Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged web copy
Minimizing Distractions for Writers
13 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Yes, Hat Trick Associates provides all kinds of writing and distribution services. But there are lots of folks who write for a living who also utilize our blog, or even those internal company writers in similar working conditions that could use some tips on how to be more productive in their writing. Here are some tips on how to:
Minimize and Eliminate Distractions
No matter what your niche is or how experienced you are as a writer, you’ve probably come to realize that dealing with distractions comes with the job. Your ability to complete a piece of writing is highly dependent on how well you can block out things going on around you to focus and just write.
Some distractions will always be out there, swirling around you and constantly grappling for your attention. Others come and go. What you do to minimize or even eliminate those distractions altogether will play a big role in how productive you can be and how stressful writing is for you.
Remember, writing should be fun! To help you keep that in mind, here’s our Guide to Uninterrupted Writing. We hope you can use these tips right away and maybe even have a little fun along the way.
[Click here to view this video online]
Eliminating Distractions
* Control Your Environment – Whether you’re at home or out in public, pick a quiet setting where you know you can be productive. In your own home or living space, pick a room that’s semi-private and used sparingly by others. Out in public, look for a quiet area where there aren’t a lot of other people. Also, control your environment in cyberspace by closing down any browser windows or programs that aren’t absolutely essential to your writing. It’s really easy to lose track of the time on the Internet, so avoid those time-wasting programs.
* Use Plain Text Editor or Pen & Paper – You can simplify your writing experience even more by using a plain text editor, like EditPlus or NoteTab to get your thoughts down. Word processing programs are great for all of their features and tools, but it can get distracting trying to figure out what each particular tool does. Using a plain text editor will help you focus on what matters most – the words.
If you’re still struggling with distractions, try to get away from the Internet altogether by writing the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper.
* Turn Off Device Notification Alarms – Now, on the other hand, when you need to be on the Internet for research purposes, you can keep your productivity up by turning off all program notification alarms. That includes instant messenger, cell phones, push notifications and the like. Think about it, you won’t be able to focus on writing if your wife keeps texting you about tonight’s tuna casserole, or you’re getting Facebook notifications from your friend ranting about his sports team. Turn off the notifications on these devices so they aren’t constantly beeping and dinging at you.
Now, we understand that sometimes you can’t get away from every distraction. In those cases, there are a few methods to at least minimize those distractions so they waste a little less of your time.
Minimizing Distractions
* Shut Out Outside Noises – Wear headphones or earplugs to reduce outside noise. Put on some music to block out the rest of the world. At first, the music will drown out the other noises around you, but eventually even the music seems to fade so you can focus on writing.
* Minimize Clutter on Your Desk – Desktop knick-knacks may be fun to play with but they can be distracting and consequently waste a lot of your time. Tidy up your work area before you use it and make sure you clean it regularly.
* Write an Outline – No matter what type of distraction you encounter, you can quickly get back on task by pre-writing an outline. When you get distracted you can just consult the outline to see what you were in the middle of explaining and what you planned on writing about next.
Remember that distractions are a part of life, but they don’t have to control your life. Take these tips and apply them to your next writing session.
Great Web Content Writing
013 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
At one time or another, every successful writer asks themselves (or should) “What makes great email copy?”
We online marketing communication writers need to be ever mindful of the content we develop, its impact on those who read it (whether intentional or not), and how to make it better.
The fact is that marketers are human just like anyone else. And this means that even the best of us can forget the key tenet of marketing: understand your audience. This simple yet inevitable fact sometimes causes us to write content that may achieve our business objectives (of our own companies!), but may not be relevant to our audience.
The truth is, content matters, a great deal in fact. As more and more email fills the Inboxes of our target audience, we need to continually make our email marketing messages stand out even more. That means understanding our audience – their needs, wants, motivations, interests, etc. And, perhaps more importantly, we need to put our audience ahead of our own priorities at all times. Which also means never falling too much in love with your own writing, but in whatever is most meaningful to recipients.
The Three S’s are recommended when developing email marketing content. They are:
1. Subject – make the subject line (very!) appealing to the recipient so they’ll open the email, the most critical component of ANY piece.
2. Sender – make it a mystery that the email is coming from someone your audience knows or cares about, never make them guess.
3. Significance – make the email content relevant, and significant, to the recipients. If you were a recipient, how much would YOU care?
There are also 4 criteria that every web writer should keep in mind for creating relevant content. Make sure the writing is:
- Branded
- Urgent
- Brief
- Enticing
And focused on your audience, of course. Don’t allow your own preferences and opinions to affect what you write. It’s a constant struggle with our human urge to see our own needs met first, but content should matter more to our audience than it does to us, right?
How are you making content more relevant to your audience?
