When Copy Writing, Look To Others For Inspiration

Published on Friday, 12 April 2013 17:19

Darin McGilvra

For a trained and talented writer, doing quality copy writing for a blog or website page is not difficult. However, writing a blog or article about the same or similar topic once or twice a day over and over again can be quite difficult and may seem overwhelming at times when the ideas refuse toflow.

This is why it is important to know where to go for inspiration. While copying someone’s written work without permission and passing it off as your own is never acceptable, as well as illegal, looking to other writers for inspiration is a great way to keep you supplied with plenty of ideas to continue pumping out great content.

Make sure you look to high-quality writers for inspiration. If you’re writing for a business website, look to articles or blogs from well-known industry magazines. These magazines are careful about hiring professional writers.

If you are not sure about the reputation of the website the person is writing for, you can look to the writing to get a feel about the level of professionalism. The biggest clue to stay away is when the writing has a lot of grammatical and spelling errors, which would make it difficult to trust the accuracy of the information that is being provided.

When you find websites and blogs that help you out, bookmark them or subscribe to their RSS feeds so you can get more ideas from them in the future. Once you build up a stable of writers for you to use for inspiration, you will be able to spend less time searching for ideas and more time copy writing your own posts.

Looking at titles can help you get ideas for copy writing

When searching for ideas, sometimes all it takes is to look at titles of articles. If you read a title and you start getting ideas of what to write, you can reword the title to make it original.

You also can look through articles about current events and then pick one to write about. You provide your own spin on the subject by describing how the event affects your industry or your local community so the information becomes relevant to your readers.

If you come across a blog or article that you really like, you could quote a portion of it in your own article and then provide your own commentary on it. Make sure you put the entire portion you are copying in quotation marks or use the blockquote button in your content management system (CMS). The proper etiquette for quoting is to give credit to the person who wrote it and provide a link to the original post you took it from.

The best way to write the article for Google’s search engine is to introduce the topic and the information yourself, provide the quote with the proper credit given, and then add your commentary on the subject at the end.

Something that has become quite popular on the Internet are list articles or posts. These are “best” or “worst” lists that provide a number of things that address the title.

If you use list articles to inspire you to do your own list, make sure you don’t provide the same list from one writer. Even though you may be rewriting the copy, you don’t want to steal the idea for the list from someone else. If you want to use the same type of list, gather information from two or more articles so you can make your own list. And, of course, make sure you are writing your own copy for each item on your list and not repeating someone else’s copy writing.

Darin McGilvra

Darin McGilvra has been a professional writer since 1997. He currently writes about personal finances, information technology and sports for numerous websites, including mycashtime.com, mchelper.com, and Yahoo! Sports.

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