you can always speak with a web consultant to make your website extraordinary.
Depending on your website’s unique audience and focus, you can choose certain businesses, experts, or topics you want to cover that you find most suitable and promising. This can be determined by keyword searches with SEO tools and by the nature of enquiries you receive via your website.
The way you cover them can also be flexible if you don’t have to follow guidelines from your partners or if you negotiate these beforehand.
Make sure you have a clear vision of what you’d like to achieve with your event and news coverage and that you also take your partners’ goals and requirements into account. This will help you identify which features to offer, e.g., photography/videography, interviews, research, social media shares/posts, email marketing etc.
Ensure you have the resources to deliver what you offer, e.g., a professional photographer/videographer or required equipment for example.
Find below my examples of different events I have covered for some of the blogs I manage to get an idea:
Top Features of Event & News Coverage Publications
As you can see, the coverage I currently offer has the following features:
Exclusive and unique photographs taken by a professional photographer or provided by a client
Quotes from exhibitors
Information about exhibitors covered
Social media posts that were shared live
Hyperlinks that take readers to the exhibitors’ websites/channels
My own commentary with regards to my expert opinions on what is covered plus tips and recommendations I have enquired about or researched
Depending on the size of an event, it can be difficult to cover everything, so I’d recommend you focus on selected exhibitors, topics, workshops etc. that will be most interesting for your audience based on what you usually cover.
Preparation is key and you should always ask all entities you cover for permission to do so, perhaps even liaise with them prior to the event to discuss possible questions and angles that they’re satisfied with as I have done before conducting these interviews:
I then shared the drafts with the interviewees first before publishing them to get their consent and green light. This is important also with regard to data protection and general professionalism.
Many organisations will want to create awareness of an event before it happens, and they may ask you to publish a press or news release that they normally send you.
You can agree to make this part of your collaboration, or you can agree on a separate arrangement for this.
Here are some examples of how I publish media releases that offer the full range of benefits to my clients for SEO and marketing:
Partners also appreciate coverage on other channels such as social media or YouTube, which I additionally provide as you can see in the below examples:
What’s the future of Events & News Publications for Bloggers & Publishers?
Since the websites I manage have grown and increased their monthly organic web traffic, I receive news release enquiries daily and for events, it’s less frequent, but also on the rise.
Every business or organisation needs to be visible on the internet nowadays and it’s not sufficient to just publish a few posts on social media if you want to reach a wider and more diverse audience.
Crunching some numbers, there is a clear upward trend for higher demand in the online publishing industry:
63% of journalists said news announcements and press releases are what they want from their PR contacts, indicating that most reporters want to continue interacting with their PR professionals in the same way they have historically.
22% reported that original research on trends and market data was also important to them, offering a new opportunity for PR and comms pros to be a source.
44% of journalists say that press releases are their most trustworthy source of brand-related information.
And there is also growing profitability in this sector:
49% of brands are spending less than $10,000 per year on influencer marketing.
23% are spending between $10,000 and $50,000.
12% of marketers are devoting $50,000-$100,000,
5% $100,000-$500,000, and
6% are spending over $500,000.
And according to statista.com more than 2/3 of individuals in Great Britain were either reading or downloading online news, newspapers or magazines in 2020.
If you are intending to take your blog or website to the next level and perhaps also to make money online, you’ll need to find ways to offer partnerships, sponsorships, and collaborations to grow and expand. After all, what good is a website with nothing useful, intriguing, interesting and trending to share?
And to constantly produce content by yourself is extremely hard and time-consuming, plus may not be that diverse.
Consider your options with your website or blog, go through some website monetisation strategies that may be suitable for your web properties and invest in expanding your services and marketing your website.
If you need support with digital marketing, SEO, or web design, I can offer more support via digital marketing agency ClickDo and web host SeekaHost, where I work as an online media and PR strategist. We have various resources and an expert team at hand to help with anything around your web presence.
Simply contact me and I’ll respond to your enquiry in no time. Make the most of your website or blog today!
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
An online presence can either make or break the success of your blog as a copywriter, influencer, small business, or large corporation.
