Do you want to hire a copywriter? To get the best results, you need to communicate exactly what you need, and the results you want from the copy that's written for you. Here are three tips which will help you when you're hiring copywriting services.

1. Sad Truth: Most Professional Copywriters Don't Understand the Web

If you want to smile, go to a search engine and enter "home" into the search query field. They are four billion results in Google -- four billion pages, all called "home". Admittedly most of those billions of pages weren't written by copywriters.

However, you can use this as a rough measure of your web copywriter's competence. Ask your prospective web copywriter for the links to pages that he's written and for his own site's URL. If you find that any of the pages he's written have "home" as the page title, you'll know that your web copywriter doesn't understand the web.

Hire a copywriter who demonstrates his expertise on the web.

2. Give Your Copywriter Everything He Needs, Starting With Your Positioning Statement

Brief your web copywriter so that he knows what results you want. Start by giving him your positioning statement. Unless he knows exactly how to position your business or product or service, the results will not be what you want.

You should also give him the URLs of your primary competitors online, so that you can tell him how you want to position yourself against them.

3. Set Your Goals First, and Make Your Copywriter Aware of Those Goals

Your time is valuable, and so is your copywriter's. Ensure that you have clear goals for the copy which he's writing, and make him aware of those goals. For example, perhaps you want to get onto the first page of the search results for a certain keyword. Ensure that your copywriter knows what that keyword is, so that he can assess the competition.

In a very competitive situation, your copywriter will be able to give you advice so you can target less competitive terms, and then can gradually target keywords which are more competitive.