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Entries from October 2009

10 Website Copywriting Tips

October 30, 2009 · 3 Comments

Powerful search engine optimized (SEO) Website copywriting can have a tremendous impact on your sales and marketing. Here are 10 Website copywriting tips to create a more effective Website and dramatically improve the way you do business online:pen 

  1. Keyword research: This is step one of Website copywriting. There are many excellent free and paid services online that you can use to identify what terms your target audience is searching to find your competitors online. Targeted keyword research plus strategic SEO Website copywriting equals better search rankings than your competition on Google and other search engines.
  2. Headline: The headline is number two on my list, but it’s number one for SEO Website copywriting. You absolutely must include your keyword in the headline. If you don’t, it’s like putting up a “For Sale” sign without stating what’s for sale. For instance, if you had a 2008 Black Honda Accord for sale but your sign said “Car for Sale,” how much are you not communicating?
  3. Keyword placement: In addition to the headline, your primary keyword should appear in the first one or two sentences, be sprinkled throughout the copy as much as possible without distracting from your message, and be included towards the end of the page.
  4. Homepage copy: This is where we see some of the most problems with Website copywriting. You’ve undoubtedly seen sites with two sentences on the homepage, as well as sites with thousands of words on the homepage. Both strategies are unsuccessful. Too little copy doesn’t allow for keywords to be used and simply doesn’t persuade a visitor to take action. Too much copy can dilute important keywords, and usually bores a visitor into clicking away from the site quickly–a double whammy when you consider your Website copywriting goal was to attract the potential customer to your site with relevant keywords and then compel him/her to take some kind of action.
  5. Persuasive copy: “Why am I here, and why do I care?” People are busy. No matter how great your site looks (put all the bells and whistles on it if you like), if the copy isn’t engaging they will very quickly move on to a competitor’s site. It’s that simple.
  6. Bullets: This is an often overlooked aspect of Website copywriting. The search engines pay attention to bullets because they call-out important items, so include a keyword or two in your bullets as well. Bullets break up chunks of copy and make information easier to digest. Since many Web users are skimmers, they may only read the bullets anyway, so make sure you include key benefits of your products and services.
  7. Customer-focused copy:  “What’s in it for me?” Visitors to your Website don’t care about you. It’s the brutal truth. They care about your solutions to their problems. Your Website copywriting needs to reflect this fact. How does your product/service benefit them? Do they save money? Time? Get a unique product? Personal service? Give them the benefits before the features in your Website copywriting and they’ll be more likely to take action.
  8. Subheads: Are your keywords in your subheads? The search engines recognize keywords in subheads to be more important and, like bullets, compelling subheads help break up the copy.
  9. Strong call to action: Your Website copywriting isn’t complete without a persuasive call to action. Whether it’s asking the visitor to contact you for more information or to purchase a product on your site, the call to action needs to specifically state what you want them to do in a way that reminds them of the benefits of your products/services.  
  10. Metadata: After you’ve completed your Website copywriting, remember to provide your Web programmer/designer with the meta title, meta description, and keywords to include in the code for the search engines.

There’s still one question you need to ask yourself: What do I want my Website to accomplish? Figure that out, and you’ll know your Website copywriting strategy.
 
Want to learn more about Website copywriting so you can increase your exposure online, drive more targeted traffic to your Website, and increase sales? Call 714.335.5677 or email info@novowriting.com for your FREE Website copywriting consultation. Visit us online at www.novowriting.com.

Categories: SEO · Web Sites
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5 Ways to Engage Women (and Moms) Online

October 29, 2009 · Comments Off

woman holding speech bubbleWomen, many of whom are mothers, wield enormous purchasing power. Today, they are responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases, and many are affluent. In March 2009, the “Marketing to Women Datafile” reported one in five women earn more than twice their significant other’s salary. In 2005, Gallup reported that one quarter of U.S. women live in a household earning more than $75,000 per year.

Combined with the fact that 63% of web users use the Internet to research a product or service before buying a product or service, these statistics demonstrate the importance of effectively appealing to this influential and profitable female market online. Here are five ways you can do just that:

1. Acknowledge that many women are busy with multiple responsibilities. This means keeping your web site’s navigation intuitive and simple – most women don’t have the time or inclination to decipher mysteriously phrased links or wade through nine web pages to find the product they’re seeking. It also means creating a clean, simple design; “visual clutter” can overwhelm busy visitors and drive them away.