With Google’s latest search algorithm update promising a meaningful impact on search results for particularly helpful content, implementing such SEO tactics is essential for any online author looking to maximise their web presence.
Achieving soaring site success depends on many aspects of the course, which I cover here on my blog. However, through a common practice that bloggers and SEO experts refer to as ‘guest posting’, online stature and notability can form the foundation of establishing a brand in the online community.
Guest blogging is more than just link building. Placing strategically planned guest articles in relevant publications can lead to additional publicity from trusted or renowned sources and introduce you to a far-wider-reaching audience, which is partly considered digital PR nowadays.
Inviting you to explore the benefits of guest posting, I will be your guiding compass for producing effective guest content to reach the SEO goals set for your site or brand.
Hopefully, I will inspire you to develop an online presence, build your brand, and gain more exposure and virtual visibility as a business or a person.
What is Guest Posting & Why do Authors Value it?
In accumulating a frequently expanding online audience base, copywriters, bloggers and businesses often turn to top guest posting sites as vital platforms for attracting interested visitors to their websites/blogs.
Guest writing is a way of sharing your knowledge, skill, or expertise with other audiences apart from your own. It can happen in different forms such as blog posts, magazine articles, interviews, news releases or reports, opinion pieces, etc. and I will share examples here.
Guest blogging, also referred to as guest posting, is the closest form of online networking for writers and authors of any kind and is an important part of outreach work for more online exposure.
Encompassed by the act of writing content for another website as an independent writer or contributor, guest bloggers should aim to be featured on a higher-ranking website with solid web traffic in their niche. Consequently, you can soak up your site’s viewership potential by virtually piggybacking on a more prominent online entity with similar posting pillars of interest.
In the example illustrated below, data analytics show a substantial rise in site traffic, where the Digital Entrepreneurship Story I wrote for Home Business Magazine doubled my visitors and tripled average page views to my blog:
Credit: Seekahost App Hosting Control Panel
The Importance of Guest Articles
The collaborative cohesion between guest posting & blogger outreach services is what makes the pairing potential a mutual win-win for both the author and the online platform where pieces are published.
Guest posting is also valued by bloggers and businesses because, by keeping readers engaged, successful guest posts deliver new perspectives through fresh content crafted to cater to their audience.
Promotional boosts can also occur when guest bloggers share their written material with their networks.
My Top 6 Benefits of Guest Posting
I know. It seems counterproductive to spend time writing articles for other sites you may view as competitors when you could be using that time to create content for your site.
1. Trust: Online Authority, Reputation, and Credibility
Influencing the extent to which people trust your brand, guest posting can help you or your business build authority via the fluid and frequent publishing of quality content you set out to offer your worldwide online audience.
With the prevalence of ‘fake news rampant in the digital era, offering solid information people can trust is of utmost importance when relying on authority as a crucial element of an effective marketing strategy.
Perceptions of you by readers build trust in the brand you’re affiliated with, subsequently improving your value and online stature. By attaching your name to the written pieces you produce, your trustworthiness gets tested, giving way to guest blogging as a critical measure for managing online reputation through the quality of your custom content.
As an equally important factor in establishing authority, credibility delivers guest blog posts on popular high-ranking sites in your industry, enhancing your virtual visibility by vetting you accordingly. Due to this vetting process, site owners who may be exceptionally picky when posting content look for the most creative, unique, and authentic content from guest bloggers.
You can learn more in my articles about online media placements and how they can boost your brand awareness and visibility with high-profile publications:
Linkbuilding is an SEO technique used in guest posts to optimise a site’s ranking. Accumulating backlinks paves the way for SEO platforms like Google to assign higher domain ratings, resulting in higher site rankings in related keyword search results.
With relevance being a key driver in search engine algorithms, a guest post includes a relevant backlink when both ends provide similar information. For instance, if you’re creating a backlink in a guest post for a fashion website, directing it to your food blog wouldn’t serve your site and readers any favors.
