I was talking to a prospect the other day about SEO. Since he was keen to get some traffic to his ecommerce website – sooner rather than later – I asked him if he’d ever considered using Google AdWords.
His answer was along the lines of, “I never click on those ads, so I don’t want to use them. And more people click on the free listings anyway.”
In these days of viral videos, Flash presentations and other multimedia fanfare, it’s easy to wonder if good old fashioned copy (you know, words) still has a place in online sales and marketing.
In case you’ve forgotten, Ken MacGriffin at Wordtracker give us 6 Reasons Why Content is Crucial to Your Website. Some ideas he brings up include:
Marketing managers, beware of using the same tired format for your company’s brochures. Jonathan Kranz, author of Copywriting for Dummies, has come up with eight ideas for livening up a brochure and making it into something your customers will appreciate and even enjoy.
Because a brochure is meant to help make sales, Kranz suggests adding value and increasing interest by going beyond the boilerplate ingredients such as company history, mission statements and dry descriptions of products and services.
Recently, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz gave a presentation for SEO newbies at the YCombinator SEO event and posted an online summary of his talk.
A key takeaway for business owners is the fact that you don’t have to be a gigantic organisation to succeed at SEO. In fact, the marketers who are most adaptable to the ever changing rules of search engine ranking can actually compete and win against big competitors.
Another thing to be aware of is getting the vast majority of your website traffic from Google. Because Google changes their PageRank algorithm so frequently, a website that relies on Google for the bulk of their traffic could face trouble if their rankings take a sudden dive due to an algorithm change.
I recently came across an article by website marketing consultant Cathy Goodwin on attracting more targeted traffic with copywriting. One of her more offbeat suggestions was to “post compelling content in unexpected places”.
She suggests leaving related comments on other people’s blog posts. Make sure to choose websites and posts that closely correspond to the topic of your website and always make a quality contribution to the conversation.
In addition, she also notes that creating topically-related Squidoo lenses that link to your main website is a quick and creative way to generate additional traffic to your site, due to the fact that the Squidoo.com domain has such good rankings in search engines and receives so many visitors [Read more...]
These days, the layout and design of a website plays a huge role in whether or not visitors to your website stay long enough to get a good grasp of the product or service being sold.
Mike Smith at WDL recently discussed 20 ways to increase web design effectiveness. Even though the WDL website focuses primarily on the technical/visual side of web design, considerable focus was given to the actual site content, and business owners should take notice of these insights.
Savvy business owners realise there are many ways of quickly grabbing a reader’s attention in web copy, direct mail, email and other marketing and sales materials.
Copywriting guru Ivan Levison recently put together an online video presentation listing 30 Ideas in 30 Minutes. It will give you some quick ideas to get better results from your marketing materials.
Some highlights include:
Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney of Wordtracker recently blogged excerpts from their book, Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building – How to Build Links to Your Website for SEO, Traffic and Response, resulting in the comprehensive post: 62 Steps to the Definitive Link Building Campaign.
When writing for the web, it’s no longer enough to simply post great copy on your site. Today’s successful business websites need great copy that’s optimised to funnel in targeted customers from search engines.
Search engines assign value to a website not only based on the site’s content, but also based on the number and quality of other websites that link to the site.
As a marketer, you can adopt link building strategies that will pay off down the road as your company’s website matures. Some ways to add more value to your website include:
Mark Nunney at Wordtracker.com compiled a comprehensive list of 99 Takeaways and Top Tips from this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference held in London.
I don’t have time to delve into all 99, but here are a few key concepts of interest to marketers:
Soft sell
To get better conversion rates, it’s important to back away from a hard sell in order to simply build rapport and trust with the customer. Testimonials go a long way in helping to establish this trust.
The results of a website makeover are often disappointing writes STW Group columnist Alex Campbell. If no one cares about your new website, the lack of a well thought out strategy is usually the culprit: “No matter how good your website looks or how compelling your content is or how clever the technology behind it is, if your strategy is wrong then nothing else matters.”
Campbell offers up a rundown of 10 common mistakes. Here are some highlights:
When hiring a copywriter it’s important to remember that it’s their job to create effective marketing and sales materials from the nuggets of source information you give them.
A give and take exists between clients and copywriters. So it’s important that you help the copywriter by providing as much information as you can from the very beginning.
The initial meeting between you and your copywriter is a crucial event where the writer will ask open-ended questions to get a feel for the best way to compose copy that will achieve your goals.
Lorraine Thompson of MarketCopywriterBlog.com created a humorous animation that shows the disconnect between a copywriter and marketing manager who don’t see eye to eye about the process of creating effective copy.
Take a look:
Though landing pages seem simple at first glance, there are some definite mistakes that business owners make when composing them.
