Customer Reviews

Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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?

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.

I purchased this book with high hopes that I would be learning something from someone who has been extremely successful in the online copywriting world. Instead of the insight I was hoping for, I got a poorly written book that obviously was published without ever having been reviewed by a copy editor.

I expect better, especially when the book is by someone who writes for a living and has the resources to have a book professionally prepared for publication.

There are pronoun agreement errors and basic 8th grade errors in the use of apostrophes on plurals. Check out your competitor's websites...

Jon, hire a ghost writer who knows that the apostrophe goes after the s when there is more than one competitor. I would overlook this error as a typo if it only happened once, but that apostrophe error had happened more than a half dozen times by the time I quit reading on page 129.

The book has screen shots of copy that the author has written that are reproduced in such a way as to make the copy too small to read.

One of my favorite sentences is on p.85. "One thing that I routinely see is a non-existant[sic.] About Us page." How true. Many companies don't do enough to tell the story of their businesses. It's a good point if you can overlook the spelling error and the illogical construction of seeing what does not exist.

Call me picky, but I can't.

Read Robert Bly or John Caples or Roy Williams, but don't buy this book. I am so disappointed. I wish I could get my money back. I guess I'll have to dump my used copy on Amazon.

There's some valuable information in this book...I think. A great deal of what the author says about SEO copywriting makes sense, although I have yet to put it into practice. I will say that it was quite strange that a man who makes his living writing produced a book riddled with typos and errors. Sure, mistakes happen. In fact, the author makes the point again and again that proper grammar counts for little when it comes to writing copy that sells. That being said...come on. It's not a book on graphic design or computer programming...it's a book on writing. And it wasn't 1 or 2 typos...the book was full of them. The effect of this careless final product was that I doubted the validity of what he was teaching. Whether that's fair or not, I don't know, but that was the affect on me. Moreover, compared to Bob Bly or Drayton Bird's copywriting books (as close as you can get to "page turners" in this field), Wuebben's style just wasn't very compelling. All in all, though, I suppose it was worth reading for the nuggets of helpful information.

I read this book hoping to get an understanding of how to do SEO copy writing and SEO content, because that is what the book is supposed to be about. While reading, I kept wondering when the answer to the question "how to write SEO content" would surface, but it never did; I didn't know when or if the question was ever answered, even though I continued to read the book. After finishing it, I had a bitter taste in my mouth. Basically, this is a conversational piece about the author's experience as a copywriter. In fact, if the name of the book was "My Copy Writing Experience, this would be a nice read.

Jon Wuebben does a good job in helping you create a website content plan that will have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. I agree that there might have been more detailed writing tutorials and examples. But after reading this book you will have a better understanding of how content affects your search engine rankings and what to do about it.

I found Chapters 3-5 particularly helpful in developing a content strategy that I now recommend to clients. For more "how-to" writing advice, I recomment you turn to Bob Bly or Joe Sugarman.

It's not easy to make a book about writing copy to optimize your rankings on search engines (SEO) into a real page turner, but Jon Wuebben makes a valiant attempt.

Writing business books is always a little dicey for the author because the audience is divided between those who know nothing or next to nothing about the topic (that would be me) and those people who are simply looking to add to the information they already have about the business being discussed--that would be my husband.

For me, a novice in the field of web sales, the topic is just plain daunting, but that's my problem, not Wuebber's. The author uses simple, declarative sentences, a laidback conversational tone and plain English where he could be using "technobabble". His examples are straightforward, easy to follow and demonstrably convincing, even for the uninitiated.

I found the apples-to-apples comparisons he uses very effective. By that I mean, he shows the copy as it looks before the improvements and SEO and then again after. The change was obvious, the explanations clear, and the result definitely beneficial. And, if I got it, so will everyone else.

My husband, with a Web history as old as the Web itself found it to be valuable as well. What impressed him most is that Wuebber cites other sources for his statistics, rather than simply personal research. This approach makes his assertions all the more compelling and gives real meat to his data.

If you're looking to find a pot of gold over the Internet rainbow, Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web may very well be your own ruby slippers.

Armchair Interviews says: This is knowledge anyone who wants to generate traffic on the Web should know.

I found Jon Wuebben's "Content Rich" to be an extremely helpful guide for preparing to tackle organic SEO. Jon presents the material in a very straightforward way and provides a great deal of practical examples. I found myself making notes throughout the text and I refer to it regularly. Jon provides the reader with a terrific amount of resources and tools to help launch their SEO projects. After reading Jon's book I felt inspired to redouble my efforts to regularly contribute meaningful content to our company's website.

As a fulltime entrepreneur who specializes in SEO copywriting for the Web and article marketing, I guarantee the information found in Content Rich more thoroughly and accurately covers the subject than any web copywriting book on the market.

I've been through the processes Jon describes, and can tell readers that the information is comprehensive - and honest. A Web copywriting business is not a "get rich quick" business - but one of building relationships, practicing what you preach, and building your credibility. The process Jon puts forth is easy to copy, and can be done by any writer who follows his instructions.

If you're even considering starting an online Web copywriting business, this book would be the first one I'd recommend you purchase; once you learn SEO copywriting, you're on your way to being as successful as Jon.