Shall I hire a copywriter? This is a question you must ask yourself if you are remotely considering writing something online which is either to be promoted or for sale.

Oh yeah, I here you mutter, I can write decent prose when I put my mind to it...

And I agree, you are quite probably a decent writer as only decent writers hang-out at Hub Pages - Right?

But copywriting is a little different, more particularly if you want an outcome. The copywriting process is not secretive, but IS specialized and structured in certain ways.

Don't forget, if you want an outcome such as a sale or sign-up your prospect has to be guided to the the action button, and when they get there they should be in the clicking frame of mind...

Sure, I'm a copywriter and for hire to boot, but that's not why I am telling you this.

Here's a recent tale:

A good friend of mine is a travel nut, even has his own website on travel stuff. About 2 months or so ago he took it upon himself to rewrite his main page, lo and behold. a week or 2 after, Google threw him off page 1 for a main search phrase. He was on the phone to me almost in tears, I assured him I would take a look at it for him.

My god! When I looked at it, everything was so obvious... His copywriting was not related to his former main page, he had almost completely revamped the subject area, and worse, he had fiddled about with some internal linking and changed some of the anchor text... It was an utter disaster!

Anyway, to cut a longer story short, I rewrote his copy and got him back on Google's coveted 1st page within 10 days...

I guess the moral is, if you have some important copy to write, you must consider whether or not to hire a copywriter - to be, or not to be, that is the question!