Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged writer
Tagging Done the Right Way
13 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Most blogging platforms let you apply tags to your posts. Tags help organize your blog so both humans and search engines can find what they’re looking for. They’re terms like “consulting,” “local” or “technology” that reflect the topics and content of the post.
Google tries to recognize tags and use them to prioritize your site in its search ranking for those terms. The tags are usually links to other pages on your blog (usually a backlog of other posts with the same tag), and like we said earlier, linking search terms to other pages on your site helps too.
So by all means, add pertinent tags to your blog post, but be warned that Google and other search engines are wary of sites that try to game this system. They will penalize you in the search rankings if you use so many tags that the web indexing bots suspect you might be attempting to associate your content with unrelated topics just to score extra traffic.
Most blogging platforms let you apply tags to your posts. Tags help organize your blog so both humans and search engines can find what they’re looking for. They’re terms like “consulting,” “local” or “technology” that reflect the topics and content of the post.
Google tries to recognize tags and use them to prioritize your site in its search ranking for those terms. The tags are usually links to other pages on your blog (usually a backlog of other posts with the same tag), and like we said earlier, linking search terms to other pages on your site helps too.
So by all means, add pertinent tags to your blog post, but be warned that Google and other search engines are wary of sites that try to game this system. They will penalize you in the search rankings if you use so many tags that the web indexing bots suspect you might be attempting to associate your content with unrelated topics just to score extra traffic.
The method for determining this is arcane, but a good rule of thumb from a pro blogger is that five to 10 appropriate tags are usually right in the sweet spot.
Writing Great Headlines: Do You Love People or Money?
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
You’ve heard us discuss before that the headline is the MOST critical component of your written piece.
But to start back at zero, let’s ask a question first:
“What is the primary purpose of any piece of writing that you publish both online and in physical form — whether a blog post, an E-newsletter, a sales letter or web tutorial?”
In the most basic sense, it’s to get visitors to read what you’ve written, correct? Before you can generate sales, revenues and profits, or even awareness, someone has to take the time to actually read what you’ve written.
And with that said, what is then the primary purpose of your headline; your layout and graphics; your color schemes and fonts; every single element of your content?
The simple but perhaps surprising answer is…
To get the first sentence read.
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This may seem simplistic or maybe even confusing to you. “Don’t we have to write compelling and interesting content with great structure and design? Don’t we have to convert?” you might ask.
Well, of course, but until the visitor reads the content in the first place, nothing else can happen.
When focused on writing great headlines remember that your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a headline or post title that turns a casual browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.
Since I began my career in PR those many years ago, I have spent plenty of time trying to master the art of writing a perfect headline, properly conveying product benefits, and learning how to craft a compelling call to action.
But along my journey, I had one of the most successful writers at our agency share the secret to becoming a great copywriter, and that is:
Every element of copy has just one purpose — to get the first sentence read.
This applies not only to headlines of course but also to the layout and graphics, the sub-headlines and titles, the font and color scheme used, everything.
The purpose of all is to get the first sentence read. Period.
And the purpose of the first sentence is to get the second sentence read. And so on, down a slippery slide that leads to your offer and the sale.
This is an extremely valuable way to go about structuring any writing, and it’s crucial to writing intended to persuade or sell. Many times we find ourselves so eager to arrive at our conclusion that we forget that the essence of making a persuasive point (or causing any action) is how we get there.
* A strong, compelling headline is critical;
* Immediately focusing on the benefit to the reader is so crucial;
* You must make a promise to the reader that you later fulfill (which this post hopefully achieves, although I used a provocative headline to help make my point);
And the key to getting someone to read is one sentence at a time, so compelled by the sentence that they want to read the next. In other words, how you say it is how you get there.
And though I accomplished the goal of getting you to read this entire article, I wouldn’t exactly recommend the strategy employed here.
It worked, and in this case it helps illustrate the points being made in the post, but in most cases pulling stunts like this won’t help you in the long run.
