As a professional contractor who wears numerous hats, you owe it to your self and your customers to be as organized as feasible. In a prior write-up, I discussed the importance of delivering an organized draft that your co-creators can easily work from. Following are some suggestions for freelance copywriters who want to streamline their duplicate submission procedure and make sure a crisp, clean draft every time.

Common Duplicate Drafting Rules

1. Do not deviate from the regular fonts, Arial or Occasions New Roman, ten or twelve stage.

2. Submit all duplicate with 1 Space after a period, NOT TWO.

three. Save all duplicate drafts as a Word document.

4. Make certain that Intelligent Quotes and all “autoformatting” is shut off prior to typing your duplicate into a fresh Word document. That means NO auto indents, NO auto bullets, NO fraction symbols, etc.

five. Use Bold, ITALIC or UNDERLINE exactly where essential. You might also html tag these as so daring if the client has requested it.

6. Each and every draft ought to be spellchecked by computer and by eyeball.

Setting Up Your Duplicate Draft

Create a Regular Duplicate Draft Template. Use this template to set up every initial duplicate draft you create. Be certain to consist of the following:

A Header that lists:

1. The client’s title or company title
2. The writer (your title)
three. Modern date
4. Undertaking description
five. Draft Number

A Footer that includes the web page number.

(To include web page numbers, go the leading menu and click on INSERT and then Web page Figures.)

When making a new document, follow the drafting procedure as outlined below.

1. Open up the Duplicate Draft Template on your desktop
2. Instantly do a Save-As and rename the document as follows:

XXX_descrip_draftX

In this naming conventention, the three Xs signify the initial three letters of the client’s company title. The label “descrip” ought to be changed by a qualifier. “DraftX” will be the draft number.

Sample filename for “Rocky’s Hot Wings” menu duplicate, draft number two:

ROC_menu_draft2

In making additional revised drafts of this duplicate, use an identical file naming format, changing only the X value at the end of the filename.

Notice: If for some reason you don’t have access to your Regular Duplicate Draft Template, you can create your personal document from scratch provided the following is included:

Prior to you becoming typing, “prep your document” by performing the following:

1. Turn off the Intelligent Quotes feature.

The reason for this is because HTML and PDFs do not interpret curly quotes and curly single quotes or apostrophes properly. This will CORRUPT your text with weird-searching symbols all through.

Regardless of what your college professor might have told you, MAKE Sure YOU USE Straight Quotes (“) AND FOOT MARKS(‘) in all of your duplicate drafts for any client work.

2. Turn off all Car FORMATTING.

Car formatting is of completely no use to somebody who plans to format text into their personal style sheets or graphic . It is more trouble than it is really worth so DO NOT hand in formatted text of any kind.

Do not tab, bullet, auto-number, auto-correct, auto-cap, make fractions out of or or else format your text.

Label Your Sections

While not every undertaking will need you to divide it into sections, products this kind of as e-book duplicate, catalog duplicate and internet duplicate will. If you are working on some thing that will be presented visually in pieces, label every section of your duplicate with an suitable descriptor. Use a Bold font or some other qualifier to indicate section descriptions.

Notice: your section descriptors ought to not be baffled with your headlines. Do some thing “different” to the section descriptors and apply that treatment uniformly all through the piece. For instance, if your headlines are bolded currently, you might want to ALL-CAP your section headers to get rid of confusion.

For instance, if you are composing internet duplicate, you might title your descriptors as so:

Home Web page
ABOUT US Web page
Items Web page
Solutions Web page
Get in touch with Web page

You can also label your headlines and subheadlines so that whoever is choosing up your duplicate can be certain of how to lay it all out. For instance:

Tips Web page

Headline: Web Copywriting Basics
Subhead: Grasp the Methods the Pros Use

Formatting “Lists”

Some tasks this kind of as taglines, banner ad suggestions and headline brainstorms will need that you submit them in checklist format.

Kind your lists at twelve stage and don’t skip a line in between every listing. The consumer will most likely be having to pay by the web page, so he’ll want his money’s really worth of creative input.

Editing An Current Draft

You might be needed to edit a draft sometimes that somebody else will make changes to. If this is the case, use the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word. As you edit, your “suggested” revisions will display up in the document as crossouts, changed text and phrase additions in a different colour than the original text.

You might also be needed to make the final revisions on a document that has currently been edited with the Track Changes feature. If this is the case, open the document on your desktop, do a Save As, and rename the document to the subsequent consecutive draft number.

You will have to go up to the Track Changes menu once more and uncheck the boxes so that you will be in a position to make your revisions without “crossouts” and colored edits displaying up.

After you’ve shut off this feature, implement the requested changes as per regular draft creation. Don’t neglect to Save every couple of minutes!

Planning a Document for E-mail Transmission

Notice: Prior to you deliver your duplicate draft document, be certain that it is saved as a Word document on your desktop and not in your Temp folder. If you depart it in the Temp folder and then make draft revisions, you can count on dropping track of exactly where those revisions are later on. They might even be deleted accidentally!

After saving your document to the desktop, attach it to an email message with suitable intro text.

Your email subjectline ought to be titled to reflect the client title, undertaking description and draft number.

Sample E-mail Subjectline:

Rocky’s Hot Wings Menu Duplicate Draft 1

When you make future revisions and subsequent drafts of this client’s duplicate, retain the identical email subjectline and delete the “RE:” from the subjectline, as this will mess up the sorting of your emails in your inbox as well as tick off the person who is on the receiving end of the work.

Your subsequent draft of this same file ought to be named:

Rocky’s Hot Wings Menu Duplicate Draft 2

At some stage you might want to inquire concerns, qualify what you wrote, make a suggestion or or else comment along with duplicate you submit. The perfect location to do this is in the email itself, as a short memo. Be certain to consist of your contact information this kind of as email address and telephone number at the bottom of the email for fast reference.

Storing Your Files

For your personal peace of mind, it is wise to shop existing drafts in their personal correctly labeled folders on your Desktop or wherever you choose to maintain your work files. You by no means know when a client will want to go back again to “square one” and if you know exactly where square one is situated you can conserve your self a great deal of anguish.

If you have any concerns about setting up, submitting or sending duplicate drafts, make sure you contact Dina Giolitto, Copywriting Advisor, at http://Wordfeeder.com.

Dina Giolitto is the writer of ARTICLE POWER: Create Dynamite Web Articles and Watch Your Sales Explode… a 49-web page manual covering every facet of write-up marketing on the internet. Learn about write-up marketing, copywriting and more at http://www.wordfeeder.com