With the emergence of ‘clickbait’ impacting the interconnectedness of the online community, context matters. As such, authors aim to minimise all mismatching material to ensure that their guest blogging makes sense for both them and site owners. This means that any backlinks added in guest content must provide the targeted reader with value first of all.
You can read my guide on effective link building to better understand what to look out for when you build links with your guest blogging, which does not only include written content by the way:
As an advanced version of gathering organic traffic for monetised blogs, high-quality traffic develops when sites begin to attract visitors who are most likely to benefit from their content or make a sale.
By publishing guest articles on other relevant websites, you’re already amassing a target audience interested in your posts. High-quality traffic takes this a few steps further by reaching readers willing to purchase sellable items featured on your blog.
If your website earnings are generated purely on advertisements or eCommerce, using compelling content to target those who are more likely to resonate with your material and hit ‘click’ will help you reach your quota.
This can be best achieved with a so-called CTA (call to action) that should invite the readers of your guest content to explore your website.
If you’re an influencer, you can check out my influencer marketing tips for higher conversions:
If you produce more visual content and are especially active on social media, then you can read my social media video tips guide to learn how to lead more traffic to your blog:
Online portfolios of work are vital for bloggers, writers, and businesses because consumers want a first-hand look at the impact a web brand has.
The more a brand thrives online often depends on how valuable the shared information is and via which sources it can be found. In terms of reputation and status, a guest publication in an esteemed magazine like we got published on Entrepreneur.com or Forbes.com can hugely impact your brand. And even search engines like Google will rank such high authority mentions well, giving your name far more online exposure.
Instead of limiting their online portfolios to their respective platforms, authors use guest blogging to branch out and engage with larger audiences, so they don’t have to promote their brand through less relevant advertisements like paid ads for example.
5. Driving Social Media Success
Gravitating toward appearing in as many places on the internet as possible, guest bloggers turn to social media as an additional online avenue for putting their brand on display to garner brand mentions.
With the potential for social media influencer marketing to meet favorable returns on investment, some guest bloggers swear by the practice as an effective tool for building brand awareness.
Plus, often the publications that publish your guest content will share it on their socials and tag you in it so that their followers also find you there. Or if you share your guest content and tag them, they may reshare it with their community as you can see below with a tagged Tweet for londonbusinessnews.com:
Credit: LbizNews
Are you a blogger with aspirations of becoming an online influencer?
Using your online persona and social media following as tools for sourcing wider audiences for your site is not a sure bet. However, turning to various social media video tips to drive traffic to your blog posts can make this goal attainable.
In addition to brand mentions and online influence, social media sharing is also considered a key motivator in driving online users to follow new accounts or visit prominent websites. Commonplace nowadays for readers to see Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn ‘share’ icons displayed on guest articles; we have site owners to thank, as guest blogging helps gain those shares.
Also falling under the social media umbrella, profile growth offers brands opportunities to feature in “who to follow” lists and suggestions with just a few simple guest posts.
The example below perfectly illustrates the potential to garner wider exposure when tagging businesses in social media posts:
Practice makes perfect and from one published post to the next, guest blogging develops and improves writing skills, directly influencing a writer’s ability to create more persuasive content for their website.
By consistently churning out captivating content through your guest articles, you will start to notice your grammar, spelling, and overall readability improve over time. Furthermore, by applying what you learn to the content on your website to make it stand out, your site will, in turn, perform better the more effective you become as a writer.
To give you a leg-up, my knowledge of using engaging content to create blog posts that Google sends many readers to will provide you with all the helpful hints needed to make for a full-proof SEO framework.
My Go-To Guide to Perfecting Your Guest
As a copywriter and online media strategist for ClickDo and SeekaHost, I am constantly trying to give other writers, bloggers, and businesses opportunities to align themselves with a credible content publishing source that is beneficial for their guest blogging agenda because digital news and media services can offer fantastic custom content marketing opportunities and you can find out more about what we currently offer via various platforms here:
Touching on various topics, digital press and news release publication services offer the faultless funneling of versatile information that covers different subject matter, which diversifies your outreach objectives.
Ready to boost your guest blogging game?
