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CopyPress: A New Model for Outsourcing Your Web Content Needs
Dec 1st
Recently I got a press pass to attend the BlueGlass online marketing conference in Florida. One of the highlights of my visit was a demo of a new product called CopyPress.
Copy Press is an outsourced content-creation service for online content. If you need content created for a blog or website, or a white paper or other use, CopyPress streamlines the process of commissioning that content.
HOW COPYPRESS WORKS
As a customer of the service, you go to the CopyPress website and order the content you need. Then CopyPress finds the writers and manages the process from start to finish. Eventually the content is delivered back to you via the CopyPress Web platform in a variety of formats ready for you to download or publish to your own website.
As a customer, you place your order, pay for and receive your ordered content online. But behind the website, there are still human beings — writers — delivering a creative service. This is not machine-generated content (the scourge of the Internet!).
ADVANTAGES OF ONLINE SERVICES
CopyPress is fundamentally a service that has been “productized” and given a Web interface. Regular readers know that I am fan of this type of business model. It is a business model and delivery model that’s getting more common today. (Other online services that I’ve reviewed include PointBanner.com for getting banner ads, and LogoWorks.com for getting logos.) I think such online services empower small businesses, and offer distinct advantages:
- Speed and convenience — CopyPress is designed to make it relatively fast and easy for you to hire Web writers online. You go to one central place and deal with one entity, instead of having to recruit and hire individual freelance writers every time you need one. That’s usually less work and time commitment for you as the customer.
- Self-serve, 24/7 — Services like CopyPress have another advantage. You can take advantage of the service on your own schedule 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So if you are like me, and need to work in the early mornings, late evenings, weekends or holidays, an online service is ideal.
- Lower cost — CopyPress has developed technology that has streamlined processes for the customer-facing front end, as well as the back-end interaction with the writers. This technology and process standardization presumably keeps their costs down — cost savings they pass on to you.
But CopyPress is not a writers’ marketplace nor a freelance writers’ job board. You don’t put out writing jobs for bid, and then have to select individual writers and negotiate prices. Instead, CopyPress manages the process of creating content for you. CopyPress hires qualified Web writers who not only can write well, but understand search engine optimization. CopyPress assigns your project to a qualified writer. CopyPress checks work for plagiarism and if you request it, for SEO benefits. CopyPress also has an editor review the content and send it back to the writer for revisions if it is not acceptable quality. You then have the ability to review the content and ask for revisions, also.
COPYPRESS PRICING
At the time of this writing, CopyPress’s typical prices range from $5 – $40 for an ecommerce catalog description, to $10 – $60 for a blog post, to $20 – $200 for a whitepaper. However, numerous factors come into play, including length and customization required, and prices may vary. CopyPress also provides bulk pricing for large packages of content.
CopyPress is not going after the cut-rate market that some content services go after. The company is positioning the service as a middle-range offering — above the low-end content creation services, but not as expensive as custom content.
CopyPress is still in a controlled public Beta. Right now if you want to use the service, you have to apply on the website. CopyPress, created by the BlueGlass online marketing agency, is only accepting a limited number of of Beta users at this time.
I have not yet tried the service myself, although I am considering it. Would love to hear from anyone who has tried it, and your impressions. Please leave a comment below sharing your experience.
CopyPress: A New Model for Outsourcing Your Web Content Needs
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A New Model of a Sustainable Business
Nov 10th
A New Model of a Sustainable Business
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
The International Business Series is brought to you by UPS. Discover the new logistics. It levels playing fields and lets you act locally or globally. It’s for the individual entrepreneur, the small business, or the large company. Put the new logistics to work for you.
When it comes to green business practices there’s a long held notion that in order to adopt sustainable business practices you needed to make sacrifices, pay higher prices or receive lower profits.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, a company now considered by many to be one of the leaders in the production of recycled, sustainable, and green products. TerraCycle builds all of its products using a practice they call “upcycling” and has a lot of people rethinking this idea compromise.
Szaky states often that people won’t pay more for green, so don’t ask them to. “It seems fairly clear to me that everyone wants to buy organic, eco-friendly products, but it’s equally clear to me that they don’t want to pay more for them,” Szaky writes in his book Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle Is Redefining Green Business.
A key tenet of eco-capitalism is that you don’t charge more for your products, and you don’t have to because they are made from waste (cheaper than virgin materials). This is one of the most important aspects of TerraCycle’s success.
“Waste has historically had a negative value,” Szaky told me. “We pay others to take it away. TerraCycle has flipped that notion on its head—we’ve found a way to turn waste into a valuable asset and a raw material.” Today TerraCycle produces dozens of products and generates millions of dollars in revenue from its “upcycling” practices. Szaky is featured as a speaker on business management, innovation, and recycling issues.
Most would say that TerraCycle is far more than just an eco-conscious company; Szaky has created an entire business model around producing products with zero or even negative production cost. That’s right: They produce all of their products from someone else’s waste stream, and in some cases make a profit even before they sell the product.
A glimpse back at the company’s beginnings might give some insight into how they got to where they are today.
At age nineteen, Szaky and his Princeton college friends created a fertilizer formulated from worm castings—yes, worm poop.
They entered their business idea in a business plan contest and won a cash prize sufficient to get the operation rolling. They continued to enter and win business plan contests as a form of financing. Meanwhile their very unique product (worm poop fertilizer) started to get noticed by the likes of the New York Times and Inc. magazine before they actually had a product ready to sell to retailers.
In an effort to save money, Szaky decided to bottle their first batches of liquid plant fertilizer in empty plastic soda bottles, partly because they fit standard-size spray tops and partly because they could go grab them right out of people’s recycling bins.