2. Appreciate that women are individuals. Throw away the stereotypes! We all know a successful businesswoman whose dream home includes a mahogany-paneled library with sleek club chairs; she could care less about the kitchen. Lavender and pink are the last colors she would choose … and she’s not alone. If you believe a flowery, frilly web site is a surefire way to snag women, you should reconsider.

3. Benefit from the value women place on authenticity. Women over 50 especially appreciate this; the National Federation of Independent Business notes that baby boomer women pay close attention to a company’s practices, especially in terms of giving back to the community, social responsibility, and how respectful and understanding it has been to her in the past. Feature your positive track record and values on your site.

4. Understand that affluent women often expect more. In a Luxury Website Effectiveness Index survey, consumers with an average income of $305,000 said they’ve been turned off by websites that were “sloppy and disorganized.” Instead, you can appeal to affluent women with your website by featuring clean, high-end design. For instance, the use of images on the Vera Wang on Weddings website approaches the level of art.

5. Recognize that women appreciate visual design. You’re more likely to increase sales to women if you present information in a visually pleasing way. “Women are taking it all in-much more so than men,” say the authors of Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy. “They’re noticing the palette of your website, and they’re getting a feeling of your brand by reading your site’s copy.” Don’t scrape by here; invest wisely.

Courtesy of Media Post.

Categories: Web Sites
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True Costs (and Benefits) of Blogging

October 27, 2009 · Comments Off

Technorati’s regular “State of the Blogosphere” analysis of the business is just out, and among the stats is the incredible fact that bloggers are being paid more than ever. Is it time to rethink the definition of blogging? Yes.

state of the blogosphere

First, the stats. Technorati’s killer finding is that among the professional bloggers they surveyed who fall into the “full time” worker category, the average salary works out at $122,222–an enormous figure. Those full-timers equate to 46% of the respondees, which means that the majority of bloggers are part-timers–but these guys still take home some $14,777 per year, which isn’t to be sniffed at. That means the average blogger salary is about $42,548. The money isn’t primarily coming from employers (14% of bloggers work for corporations). Nor is it pouring in from ads on self-published blog pages–the financial meltdown put a massive dent in Internet ad revenues. Instead, bloggers are leveraging their popularity and expertise into speaking engagements, “traditional media” assignments, and setting up and running conferences, as VentureBeat notes.

In other words, blogging is now a diverse, popular and successful enterprise that covers a multiplicity of online writers, from extensive Twitterers to self-described Mommybloggers to tightly written, up-to-the-minute, smartly edited online publications like this one–a “professional blog” by Technorati standards. And it’s in that last sense that blogging is becoming a farm system for future journalists, who are apparently riding out the economic downturn pretty well (on average, at least). Think about that for a moment, and then remember how many traditional journalism jobs have been lost over the same period.

So here’s the radical suggestion: Let’s redefine what blogging means. If you’re writing self-absorbed or inexpert opinions about the minutiae of daily life, without hyperlinks, fact checks or any pretence at engaging with the news, you’re a blogger. You probably fall into the lower categories of pay in the Technorati survey if you in fact make any money at all. But if you’re a writer for an online publication, one that takes real-time stories, updates them as events unfold, reference your quoted facts, break stories and produce original writing then shall we just say you’re a journalist? An online one, but a journalist all the same.

And when you maneuver your thinking in this direction, you come to a strange new conclusion: Journalists who write for online versions of their (perhaps historic, perhaps not) newspapers are the same as journalists who write for totally different online news portals. Even the Pulitzer committee has said online entities can consider themselves eligible for its prestigious prize, with some limitations.

If the FTC would only figure this out, it would likely scrap its insidious plans to regulate how bloggers behave–an action that many are labeling as unfair, and possibly motivated by behind-the-scenes lobbying and cronyism from newspaper moguls. The FTC has moved back from its aggressive stance a little, but it certainly targets bloggers as a workforce while leaving traditional journalists unmentioned. That’s a position often reflected in opinionated but ill-informed commenters on blogs whenever traditional media is downplayed.

But no matter how vehemently the FTC or old guard media moguls reject the coming change, it’s still coming. If the advent of ubiquitous mobile Web technology and imminent graphics-rich tablet PCs hasn’t signaled the change strongly enough, Technorati’s data on blogger income should. Blogging’s about to shed its ugly caterpillar stage and emerge as journalism’s future.

Courtesy of  Jim Woods (Adjunct Professor at the Colorado Technical University) and his Posterous Blog.

Categories: Social Media
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