My proven tips include always remembering to:
Use your guest content to cater to your intended audience
Establish collaborative brand alignments
Follow editorial guidelines
Avoid submitting overtly self-promotional material
Include a call-to-action
Include internal SEO links strategically
Include added media strategically
Be original
Conclusion
Guest blogging is hands down one of the best ways to test new content marketing strategies and developments for the benefit of your blogs and websites.
Be bold and reach out to top publications with a tempting guest post pitch to test the ideal strategy that works best for guest content publications that boost your name or brand. While you are at it, avoid letting yourself get mystified by the myth that content featured on someone’s site doesn’t serve any purpose for yours because it does – and in a myriad of ways as highlighted here.
For guest bloggers, their blogs are their brand, and by offering a platform of opportunity to generate revenue online, guest posting has become one of the best SEO practices for any website, from everyday bloggers to large corporations. So, get involved now.
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
Irrespective of the distinct polarity surrounding the structural parameters involved in producing press releases and guest posts,
Who’s to say these outreach techniques will guarantee copywriters/bloggers, PR practitioners, small businesses, or large corporations effective and consistent online notoriety?
FACT: For content creators diving headfirst into a digitised sea saturated with infinite information sharing, simply publishing press releases and guest posts is not enough to penetrate today’s online arena and see your website and online presence thrive.
Want to see your site succeed?
You are in luck! Widely sought-after credibility, interconnected network expansion, and insurmountable website traffic are at the epicentre of any site’s SEO success.
Consequently, I will share communication and outreach strategies adopted by successful guest post and press release creators that you can incorporate into your content outreach methodology, ultimately awarding you the online stature your quality content truly deserves.
But before we go into that, let’s look at different content types first as the outreach campaign will vary.
How Different Content Types Meet Collective Outreach Objectives through Pitches?
While press releases and guest posts support differential functional frameworks, they exist to serve the same purpose: mounting visibility in the marketing and media arena.
Nevertheless, the contrasting factors between press releases and guest posts are critical when configuring your content outreach initiative to meet the best possible outcomes for your site.
Comparing Press Releases to Guest Posts
Although either communication outreach tactic is employed to build online brand awareness, harness exposure, and boost page views, successful copywriters, marketers, and businesses are effective because they can identify how press releases differ vastly from guest posts.
For example, guest articles are single processes for a single post in an ongoing two-way dialogue between writers and site owners.
In contrast, press releases are one-way broadcasts of information, where you can be open to returning conversation without an overall expectation for a response. In other words, if someone wants more information, they can reach out to you, but most people and most sites will not.
Due to the influx of outreach emails that editors and publishers receive daily, the all-encompassing distinction between outreach success and failure in your chosen strategy lies in your overall pitching potential.
Pitching Press Releases & Guest Posts
Since preparing the perfect pitch can make all the difference in measuring the effectiveness of your specific outreach agenda, distinguishing between pitches for guest posts and press releases is just as vital in the implementation of your chosen success-driven strategy.
Differences for Pitches to consider:
Example press release pitch sent to me via the londonbusinessnews.com blog
1. Press release pitches communicate happenings in the present tense, which focuses primarily on the newsworthiness of the business or organization that submits it.
2. A guest post pitch will often focus on trending topics that are relevant to the website/platform they are trying to get published on to make a valuable contribution to the editorial of the publication.
3. Issued for ‘Immediate Release’, the publishing window period in press release pitches is time-sensitive in contrast to guest post pitches, which have wider coverage timeframes. It is vital to never push for a publication date sooner than the editors have suggested as that comes across as extremely rude.
4. In guest post pitches, guest bloggers often confirm their compliance with website editorial guidelines to increase the likelihood of getting their pieces published. In comparison, press release pitches are more flexible, offering authors a self-promotional platform that endorses their content on different levels.
5. In contrast to press release pitches, guest bloggers must remain cognisant of the fees websites may charge to feature their written material on such platforms, with the terms and conditions surrounding this fee varying per site. Many will outline these via their media packs or dedicated service pages such as here on these example sites that accept both press releases and guest posts:
Example guest post pitch sent to me via clickdo.co.uk
Although there’s proven divergence in pitches for guest posts vs press releases, it’s also just as noteworthy to establish where similar structural frameworks for both converge to meet the same outreach outcomes.
