Website Copywriting: How to Get a Killer Home Page
April 28, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · 1 Comment
You can write your own home page. After all, how hard could it be?
You can also hire a website copywriter like me to write it for you. Either way, you should know exactly what goes into crafting a home page that is both effective and purposeful.
Think for a moment about the role your website has in contributing to the success of your business. Think about how your site works toward helping you achieve your goals. Your home page is your store front, your magazine cover, business card, brochure, and television commercial all rolled into one. It is your number one marketing tool, and it has an enormous job to do.
The Purpose of a Home Page
The visitors that come to your site are like window shoppers. They’re standing there for just a moment, checking out your sign, peeking at your inventory, and wondering if they should step through the door. You have that one moment to capture their attention and convince them to come inside.
Each home page is unique but they all have one common purpose: convert visitors into customers. A customer can be defined in many different ways — someone who subscribes to a newsletter, a person who purchases a product or service, or anyone who signs up as a registered user — these are just a few examples of someone who is considered a customer.
A website copywriter has to understand how to dress up that window so people want to come in and become customers. If you can do that, convert visitors to customers, then you’ve written a killer home page.
The Four Cornerstones of a Killer Home Page:
So how do you get passersby to come in? Start by applying the four following website copywriting techniques:
- Define your Offer – Tell people what you offer on your website by clearly describing your product or service.
- Identify a Need – Explain why visitors need your product or service. Tell them how it solves a problem or fulfills one of their desires.
- Make a Promise - It’s not enough to tell people what you’re selling and why they should buy it. You have to give them a reason to buy it from you. In this step, make a promise that makes your offer the most attractive one on the market.
- Issue a Call to Action - Lead the visitor to the next step using links, buttons, or clickable images. Take them to a registration page, catalog, or to the online store. Direct that traffic! This is where the conversion from visitor to customer happens.
To put it simply, you tell people what you’re offering and why it will make their lives better. Then, you explain why yours is the best place to get it and nudge them toward the cash register.
Website Copywriting That Makes People Want to Come Inside and Buy
Once you’ve established your four cornerstones, you’ve got the foundation for your home page, and all you need to do is develop the structure. Laying the groundwork is as easy as pouring cement, but building rooms and hallways, putting up windows and doors — doors that customers will want to walk through — that’s the tricky part.
Good website copywriting is a specialty all its own. There are specific techniques for writing a killer home page, an intriguing About page, or a compelling Product or Services page. And then there are skills that apply to all of the written content on a website.
Truly great website copywriting achieves the following:
- It is clear, concise, and compelling
- It speaks to customers in a language they can understand
- It incites visitors to take some action so they become customers
- It focuses on benefits for the customer rather than features of the product
- Good website copywriting always maintains the company brand and image and adheres to the company mission and philosophy
There are plenty of other factors too, like search engine optimization (SEO) keywords, which draws visitors to a site organically through search engines. When keywords become part of the equation, website copywriting becomes SEO copywriting, and that requires even more skills, because specific words and phrases have to worked into the text and formatted accordingly.
Finally, truly excellent website copywriting always looks good on the screen. It’s aesthetically pleasing. This is particularly significant on a home page because it’s more than likely that’s the first page a visitor will see, and we all know how crucial first impressions are.
A website copywriter has a job that combines the skills of writing, marketing, and design with an understanding of how people use the internet and respond to web content. Anyone can write a home page, that’s the truth. But writing a killer home page, that just might require a specialist.
Scribizzy offers a full suite of website copywriting services, and you can even get a quote online!
Doing Business Online with Niche Marketing
April 21, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · 1 Comment
Today’s businesses are learning to harness the power of niche marketing, and many modern small businesses are being built entirely around niches.
This smart strategy puts small businesses in a position to target a smaller and more well-defined pool of customers.
Niches are effective for business models in the brick and mortar world, but they’re even more effective when you’re doing business online.
Niche Businesses
You can be a florist. Or, you can be a wedding florist. As a general florist, you are looking at a huge range of customers – people who buy flowers for anniversaries, funerals, Valentine’s Day, and a host of other occasions, celebrations, and holidays.
As a wedding florist, all you have to think about are customers who are getting married.
In fact, your entire business is built around people who are getting married, so your entire business model shifts and becomes a lot more focused. You don’t need a shop because you’ll be doing most of your work on location. You don’t need to worry about having enough red roses on hand around Valentine’s Day. You can focus on a single service for a very particular type of client, and in that niche, you can quickly and easily become an expert.