Eventually they turned to area schools with a “bottle brigade” program in which schools would collect recyclable bottles and give them to TerraCycle and in return TerraCycle would pay the school or organization for collecting the bottles. This built-in community component would later become a key word-of-mouth strategy as they expanded nationally and could tap schools in other communities while gently promoting their consumer products to the school parents.
The decision to rely on recycled waste for production material transformed TerraCycle. Instead of simply producing environmentally friendly, affordable, and effective plant food, they became a company that produced a variety of products made entirely from waste streams. TerraCycle now produces holiday bows from Clif bar wrappers, trash cans from plastic computer cases, pencil cases and backpacks from juice pouches, and kites from Oreo wrapper kites as well as their line of plant foods.
Has Szaky’s model worked? Here are some facts about the company:
- 2009 revenue: $7.5 million.
- 63,347 collection locations worldwide.
- 8,866,368 people collecting waste.
- $607,295.84 money contributed to charity.
- 1,263,589,839 units of waste diverted.
Some of the retailers carrying TerraCycle products include: The Home Depot, Wal*Mart, Target, Whole Foods Market, Kroger, CVS, Office Max, and Petco
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
How Evernote Is Changing the Free Model
Aug 3rd
How Evernote Is Changing the Free Model
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Phil Libin (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes
For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I had the chance to visit with Evernote CEO Phil Libin.
Evernote is a simple service that allows you to track and store everything you want to remember and get it out of your “meat brain” and housed somewhere safe and trustworthy. About 9,000 people a day are joining the free version of this service that also syncs incredibly well with iPads and mobile devices. (GTD fans, funny David Allen story here)
One of the reasons I wanted to record this show is that on top of being a user of the service, I’m taken by the fact that Evernote has also figured out how to get serious numbers of users to upgrade from the free to the premium version. The traditional freemium thinking is that you get lots of users and figure out how to turn them into paying customers.
While the web 2.0 landscape is littered with lots of bad freemium ideas, Evernote is turning users into fanatics and fanatics into profit. So, how do they do that?
According to Libin, “focusing on the free part is where people make the mistake. Evernote focuses instead on how many people are paying and how much it costs to get them. That’s the approach all businesses need to take. Freemium doesn’t change that approach, it just changes the math.”
To get a million people paying you just need to get ten million people using it. The free users are just part of the cost.
While this explains, to some extent, why Evernote is profitable, it doesn’t capture the other part – why people would pay for it. In my view, Evernote has done a couple things that people find attractive and worthy of commitment. They’ve created something that works and is simple – simple to use, to explain, to adopt. And, they’ve captured trust – repeatedly stating that your memories are safe. Evernote is adamant that they have no data deals in the works, just put your stuff here and don’t worry about any funny stuff or privacy issues. Those two items are central to what gets people to want to pull out their wallet and pay for the premium version – there’s actually an element of support as well as value.
Too many freemium offers start off with an offering that’s not worth paying for, assuming lots will jump on board simply because it’s free.
I’m working on my next book and using Evernote as a significant bridge to all the information I need to explore and save for this project.
So, tell me your Evernote story, how are you using it?
The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Fairfield Inn & Suites Small Business Road-to-Success Challenge
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Viral Old Spice Man Ads Could Be Model for Internet Video – Science and Tech
Jul 13th
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Look at your marketing campaign, now back at Old Spice’s. Sadly, your campaign isn’t Old Spice’s. The company took its well-produced marketing… |
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OfferMobi Introduces Mobile Performance Marketing Model at DPAC Conference
Jun 24th
| Mobile marketing will be the topic of at least 5 of the 24 sessions and a workshop is devoted entirely to Apps and Mobile Internet strategies. |
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Business Model: Money Equals Happy
Jun 4th
I’ve always thought the basics of business were pretty simple. Create a good product, get out the word, sell it at a fair price, and be nice.
But I’ve sat through enough graph loaded, jargon jammed, longwinded meetings to know that not everyone is satisfied with the basics.
So one day, after mocking an overly complicated PowerPoint, I got the above idea for breaking it down as simply as possible: money = happy.
It took a little longer to find just the right caption to go along with it, but judging by the almost constant sales of this cartoon, I suspect I found it.
Business Model: Money Equals Happy
View full post on Small Business Trends
WSI Launches an Advanced Digital Marketing Franchise Model | Earth Times News
May 16th
| Toronto, Canada, May 16, 2010 –(PR.com)– WSI, the world’s leading Internet marketing franchise with offices in over 80 countries worldwide,… |
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KCM HOLDINGS Expands Venture Philanthropy Model “My Perfect Economy” to Combine Social Media & Social Responsibility to…
Apr 12th
| The site will combine social media and social responsibility to access an advertising market estimated to reach $1.3 billion in 2010 according to a… |
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Everyone’s model of work is a job
Mar 12th
That’s the conclusion of a very long essay on startups by Paul Graham, and it’s an insightful quote.
The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you’re in the minority–a job would destroy my psyche) is that you’ve been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it’s more than training or acclimation. It’s something that’s been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be. [Download Brainwashed]
If you’re a boss, you need applicants, lots of them, to keep the wages you have to pay nice and low. And so the more people who believe they need a job, the better it is for you.
I don’t believe that everyone should be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, that everyone should quit their job and go work for themselves. I do believe this:
The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
New Internet Marketing Model Gives Business Opportunities from Home a Unique Dimension
Mar 11th
| A new Internet marketing platform has become the talk of the online marketing world with its unique concept. The product, named Carbon Copy PRO, is… |
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