Day 21. I beg you. I implore you. I urge you politely and respectfully. Don’t do it unless you’re a trained professional. Writing your own website can singlehandedly ruin the experience for a web visitor, and quickly, too. In just the time it takes to say, “F. Scott Fitzgerald might have been the greatest American writer ever, with the possible exception of Hemingway” is all the time you have to capture and win the attention of a web guest. If you have the writing chops to do it, let it rip; if not, outsource.

Web text writers, and you’ve read it here before, are not the same as other writers. Web text writers understand search engine optimization. They work, as I do, with a keyword list of generally 100 words or more, laying right beside their keyboard. They understand the balance of copy weight as it relates to Google’s famed algorithm. If you have to ask what that means, then you know for certain that writing your own website is a mistake. Essentially, it means that Google values longer content, but a web visitor does not. Knowing the workaround to this problem is invaluable. And most of all, web text writers know how to drive traffic to your site, and with traffic you’ll get leads, and with leads you can nurture your prospects, and with nurtured prospects, you’ll get profitable sales conversions.

Two years ago, very few companies would pay to have someone else write their website. Today, the floodgates have opened. Since Google’s algorithm change in May of 2013, which placed a heavy influence on search rank based on original, relevant and frequent content, many businesses finally understood that writing it themselves wasn’t saving them money, it was costing them sales. And just to make certain businesses really understood it, Google fired another salvo across the corporate bow this May with another tweak to the algorithm. And guess what? 8% of the websites in the U.S. were impacted.

The lesson for businesses is that this is pretty serious business. And this writing lesson from F. Scott himself is also serious, but in a wonderful sort of way, “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” Right on!