Niche Marketing
As a wedding florist, you can market exclusively to your target customer. You’ll go after features in bridal magazines, set up booths at bridal fairs, and build your entire marketing campaign around a single event: your client’s wedding.
You’ll team up with other wedding professionals and offer packaged services. Connect with bands and DJs, makeup artists and event planners. Develop cross-promotions, referral programs, and venture partnerships with wedding service providers.
And remember, whether you offer your products and services to the public at large (anyone who needs flowers) or just a small segment of the population (people who are betrothed), you can always use niche marketing to promote your business, especially when you’re doing business online.
Doing Business Online in the Niche Marketplace
The Internet provides a venue in which you can take full advantage of niche marketing.
For example, you don’t have to limit yourself to one website. The Friendly Florist may have a shop on the corner that carries a wide variety of flowers for sale. There’s probably a Friendly Florist website that features seasonal arrangements, provides options for ordering bouquets online, and lists the shop’s location and hours of operation.
But the Friendly Florist can also launch a second (niche marketing) website: Friendly Florist Weddings. The entire website can focus on services that are designed especially for weddings and bridal parties, thus drawing very specific visitors to the site (ideal for SEO) and providing information that is more relevant to those visitors.
When doing business online with niche marketing, venture partnerships are also easy and effective. Exchange links and referrals with other wedding professionals. It doesn’t cost either partner a dime and has the potential to double all partners’ business.
You can run special promotions online with other businesses in your niche, and you can build an entire team of professionals for a special promotion or for an entire website. Get the DJ, makeup artist, wedding planner, and caterer all on board. Call it Friendly Weddings. Split the cost of the website and the advertising, and then everyone can enjoy greater revenues by doing business online.
The Benefits of Niche Marketing
Nothing compels a perspective customer more than feeling like the business she is patronizing caters exclusively to her needs. A young bride has a problem. She’s getting married in six months and she’s going to need flowers, and lots of them. You might have a flower shop, but she’s going to take greater notice if you’re a wedding florist, because what you’re offering is a direct solution to her particular problem.
Niche marketing also make it easier to identify target customers and then send them a message that is appropriate and relevant. Compare a slogan like “flowers for all occasions” to one such as “perfect flowers for your perfect wedding day.” If you’re about to walk down the aisle, which business would you choose?
There are lots of businesses that offer a wide range of general services, and niche marketing may seem too small or limiting at first. But it’s much easier to identify and market to small groups of customers than to try to appeal to everybody. Remember, a business can launch as many niche marketing campaigns as it wants and with the affordable cost of web hosting, doing business online with multiple websites is more effective and more cost efficient than ever.
When it’s time to put together your next marketing plan, take some time to consider the benefits of niche marketing for doing business online. You may have to divide your customers up into smaller groups and pay more for branding, advertising, and other promotions, but doing so could have a positively exponential impact on your bottom line.
The Purpose of Online Marketing Strategies
April 14, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · 3 Comments
What’s the difference between traditional and online marketing strategies?
Simple. Online marketing strategies are executed entirely on the web.
Of course, that’s assuming it’s happening at all. Plenty of business owners and website managers are wandering around and handing out blank business cards. They are failing miserably at marketing their products and services online, even if they’ve established some kind of online presence.
The goal of having an online presence is to get people to visit your website, to drive traffic to the site and then convert those visitors into paying customers. That’s what online marketing strategies are all about. They have the same set of objectives as any other type of marketing strategy:
- Establish and build brand recognition
- Determine pricing and make offers
- Run advertising campaigns, promotions, discounts, and specials
In order to do all that, you need a strategy, even though…
Sometimes it Just Happens By Itself
Today I was visiting a relatively new blog, which has quickly become one of my favorites, and I noticed that the comments have just about tripled in the last couple of weeks. The blogger isn’t doing a whole lot of marketing or promotion, but people are starting to whisper and nudge each other and say, “Hey, have you been to that guy’s blog? It’s pretty cool.”
That’s what can happen when you’ve got stellar content. A buzz ensues and next thing you know, you’ve got word-of-mouth marketing working for you, and it didn’t cost you a dime.
But there are three things to keep in mind when it comes to word-of-mouth advertising: 1) The blogger wasn’t actively trying to gain a larger audience, 2) It’s completely organic, and 3) It rarely happens.
