13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awful, January 11, 2011
This review is from: Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web (Hardcover)
I make my living as a freelance writer, and do 95% of my writing on the Web. That said, I'm always looking for ways to improve my skills and success - which is where buying this book came in.
First and foremost, I've never seen such a bad book go to print. I suspect that "Encore Publishing Group" (who published this book) is essentially just a self-publishing outlet, but the errors here go above and beyond. I stopped counting the errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation when I hit about 25, and that was just in the introduction!
For a book geared toward writers and writing, you'd think that someone would have stepped in with a red pen. Seriously, use the "Look Inside!" feature and check out the "First Pages" feature. Not only are there plenty of errors, but the book is written way below the speed of its audience. For anyone really looking to write successful online copy, there are far better sources than this. "Content Rich" is far from a guidebook to SEO success. Check into some free online SEO and copywriting resources like Copyblogger and SEOBook before wasting your money on this.
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39 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Typo Rich, April 6, 2009
This review is from: Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web (Hardcover)
Painful. This book is one of the most painful reading experiences I've ever had.
I had ordered this book for some advice on breaking into online copywriting. Two or three times I just had to stop and double-check its Amazon.com rating. Four-and-a-half stars? Really?
Now, I don't doubt that the author has made a lot of money copywriting--his business has its own website and there are a dozen testimonials in the front of the book. In fact, the copywriting principles themselves seem pretty sound. What I could not handle were the two or three typos on every single page.
Some typos are pretty standard, like "its" for "it's." The book seems afraid of hyphens, as in "multi billion dollar industry," and "benefits oriented, keyword rich copy." It also has a loose understanding of title capitalization: "How many Articles Do I Write? When and Where do they End Up?"
Other typos are really head-scratching, like on page 61: "To give you an example of how keyword prominence is used on a real site, let'sconsideraprojectIdidforwww.batterystuff.com.Thekeywordphrasewas 'motorcycle battery.'" And again on 114 and 115, which has the phrases "get rid of the fl uff," "You'll fi nd when you do this," and "adjective fi lled ones."
Sometimes I had to read a sentence a few times to even begin to understand what the book was trying to say. On page 69: "You can see in the prior examples that we followed a certain strategy in regards to the headers. For the first one, 'Catchquick: The Easiest Shopping Search Engine on the Web!,' we used the company name, Catchquick, the most important keyword phrase - Shopping Search Engine and communicated a good benefit - it's the easiest on the web."
And on page 73: "Something else you could do - and this is a recommendation you don't hear very often is study the masters of writing - some of the best copywriters, like Bob Bly and others as well as some of the better direct marketers out there like Joe Sugarman 24."
The "24" in the last quotation was an end-note reference. The book starts out with those numbers in superscript, then puts them in line with the text, then goes back to superscript. But do you want to know the funniest part? Here's what the end note for 24 says: "Joe Sugarman." That's it. Nearly every end note is like that. The author tells his readers to check out something like 6smarketing.com and zephoria.com, then he points them to an end note that says, "6Smarketing.com/Zephoria.com." It's like the author vaguely recalled a high school English class that said end notes were important, so he threw some in there for kicks.
All through this book, I've been saying to myself, "The subject matter is important, not the proofreading... the subject matter is important, not the proofreading..." But you know what? This is a book on how to write, for crying out loud.
If this book represents the online copywriting industry standard, then there must be a whole lot of hacks and crooks out there. And if it doesn't, then why did I pay money for it?
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful Book for Newcomers, March 13, 2009
This review is from: Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web (Hardcover)
As a newbie to the online marketing space, I needed a book that would walk me through the concepts and explain things to me in a way that I could understand. Content Rich was exactly what I needed to read..it helped me reduce the learning curve and got me up to speed right away. I have already recommended the book to 3 of my friends...if you are a small business owner with a limited or non-existent web presence, this book could change everything for you. It has for me.
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