Archive for Writing for the Web – Page 4

Writing Web Content that Gets Results: Questions

By Patsi Krakoff
Saturday, September 24th, 2011

The rules haven’t changed, but it’s surprising how many people start writing web content without regard for the basics. Many people focus on the medium, the latest shiny tool: the blog, the Twitter tweets, and Facebook updates, without regard for the basic rules of writing copy for the Web.

Content marketing is a buzz word not just because marketing people like new buzzes. Smart marketers know the rules and follow them. Even if the Internet changes at lightening speed, the writing basics for content remain the same.

I’ve been writing on the web for twelve years. Before that, I was a journalist and a psychologist and wrote feature articles and academic papers. Writing content for marketing is different. It’s designed to produce an action, most often sales.

Every once in a while, I go back to the basics. A standard learning tool for many copywriters is Maria Veloso’s Web Copy that Sells, originally published in 2004. The 2nd edition is now out and I’ve been reviewing and re-reading it. Good stuff.

Here’s a recap of some really key nuggets from this book:

Before you write one word, you must first:

  • Know your objective
  • Know your target audience
  • Know your product or service

I know this seems so common sense it’s not worth spending time on, but the time you take to write down a few notes on each of these things will be well worth it.

For example, writing on the web can have several objectives, besides making a sale. What is it you’d like readers to do? Contact you for more information? Sign up for a digital report? Leave a comment, watch a video, fill out a survey?

It’s okay if you’re a teacher and enjoy educating people without any sales objective in mind. However, if you’re not asking readers to think, ask, remember, or act, then you’re not really teaching, are you? Don’t let readers leave saying, “That’s nice, so what, bye-bye…”

Who are you trying to write to and reach? The more you know about your audience of readers, the easier it will be to “speak their language.” You can’t really connect if you don’t know to whom, can you?

And of course you know your products and services, especially if it’s your own business and you’ve been working in it for a while. But how well do you know what the benefits are to your end users? How well do you know your customers’ challenges and problems?

Example: one of my clients is a talented artist who sells original painted greeting cards for various occasions, online through her website. When I asked her what problems does she solve with her cards, she said she provided a thoughtful way of connecting with someone on a special occasion. She hadn’t thought out all the other ways she helped her customers:

  • Her cards were unique, and therefore said much more than a store-bought card from a large company
  • Her cards were original art work which recipients were more likely to keep
  • Her cards saved people time from having to go to a store to browse through hundreds of cards
  • Her cards saved people the hassles of getting into a car and driving
  • Her cards offered a large selection of messages, including many blank

The more you can dig deeper into all the challenges your customers face, and the more content you can create that addresses solutions, the better your writing will resonate with readers. The stronger your online writing will be. Readers will subscribe, keep coming back, sign up for more, and become loyal fans.

I want to give you this simple 5-step blueprint for writing web copy that sells, as explained in the Velosa book, so stay tuned. If you want to be sure to get an email notice when I publish the next post, use the subscription form in the upper right hand corner to subscribe.

In the meantime, have you identified your first things first?  If you haven’t, why not?  I’d love to hear from you.

Categories : Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content, Writing Great Copy
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Edit Your Content: 12 Things NOT to Miss

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, September 16th, 2011

Here’s a checklist for editing your blog content before you publish. For any content that is vitally important, i.e. sales content or articles delivered to clients, I use Barbara Feiner, a professional editor. She not only corrects errors, but evaluates for clarity and flow.

But for blog posts and everyday content creation, I put on my editor’s visor, and act like a grumpy newspaper editor with a red pencil. Here’s what I look for:

Language

1.  Common typos like theirs for there‘s, your for you’re, that or which for who, and all those pesky things a spell check won’t pick up.
2.  Grammar goofs: The most common ones are when the verb doesn’t agree with the noun, as in “Here’s my mistakes…”
3.  Review for commas, semi-colons, ellipses and em dashes. The important thing is for it to read well, read clearly. Helps to read it out loud.
4.  Review for paragraph and line spacing, since I like to break up long blocks of text.

Formatting

5.  Review for bolded words and insert subheadings where needed.
6.  Separate a blog post after 2-3 paragraphs so that it goes to the extended post feature (“read more…”
7.  Review for eye-candy: Where would an interesting photo clip add interest to your blog post? I always start a post with a photo, usually from iStockPhoto.com.

Value  

8.  Review for external link opportunities. I always link to a person’s name (to a page on the web where you can learn more about them), to a book, or to a Wikipedia definition when useful. This is really important for building relationships with the people you respect.

9.  Review for internal link opportunities. Surely you’ve already written more than once about something; you should link the keywords to that post on  your own blog or website.