Sometimes it Never Happens
Ironically, I was visiting another favorite blog today and noticed the exact opposite thing was happening. Even though the content is strong, there has been little to no growth since I first started reading it on a regular basis about a year ago. How do I know? The blog has its subscriber count displayed and it shows less than 100 subscribers.
Most blogs will see more growth than that without carrying out any online marketing strategies. So, I poked around and realized that this blogger was doing absolutely nothing to promote the content on her blog. There wasn’t even a distinguishable brand. The site’s title was sort of sitting there doing nothing and although the content was stellar, the way it was organized, presented, and packaged had no appeal whatsoever.
Even a minuscule online marketing strategy could help this blogger. She could probably double her subscribers in a month by investing nothing more than a little time: leaving comments on other blogs, submitting a few guest posts, setting up a social media profiles with links to her blog. She could also throw a few dollars at the problem and get a decent logo and tagline, and then follow up by buying ad space on relevant sites.
Most of the Time You Make it Happen
In order to get people to your site, you need online marketing strategies that are going to work. In traditional marketing, you can do something as simple as stand on the corner of a busy intersection holding up a sign that has your business name written on it. On the web, you can invest in ads, set up social media profiles, harness the power of search engine optimization, and practice smart networking.
You can spend your time or you can spend your money. Either way, every business should invest in online marketing strategies that will drive traffic, convert visitors, and make sales.
The first step is to ask yourself how do I get people to my site? Once you pose this question, you can start looking for answers, and that is when you’ll start to uncover a whole world of online marketing strategies. One of them is sure to be the perfect fit for your products and services, your website, and you.
Need smart copy for your online marketing strategies? Check out Scribizzy’s marketing copywriting services.
An Introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
April 7, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · 14 Comments
If you own or operate a website, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization or SEO.
My first introduction to search engine optimization happened several years ago, when I first started learning about website management and blogging. I already knew how to create a website and write the content, but getting traffic was a completely different ballgame.
Search engine optimization (SEO) was a distant promise that if you build a website, and then optimize it for search engines, visitors would come. But it seemed highly complicated. There were long lists of things you should and shouldn’t do to attract search engine traffic. I studied it from a distance for a long time.
And then I became a website copywriter.
As a website copywriter, SEO is often part and parcel of my job. Clients ask for blog posts, articles, and website copy that includes any number of particular keywords, and sometimes clients simply ask that I include “any keywords that make sense.”
Ah, if only it were that simple.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the volume of traffic to a website by improving its rank on search engines through organic search results. The idea is that the higher a site ranks for any given keyword, the more traffic the site will draw.
SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization, and SEO also refers to those professionals who provide search engine optimization services.
There are two types of search engine optimization:
- White hat SEO
- Black hat SEO
White hat SEO attempts to follow basic guidelines set forth by search engines. According to Wikipedia, white hat SEO “is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.”
Black hat SEO uses techniques that involve deception, often using SEO to rank for keywords that are not relevant to a site’s content. The only thing any honest business person needs to know about black hat SEO is that it’s wrong, it screws things up for businesses and websites that are trying to draw relevant traffic through SEO, and it can get you banned from Google and other search engines. Stay away from it.
How Does SEO Work?
I could tell you, but then I’d have to charge you.
Alright, let’s cover a few basics. Here’s the ultra-slimmed down version of how SEO works:
Search engines employ spiders, which are automated bots that travel around the Internet checking the content of the websites they find. The content is saved and indexed, then checked against highly complex algorithms to determine whether these websites should be listed when searchers enter certain phrases and keywords into the search engine. The algorithms also determine the order in which websites should appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO is all about getting a website to rank well on the search engine results pages for particular and relevant keywords. Optimizing a site may include the following steps:
- Establish website purpose, goals, themes, and assess its content. For existing websites, evaluate current keyword and search engine performance by analyzing traffic statistics.
- Build a list of keywords that are relevant to the site’s content, and which are likely terms that the target audience might enter in search engines to find said content. The size of the list will depend on the size of the site. There could be five keywords or five hundred.
- Optimize existing content or create new content using keywords in the site code, text, and tags. This, of course, is the actual act of optimization.