Both content communication constructs, for example, share three components in common, namely:
Personalised Copy
Proofreading
A Clear and Concise CTA (call-to-action)
If you want to send a pitch my way you can go through the below pages, where I have listed different content publishing formats for guest contributions:
When following the basic principles of proper email etiquette, understand that quality trumps currency, so initially shift your focus more towards the value and credibility of the quality content you’re offering, with money matters eventually explored later in correspondence if a publication is interested.
Follow-up emails remind recipients who might have missed your first outreach attempt of the collaborative prospects you still have on the table. Although journalists and site owners generally respond to follow-up emails, always avoid inundating them with a flurry of follow-ups.
Depending on the type of outreach strategy you are employing, there is a difference in the number of necessary emails to send before your returns start to diminish, potentially redirecting your emails to receivers’ spam folders.
If you haven’t received a response within a few days of submitting your pitch and you’re considering sending a short, polite follow-up message to an outreach recipient, check out this cold email infographic as a benchmark that can help avoid landing you in the ‘heckler’ hot seat.
As illustrated in the statistics, response rates to follow-up emails do not drop off significantly compared to the first email, giving them value. However, your general politeness, coupled with the frequency of your follow-ups, must be taken in high regard.
3. Be Rude
When approaching prospective publishing channels with your pitched proposal, the last thing you want to be is offputting – this is simply counterproductive to your outreach objectives.
Being rude isn’t worth the risk!
Given the high number of pitches that publishers receive daily, drawing their attention through expressions of sincerity and genuine fondness for the publication goes a long way.
With your online reputation and credibility always on the line, don’t foil your chances of potentially publicising your impactful stories by leaving a bad taste in the emails you send to influential editors.
With your pitch offer them something rather than making demands.
4. Veer Off-Topic
Always avoid including unnecessary exaggerated information or connections to names and topics in your news/press release pitch:
As demonstrated in the old-school trick above, editors can easily get misguided by any insignificant information you provide, having the potential to completely overshadow your hard work.
How Both Outreach Initiatives Influence Online Notoriety
You’re probably wondering,
Which outreach option is better?
The answer is simple: both.
While guest posts should be your primary link-building method outside your usual network of sites, press releases serve as helpful tools for building an online hype, which could potentially lead to securing additional media coverage such as interviews.
Furthermore, both are instrumental in sparking social media cohesion and garnering site traffic to a landing page where additional information is accessible to readers and publishers alike and SEO copywriting skills are key here.
Guest posts and press releases are essential drivers in helping you gain an online reputation that mirrors your expertise in a field/area of interest. So, when setting out to get your name and face out there, if building long-standing relationships with specific sites is at the core of your outreach objective, guest posts are the way to go.
Conversely, if you want a lot of eyes to see one specific piece of information (i.e., a new product launch or event announcement, etc.), a press release is ideal.
How to Implement Guest Posts in Your Link Outreach Strategy?
Often incorporated in link-building practices carried out by guest bloggers, backlinks form the virtual backbone of any site’s success, acting as an effective SEO tactic adopted to meet overall outreach objectives.
Using Backlinks as Your Building Blocks
Backlinks are vital because top search engine optimisation platforms like Google give websites with more backlinks from other authority websites a higher domain rating, consequently resulting in higher rankings in their search results for related search terms.
By turning to various link-building services to help boost your SEO, you can accumulate backlinks to your work, further broadening your target audience.
When it comes to searching for the best guest posting sites to submit your written material to, ensure you’re looking in all the right places by adopting the below SEO criteria in your independent research accordingly:
Aside from adopting the expected yet effective link-building methods mentioned above, you can also build credible notoriety by having a go at more unique outreach tactics, which include:
Pitching requests to have your links added to published posts.
Fortifying relationships with site owners by sharing helpful updates on broken links.
