Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged web writing
Proofreading Tips For Your Next Article
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Article marketing can be one of the most user-friendly, reliable and cost-effective methods to boost your site’s SEO and overall traffic. But it does require some work. Every article you submit or distribute should be high quality, free of any spelling and grammatical errors and the misuse of any words. In general, something that you would be proud to see representing your company or brand.
In addition to the eyeballs that will be reading your article – and judging the company or author that created it – publishers also have guidelines, sometimes very strict, about what they will and will not accept. That’s why proofreading your articles is so important. Here are a few tips:
Give Your Article a Cool Off Period
After you’ve finished writing, step away from your article for a few hours before reading back over it. When you’ve been looking over a block of copy for an extended period of time, it becomes more difficult to see glaring errors, the kind you would instantly notice in other situations. Your mind may start to automatically fill in what you expect to see, not what is actually there on the page.
Read Your Article Backwards
This is a technique I have often used. Have you ever read an article so many times that you can almost recite it without looking? The more familiar you are with a piece of writing, the harder it becomes to proofread. So read the last sentence of your article, and then the second to last sentence, third to last, etc. Reading out of sequence takes away any familiarity and can help you to see grammar and spelling errors.
Print Your Article, Stand Up, and Read Your Article Out Loud
Hearing an article spoken aloud can be extremely effective at highlighting grammatical errors and awkward phrasing. Your ears can sometimes be more perceptive than your eyes. For maximum effectiveness, combine tips 2 and 3, and stand up and read your article aloud AND backwards.
Find a Friend with Excellent Editing Skills
If you have someone close to you with great grammar and spelling skills, see if you can enlist his or her help in looking over your article. A second set of eyes can be very helpful!
Make Sure Spell Checker Is On, And Grammar Checker Too
Spell checker has pointed out countless routine errors and typos from my documents, and though I find grammar checker to be a bit less useful, it doesn’t hurt to keep it on. But these are never substitutes for proofreading of course, since spell checker won’t find words misspelled that are still actual words (“Come to my part tonight” instead of “Come to my party tonight”) or words used incorrectly (“affect” instead of “effect”).
Remember that proofreading is important. It pays to take the extra time up front before publishing a blog post, e-marketing piece, uploading website copy or submitting an article or press release. This ensures that your online content represents your company in the best possible way, and puts the spotlight on your expertise and professionalism to all who you interact with online.
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Need Help With Your Next Writing Project?
Contact me directly at: jhaynes@hattrickassociates.com or visit our Contact page and fill out the brief form.
Jim
5 Steps To Create Content That Converts…& Increases Your SEO
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Getting “found” online is the end goal of your content and SEO initiatives, in addition to the conversion of your web visitors into customers too, of course.
And it really wasn’t all that long ago that you could effectively grow your business or share your ideas online by “interrupting” prospective customers with Push methods such as banner advertising, unsolicited email messages, or other off-line (and old school!) methods like cold calling. But business people grew weary of being targeted by outbound marketing and promotions long ago, and the technologies in use today have become far better at blocking these methods.
Businesses and people in general have also changed the way that they shop and learn, primarily utilizing search engines, social networking sites and blogs to find the information that they need. “Pull” or inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn. Here are five tips that you can use to help yourself “get found” online:
1. Start with an extraordinary idea
The days of needing a huge advertising budget to spend on marketing and PR to promote your ideas are long gone. Today, truly unique or extraordinary ideas can find many ways to spread like wildfire on their own online, without any significant expenditure. And by comparison, those ideas that are not extraordinary usually languish unfound – regardless of how much advertising or public relations that you do. Make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering and it will spread like wildfire online, if it’s truly unique and innovative.
2. Create LOTS of content
Once you have found an extraordinary service or product, you need to create lots (and lots) of quality content about it. There are many ways to distribute your content – social media accounts, blogs, article marketing, tweets, videos, podcasts. Great content about a great product or service will attract the links you need from other sites. These links generate traffic, which in turn tells Google and every other search engine that YOU should be ranked more highly.
(Need some writing help to keep up with your publishing schedule or additional resources to help you distribute what you are creating? Contact us for your many cost-effective options!)
3. Optimize your content
All of your content should be “keyword optimized,” both for search engines like Google and also for users of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr etc. who will be spreading it.
Be sure to include some of the most important keywords within the title (or Title Tag) of your piece so it will be easy for the engines to find and identify it. But you also need to make the titles enticing for human eyes as well, with a subject line that will elicit responses. Something that arouses the curiosity of readers such as” “Everything you need to know about…” or statements that can only be answered by reading all of the content, such as “How to”, “What can” or “Why do”.