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…and although not related to online content, if you happen to be interested in my take on choosing people over money ~
If I offered you $10,000, tax-free with no gimmicks, but could only give you the money in quarters, would you take it? What about in all $1 bills? Or $10 bills? Still want the money? Unless you only use your head as a hat rack, you’ll accept the money in whatever form offered to you. Money is money no matter what, right?
But many people are far more accepting of money in all its forms than we are of people in all their forms. We’re far less discriminating when it comes to green pieces of paper, but are brutally judgmental when it comes to people. And yet we all want people to accept us exactly as we are. We all want to be loved and appreciated as is, and are hurt and offended when we aren’t.
When considering that list of criteria you have for friends or a spouse, like skin tone, hair, eyes, weight, height, financial or social status…remember that when you harshly judge others, you are also judging yourself. If you think that someone is ugly or dumb, you are assuming that you’re smarter or better looking. Learn to be as accepting of other people as you are of money and you can’t go wrong.
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Of all the things that make me sad or sentimental about the continuous march of technology, one of the worst is probably the demise of printed words…whether they be in newspapers, magazines or actual, non-Kindle books. Sure, looking up fantasy baseball stats every morning at the breakfast table from the Sports section was a lot less convenient to logging on at any time and getting them instantly…but in retrospect, maybe a bit more fun…and more of an “experience”. This recent news:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Newspaper advertising in the U.S. has sunk to a 25-year low as marketing budgets followed readers to the Internet, where advertising is far cheaper than what publishers have been able to command in print.
Advertisers spent $25.8 billion on newspapers’ print and digital editions last year, according to figures released Tuesday by the Newspaper Association of America. That’s the lowest amount since 1985 when total newspaper advertising stood at $25.2 billion.
After adjusting for inflation, newspaper advertising now stands at about the same level as nearly 50 years ago. In 1962, newspaper advertising totaled $3.7 billion, which translates to about $26 billion today.
Print advertising has fallen in each of the past five years, dramatically shrinking newspaper publishers’ main source of income. Even as the economy has gradually improved since 2009, newspapers are still bringing in less revenue as advertisers embrace free or cheaper Internet alternatives that aim to deliver the messages to people most likely to be interested in the products being pitched. The shift has accelerated in recent years as more readers abandoned newspapers’ print editions for the Web.
Newspapers have been mining their digital editions for more revenue. Online ads generated $3 billion for newspapers last year, an 11 percent increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, print ads dropped 8 percent to $22.8 billion. Before the slump began in 2006, print advertising generated about $47 billion in annual revenue for newspapers.
To cope with the upheaval, newspapers have cut their staffs, raised their prices and, in the most extreme cases, filed for bankruptcy protection to lighten their debt loads.
Many publishers are pinning their comeback hopes on delivering more news to the growing audience on mobile phones and tablet computers such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.
Tablets, in particular, could create new moneymaking opportunities because early research indicates that their users tend to spend more time reading stories and watching video on those devices than they do on laptops and desktop computers. That trend could help newspapers charge higher rates for ads on their tablet editions than they do on their websites and perhaps make it easier to sell subscriptions to digital editions. With the exception of The Wall Street Journal and a few other newspapers, most publishers have given away their content on the Web — a factor that contributed to their financial woes in recent years.
Publishers would settle for any sign of overall ad growth after 16 consecutive quarters of decline from the previous year. The severity of the slide has been easing since 2009 as the U.S. economy has gradually recovered from the deepest recession since World War II.
Newspaper advertising totaled $7.3 billion in the last three months of 2010, down 5 percent from the prior year. The quarterly decreases have been getting progressively smaller since the July-September period of 2009, when newspaper ad revenue plunged 29 percent from the previous year.
Online ads were the bright spot again in last year’s fourth quarter, rising 14 percent to $878 million. The Internet now accounts for about 12 percent of newspaper’s ad revenue, up from 4 percent in 2005.
“Quarter after quarter, newspaper advertising has shown signs of a continued turnaround and an essential repositioning,” said John Sturm, the Newspaper Association of America’s president.