25 Sources To Find Content For Your Next Blog Post
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
If you’re a blogger, you already know that sometimes the hardest thing to do is come up with new content for your blog. Finding ideas for your blog (especially if you regular publishing schedule like we do – at least one post a week on Mondays) can often lead to you not blogging at all, because you start hitting the wall when it comes to finding topics to blog about. So I thought you might find it useful to share 25 ways to use the web to find fresh content for your blog. And of course, most of these tips work just as well with creating content for your E-newsletter, email marketing, website copy, article marketing campaign, etc!
Blog Comments
1. Using a plug-in like CommentLuv allows your commenter to share their most recent post. I’ve seen blog titles that have intrigued me and clicked through to read, which then have given me ideas for a post of my own.
2. If you see a comment that really resonates and offers a unique viewpoint, contact the poster directly and ask if they’d like to guest for you and expand on their original comment. Very often they will say yes!
3. Similar to above, if you see a comment you disagree with, expand your own view into a post and offer reasons why your viewpoint is different than the counter-point.
Other Blogs
4. As pointed our in #1, CommentLuv is great for sharing the most recent post of a blogger, but not every blog uses it. So click through the URL of someone’s comment and see what they’re writing about, to see if you can gather ideas from there.
5. Blogrolls. While some have called blogrolls out of date, many bloggers still use them to share what they’re reading. Visit the blogs that your favorite blogger reads, and see what ideas you can glean from them.
6. Many bloggers have category lists for Top 10 Tips and other popular posts in their main navigation menu. Take a look and see what’s there, and use these to construct your own content.
7. Talking about popular posts, if a blogger has their most popular posts on display in the sidebar, click on a few to read and see what made these specific posts so popular. Then see how you can take this inspiration and apply it to your own posts.
Social Bookmarks
8. Delicious is a fantastic resource for finding blog content. Just type your topic into the Delicious search bar and you’ll find a ton of results from people that have saved articles or blog posts about your chosen topic.
9. Stumbleupon is a very cool add-on for your browser which lets you browse websites at random. You can land on some great content that will give you your own ideas for your blog.
10. While not quite as popular as it used to be, Digg still has some great shared posts and news on its site, and can be a great tool for finding new content ideas. Look at the most popular posts and see what new take on these topics you can offer readers.
11. BizSugar concentrates on small business news, and is rapidly gaining in popularity. If your blog relates at all to this niche, you can get some really good story ideas from here.
12. A mix of social community and bookmarking service, Blog Engage is similar to Digg and BizSugar with its voting system, but it focuses a lot on just bloggers and is another great starting point for subject ideas.
Blog Resources
13. One of my favorite blog communities is Scribnia. You can find authors and bloggers based on niches, and this can really help you target the content you’d like to get inspiration from.
14. Alltop offers a great collection of blogs in a myriad of different topics – if you can’t find something to write about there, then you really are stuck!
15. Still viewed by many as the Blogger’s Bible, Technorati has more than 133 million blogs registered within their site. Use the top topics or categories to discover content you can get ideas from.
16. Google Blog Search is a resource which offers a treasure trove of information on every topic under the sun. Much like Technorati and Alltop, use the search tool to find your interests.
17. Another popular resource from Google is their “Trends” portal. If you’re a quick writer, you can write a blog post about a trending topic right now – optimize it for SEO – and hopefully be found by those looking at the trends at that exact moment!
18. Junta 42 offers some great tips on content marketing – check out their articles for ways to get ideas for your own blog. find content for your blog
Social Networks
19. If you’re on Twitter, one of the best ways to find content for your blog is to jump into the weekly #blogchat discussion. Great bloggers, great topics – what more do you need?
20. Staying with the Twitter theme, take a look at what’s trending right now on the platform to see if you can get a post written quickly about it. Just don’t be overly spammy with your hashtags.
21. Once again with Twitter, Twitter Search is great for finding out what people are saying regarding the stuff you blog about – type in your keyword, and see if the current conversations give you inspiration to expand on their topics in a new blog posting.
22. A great application on Facebook is called Networked Blogs, which shares content from Facebook users with blogs and also the Networked Blogs directory itself. You can get a widget with different blogs in it, and use this to build some thoughts for your own content.
23. LinkedIn Groups are perfect for finding blog content. Find an appropriate question being asked there and then write a blog post as the answer.
24. Slideshare is more the just a place for file and document sharing has great presentations that are just chock full of ideas for you to take away and build several blog posts from.
25. In the same way as Slideshare, YouTube is also much more than just a video upload site – think about grabbing a Tips and Advice video, as an example, embedding it into a blog post, and then talking about what else could have been said or added to the video to make it an even better resource.
With these tips, you should be able to find plenty to talk about in your own blog. But for some folks, finding appropriate fresh content isn’t the problem – the time required to track it down, write and edit a blog post, and then uploading it – on a established schedule is the problem. But regular readers of our Hat Trick Associates blog already know that having well written, fresh content on your site very frequently is a critical KEY to having a superior SEO ranking – to convert current visitors and bring new ones in the future.
If you are having trouble finding the time to research and write your regularly scheduled blog, or don’t quite have the desire or writing expertise to get it done efficiently, look into our very cost effective blogging services.