Lists are very popular as well, like “10 things you must do on your website” or “5 easy steps to…” Provocative titles such as “7 things your bank doesn’t want you to know” or other even more sensationalized titles such as “5 financial decisions that could RUIN your retirement” or “8 Mistakes that cost you money, every month” also often work well.
People often respond as well to avoiding negative consequences as they do to potential positive outcomes.
4. Share your content
After you have created a remarkable piece of content and optimized it, now you need to spread the word. Email it to your E-Newsletter subscribers, post the content on your blog, tweet it to your followers, update your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile with it, then share it with article directories.
If your content is truly extraordinary, others will share it online for you. And as your content spreads, you will have more people subscribe to you or Follow you, so that the subsequent content you publish in the future will have an even greater audience.
5. Measure the results
If you cannot measure your results, you’ll never truly know which methods or channels work best for you. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic search (both branded and non-branded), Google paid, your E-Newsletter and Twitter feed, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media, Forum postings, and any of the myriad campaigns you could be conducting right now.
You should track visitors, leads and customers over time, for every campaign. Then increase resources spent on campaigns that are working, and discontinue or scale back the ones that aren’t.
How Important Is Bounce Rate As A Metric?
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Bounce Rate, or the number of web visitors you have that visit just one page – the first one they land on, can be a vital metric to consider when current overall success and conversion rates of your organization’s site.
Bounce Rates can be especially important if:
– You have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.
– Exploration of your site is important to your goals.
– You are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.
– Yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.
– Your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content.
So what are some causes of a high Bounce Rate?
Your keywords and content could be mismatched. In cases where visitors are coming from search engines, a high bounce rate may mean that the keywords they used and the content they found when they arrived on your site aren’t aligned – so the page they landed on doesn’t meet their expectations in some way.
The best way to address this is to take the time to analyze your keyword traffic and make sure your pages are optimized for the keywords you want and that the content is closely aligned with keywords and not misleading in any way.
Another problem could be that the next step in your goal or conversion process is not obvious enough for visitors to follow. Look at your landing pages with a more critical eye and make sure the next step clear and easy to take. If it would typically take more than one more step to complete the conversion process, and visitors can’t find the necessary additional content they need for the decision making process, re-evaluate the navigation and see if there are ways to streamline or simplify. Also double-check for browser compatibility – perhaps the page is not displaying correctly under some conditions.
High Bounce Rates could also indicate your offer or product is not presented in a compelling or easy to understand way. Look at your sales copy or offer details and see if you can refresh it or make it more appealing. You could try split-testing different versions to see which performs better.
Another issue could be technical problems with your site. Particularly if your bounce rate suddenly spikes or displays an unusual trend, it could be an indication of technical issues, such as broken images or links, or something on the page not loading correctly.
In this case, check for compatibility and broken links. Test the load speed of the page and generally make sure your code is as clean and functional as possible. Check for server outages and other issues that could have temporarily affected the functionality of your site.
High Bounce Rates don’t always indicate a problem
If you have a blog homepage containing all your recent posts in their entirety, and many blogger sites are notorious for this. If all of your posts are presented up front, there is little reason for someone to click to any other pages. And if you have a loyal blog following, resulting in a higher proportion of returning visitors compared to new ones, your subscribers may just want to read the newest post and have no need to visit other pages. Blogs also typically have higher bounce rates compared to other types of sites so the same benchmarks do not apply.
If a landing page contains the call to action within it, such as submitting an email address, that single page can do its job effectively without requiring further clicks, and similarly a call to action or conversion that takes your visitor off-site – to an external shopping cart or email sign up, would look like a bounce without actually be so.
You should also realize that Bounce Rate is not the only metric that matters, so this data should not be analyzed in isolation. Look at the overall picture of your website and how it’s performing according to the metrics that matter to YOU. Take the time to distill exactly what you DO want your visitors to do when at site. And then ask if you’re making it easy for them to do that, and are you measuring it?
Look for trends and other data that give you a fuller picture of what the Bounce Rate really means:
– Is the bounce rate much higher or lower for certain keywords? If so, refocus the content on your site to address the better keywords.
– Does it vary according to how people found your site? If those that find your site via search engines are higher or lower vs. social media, for example, you once again know more about where to focus your energies going forward.
– How does it vary with New vs. Returning Visitors? As noted, Returning Visitors are less likely to take further steps with some sites (like blogs), and are expected to do the opposite on others (Bank or Credit Union site). Which of these types of sites is more applicable to you?
– Which particular pages or types of content on your site have higher or lower Bounce Rates? Spend more time on the style on content or pages that are producing for you.
– Especially important for a blog, looking not only at Bounce Rate but also at the length of time spent by individual visitors on the page can help indicate to you whether or not they are reading what they find once they arrive.