Today we’ll take a brief look at a few of the 5 Landing Page Mistakes compiled by AdWords guru Howie Jacobson, of AskHowie.com.
There are days when even the most creative and experienced marketing professionals have trouble getting their initial ideas and concepts onto paper. Which can cause frustration, as well as a massive loss of productivity.
For the most effective sales materials, it’s much easier to edit badly written or incomplete text than wrestle with a blank page. So it’s best to not focus on perfection at first, in order to get something down that can be improved upon later.
Building on this rationale, copywriting virtuoso Michael Fortin blogged about the 60-Minute Naked Truth Salesletter Formula that he learned from information marketer Dean Jackson.
Have you ever wondered how your website design affects the readability and effectiveness of your content? Well you should have, because when it comes to marketing online it’s the words that do the heavy lifting.
Recently Smashing Magazine’s Dimitry Fadeyev compiled a list of 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines. Here are 3 guidelines to help your content work harder:
If you’re new to copywriting, it’s normal to experience periods of time where you can’t seem to verbalize your thoughts and ideas about the product you’re marketing.
In his Amazon School of Copywriting video, master copywriter Jay Abraham offers a deceptively simple tip for instantly bypassing this obstacle in order to transform mediocre copy into words that deeply resonate with your prospective customers.
Brochures are a very popular marketing weapon for SMEs and corporates alike – even in this internet age.
The trouble with brochues is they’re expensive to produce and distribute, go out of date quickly, and are easy to ignore.
Worst of all, they often fail to make an impact on the bottom line. The reasons for this are many and varied, but include:
The end result is often a carton of dud brochures gathering dust in your storeroom.
To help you avoid this fate I have compiled a list of my favourite brochure copywriting resources from the best brochure copywriters in the business. These tips and tactics will help you create a brochure that not only will your customer will want to read, but will increase sales too:
“Some guy told me I need to put a Google search box on my site and have a 5% keyword density on each page if I want to get on the first page of Google…”
Really? You’ve got to be very careful whose advice you trust when it comes to SEO. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there, much of it highly speculative or woefully out-of-date.
(BTW, my two most trusted and useful sources of SEO information are Dan Thies and Jill Whalen.)
The only people who really know how Google works are the folks at Google, and they ain’t telling.
But the next best source of infomation is SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors survey. Every couple of years SEOmoz surveys the world’s top SEO experts to gauge their opinions on what factors are most important in achieving top Google rankings.
So without further ado, here are the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the 2009 survey:
“How can I help you?”
Walk into a retail store and that’s often the first question on the sales assistant’s lips. It’s also the question your website content must answer.
Many businesses make the mistake of presenting their website as a glowing resume, detailing their history, size, mission and achievements. But they forget the most important person: the prospective customer!
I’ve just discovered Google’s YouTube channel and they’ve got some fantastic instructional videos on how to get the most out of your AdWords account.
This one’s on improving your ad copy. The important points to note are:
In his book Your Marketing Sucks! marketing consultant Mark Stevens states: “If your website is nothing more than an electronic brochure, you are squandering the power of the medium.”
B2B copywriter and consultant Dianna Huff agrees. In her blog post, Your B2B Small Business Website is Not a Brochure she gives five crucial points of difference between small business websites and brochures.
Do you have trouble incubating leading-edge solutions for your corporate website?
Or perhaps you’re wondering how to innovate compelling cross-media content?
Here’s a next generation solution for your mission-critical website redesign…
What’s the difference between reading a novel and a website?
When someone reads a novel they start at page 1, then read page 2, and so on, until they get to the end. It’s a linear process.
But most people start reading a website on the page they arrived at from clicking a link on Google. They can then read the web pages in any order. It’s random access.
I learn something new about website copywriting every day.
Over at Smashing Magazine they’ve put together a list of 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines.
The first tip is to put form labels above the field. It makes sense because we fill out forms from top to bottom.
Looks like I’ll have to email my website designer and get him to tweak my forms!
Other pearls of wisdom include:
Direct mail copywriter Dean Rieck has put together a useful list of 30 copywriting blogs that are actually worth reading. He’s based his selection on who provides the most useful copywriting tips.
The blogs that I turn to when I want to hone my copywriting skills are:
So many business owners focus solely on increasing website traffic – getting more visitors to their site – to the detriment of improving website conversion – converting more browsers into buyers.
The bottom line is that you’re wasting your money on traffic if your site’s doing a poor job of conversion. It’s like putting a massive ad in the Sunday paper and having hundreds of people visit your store, but not having enough salespeople to serve them. They just leave with a low opinion of your operation.
"I help my clients communicate more effectively, improve their images, and increase their sales with high quality copywriting."