Targeting high-ranking bloggers in addition to premium publications.
5 Steps to Executing Your Press Release Outreach Work
As a proven method for influencing a brand’s public perception, developing a full-proof media outreach plan is essential when conducting rewarding press release outreach work.
Although teaming up with top press release publication services like the ClickDo digital publishing services can offer you customised content publishing and marketing solutions via top-quality digital news channels, simply following my five steps to creating a full-proof media outreach plan is guaranteed to get you well on your way to widespread online notoriety:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Knowing the audience allows you to connect with prospective customers, investors, business partners, and other stakeholders. By researching and understanding your target audience, you can identify the appropriate media outlets to approach with your pitch.
2. Create a Media List
After identifying your ideal audience of interest, the next step in your press release outreach work involves building a list of media sources and journalists who create content that appeals to your audience by conducting web searches for keywords related to your niche.
For example, imagine you’re the proud owner of an independent cosmetics startup company that develops herbal organic skincare products. You might start your search by looking for published articles involving herbal cosmetics, organic skincare, small businesses, startups, cosmetology clinics, and eco-friendly skincare topics.
Identifying popular sites, blogs, and online platforms where media influencers publish similar content to yours can also help you develop a list of networks and journalists to contact.
3. Gather Contact Information
While some publications may include instructions that describe how to contact them with a proposal, others may not. Worry not, however, because you can contact journalists directly via social media or a listed email address showcased on their platform. Many journalists work freelance and include their contact details on their professional platforms or digital portfolios.
Networking is another effective method for gathering contacts. The growing influence of networking through establishing relationships with media influencers is crucial for developing a database of contacts to leverage for future outreach initiatives. Since media heavyweights often host events (i.e. conferences, professional meetups, conventions, etc.), attending those events and developing an extensive network of media professionals may help you promote your online material via diverse channels.
4. Define Your Media Outreach Goals
By adopting the SMART method to set your outreach objectives in motion, you can work toward your goals and accurately measure your progress.
The SMART method involves setting goals that are:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
An example of a SMART goal for a press release outreach campaign may include contacting 20 journalists and obtaining three or more responses within two weeks. This media outreach goal uses specific numbers, sets a realistic expectation that applies to the task, and establishes a timeframe to be met.
Based on the results of your outreach work, you can adjust goals that will help ensure future success for your site.
5. Execute & Monitor Your Plan
Once you’ve developed the perfect press release pitch that caters to top contactable publications, with a desired audience and goal in focus, the final step of your effective media outreach plan involves executing your outreach strategy to the highest degree.
As you contact journalists and publishers, consider creating a spreadsheet or another document to organise and monitor your plan. For example, you might be partial to creating a spreadsheet that lists your current, completed, and planned outreach campaigns.
Other items to incorporate in your spreadsheet might also include:
Despite the glaring differences between guest posts and press releases, the two outreach strategies share the common interest of limitless online notoriety for the betterment of your site’s or blog’s success.
Although both link outreach initiatives bear striking similarities in their pitch proposal frameworks, content creators and marketers must understand that they differ vastly, each with individualised defining factors separating them as outlined here.
Hopefully the above tips will help you with the best possible guest post or press release outreach campaign for your brand and online presence. If you’d like to ask some more specific questions about your unique outreach campaign, feel free to contact me and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
Blogger and Educator by Passion | Senior Online Media & PR Strategist at ClickDo Ltd. | Contributor to many Education, Business & Lifestyle Blogs in the United Kingdom & Germany | Summer Course Student at the London School of Journalism and Course Instructor at the SeekaHost University.
Influencing the extent to which people trust your brand, guest posting can help you or your business build authority via the fluid and frequent publishing of quality content you set out to offer your worldwide online audience.
Linkbuilding is an SEO technique used in guest posts to optimise a site’s ranking. 
Online portfolios of work are vital for bloggers, writers, and businesses because consumers want a first-hand look at the impact a web brand has.
Practice makes perfect and from one published post to the next, guest blogging develops and improves writing skills, directly influencing a writer’s ability to create more persuasive content for their website.