- Engage in further search engine optimization by using a wide range of tools, both for actual optimization and for tracking purposes. Example: posting a sitemap will encourage search engine spiders to visit and crawl a site more quickly, and therefore index and rank the site much faster. Using a smart statistics tool, such as Google Analytics, will help you assess how well your SEO strategies are working.
- As you track keyword and search engine performance over time, tweak and add content as necessary and continue to develop and hone your SEO strategy.
That’s it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s not, and that’s why SEOs who are good at what they do are making big bucks.
Does it Work? Is it Worth It?
Search engine optimization is an inexact science. For example, nobody except the men in white coats over at Google know the algorithm that Google uses to rank websites on its search engine results pages. The best anyone can do is try different SEO methods, and then test and track them to see what works and what doesn’t.
Now, there are a number of factors that SEOs know to be true with regards to search engine optimization. For example, if all else is equal, an older site will probably rank higher than a newer site. Age matters, and Google gives seniority to sites that have been around longer. We also know that there are certain places in the code and in the formatting of a web page that can give SEO a boost. For example, search engines look at page titles and headings. They believe these are good indicators of a site’s content.
However, any search engine could change its algorithm at any time, which means certain SEO efforts might suddenly stop working as well as they have in the past. Furthermore, it’s hard to know what the competition is up to. If another website offering the same content as yours is also optimizing, they might outdo you – possibly by simply being a couple of years older than you are – and you could drop in rank as a result.
But for the most part, yes, search engine optimization works. After optimizing approximately 25 pages on one of my websites, my traffic nearly doubled.
Who Benefits from SEO?
Ideally, everyone involved benefits. Search engines want to produce search results that make searchers happy. If you’re searching for “baby gifts” and end up on an adult website, you probably aren’t going to be too happy about that, especially if your five-year-old is sitting right there next to you.
Good, honest, white hat SEO benefits search engines because if they produce quality results, more people will use those search engines to conduct searches online. People using the search engines will also benefit because when they search, they’ll find exactly what they’re looking for. Finally, website owners will benefit because SEO will help them draw targeted traffic – that means that searches will produce visitors who are a match to what the site is offering.
And that’s a good thing.
Is Search Engine Optimization Right for Me?
Consider this: the search term “flowers” gets almost 25 million searches per month on Google alone. Now, if you are in the flower industry, wouldn’t you like your site to appear at the top of those search results?
Maybe not.
Let’s say you run a small, local flower business, and you primarily do flower arrangements for weddings. You are an independent entrepreneur, and maybe you have an assistant or two.
Do you really think you could handle 25 million potential customers, especially if they are located all around the world?
A florist, such as the one described above, would be better off using more targeted keywords – such as phrases that include “flowers,” “bridal,” and “wedding.” However, the best approach might be purchasing ads or developing partnerships with other local businesses that provide wedding services.
Relying solely on search engine traffic might be beneficial for some businesses and websites, but others will fare much better by investing in alternative online marketing strategies, and there are plenty of those. Each website has a different set of goals and purposes, and it’s no good to draw a hoard of traffic if it’s not a match to what you’re offering on your site. Plus, you’re taking up valuable space on the search engine results pages that other folks could really use!
How Hard is it to Optimize a Site?
Like most things on the internet, search engine optimization is as difficult or as easy as you make it. You could go all out, and invest days, weeks, even months optimizing a site. Or, you could churn out a few hours. Chances are that you’ll see better results if you pour a lot of effort into it, but if you have an older site with tons of content, you might just get lucky with minimal effort.
For example, you might optimize a few pages on your site and find that doing so lands you on about page five of the search engine results page. At that point, you can be happy with the traffic that page five sends your way, or you can dig your heels in and continue optimizing, and try to get to page three or even page one. You can also optimize the content only, or you can get into the code and optimize that too. Plus there are host of tools you can start using that will enhance your SEO efforts.
As you can probably guess, the more you do, the better your results will be.
Summary
Search engine optimization helps drive more traffic to your site, and it’s one of the most popular online marketing solutions around. However, SEO is not for everyone. Optimizing a website for search engine traffic can be highly involved for website owners who want to optimize on their own, and it can be costly for business owners who hire professional SEOs to do the work for them.
However, the benefits can be immense. There is unlimited potential for sites that can thrive through search engine traffic and in many cases, efforts and investment of time and resources can pay off in a big way.
Interested in optimizing your site to increase traffic from search engines? Check out Scribizzy’s SEO services.
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