Optimization

10.  Review for keywords. Do you make it easy for search engines to know what this is about? Come on, help the poor little spiders out, they’re not exactly geniuses.
11.  Review your headline for how compelling it is. Does it draw the reader into the post to learn more? Is it keyword-rich?
12.  Description.  If you’re using a Scribe SEO Optimizer (you are, aren’t you?), make sure you’ve created a short description using the All-in-One SEO Plugin (160 characters maximum) containing keywords.  Be sure to check your tags and categories, too.

What else?

You tell me: what other things do you check for before you hit the publish button? Hit the comment link and leave me your ideas.

Categories : Content Marketing, Grammar & Common Usages, How to...Tips, Writing for the Web
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Starting a Business Blog? Read Me First

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, September 8th, 2011

I hear it all the time:  smart professionals, who are great at what they do, don’t have enough time to blog, or even start a business blog. Recently someone shared with me how they had started blogging with great gusto – they put in a lot of time – but got stuck, and never went back.  It reminded me of something I once heard…

About 20 years ago I was recovering from an illness and to avoid being bored, I took up needle work, you know, cross-stitching designs on canvas with yarn. One day as I was completing a big canvas, I was listening to a motivational speaker.

All of a sudden, I heard these words:

“Most people just start doing things without reading the instruction manual.”

Loud and clear. I looked down at my needle work and like a shock, it hit me. I’d been doing them all backwards.

Sure enough, a quick reference back to the user manual clearly showed that I was inserting the needle backwards, not producing the right effect. I put down my work and never went back to that hobby ever again.

My point is that I see many professionals who are pretty smart at what they do, but they start blogging without reading any instructions at all. Later, when they get stuck, they complain about not having “enough time” to blog. Read More→

Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

This is a little story I share with new blogging clients who get hung up about keywords. One client in particular (let’s call him Ted) had written about 10 blog posts which were saved as drafts because he was worried about keywords.

Let me say that there’s a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there’s no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts—a lot of them. Saving them as drafts won’t work.

Being that it’s U.S. Open time, I was thinking about how this relates to tennis (of course!). You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn’t count. You can’t learn from your results.

Here’s what I told Ted, “When you sit down to write a new post, focus first on these steps:

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

  1. Write to deliver valuable information that solves a problem for your typical reader
  2. Grab their attention and make it interesting to them through stories or examples Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web
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Does Your Blog Post Answer These 4 Questions?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

This is important: You want your blog posts to educate, entertain, engage, and enrich readers of your business blog. Aim for all four of these goals when blog writing, and you can’t go wrong.

What do you need to remember when writing a post that’s designed to educate? I wrote about that here: Educate Your Readers, about the four different learning styles of blog readers.

According to the 4MAT system on www.aboutlearning.com, when you’re educating people you need to appeal to four different kinds of learning styles:

  1. Imaginative learners
  2. Analytic learners
  3. Common sense learners
  4. Dynamic learners

How does this translate into blog writing for your business? Think in terms of the questions each type of learner would be asking as they read your blog post:

  1. Why?
  2. What?
  3. How?
  4. What if? Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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How to Avoid Problems with Hyphens and Dashes…

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Have you ever encountered this problem when blogging or writing content marketing?

Because of the informal nature of writing on a blog, or for online ezines, people now write like they speak – you know what I mean? Instead of commas or semi-colons, everyone uses dashes to interject phrases – just like the way we talk.

But everyone uses them differently! Forget the Chicago Manual of Style! As I read through other great blogs, I see lots of variations on the use of hyphens and dashes:

1. People use a double hyphen–like this. Sometimes with a space on both sides — like this, sometimes with no spaces on either side.

2. People use a hyphen instead of a dash. This is most likely because the dash is not on the keyboard. You have to find it under symbols and who wants to take time to do that?

3. People use an en dash instead of the em dash. An en dash is the shorter version of the em dash. With an en dash there is a space on both sides – with an em dash, there are no spaces—you just put it in.

Am I the only one who cares about this? If we are not going to follow the rules of academia as outlined in the manuals, are we inventing new usages because of the lack of a dash on the keyboard?

(WordPress tip: you can insert custom characters found in the omega icon in your wysiwyg editor.)

I feel like the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Lynn Truss)…my inner stickler is on the loose.

Let’s all get together and decide: if we use a hyphen instead of a dash, let’s make it just one with spaces on both sides – like this, okay? Personally, I prefer the em dash with spaces on both sides — but that’s not supposed to be correct.

Unless you write in to tell me you’d prefer something else, I’ll keep on doing that and assume you agree with me…

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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7 Writing Tips to Connect Emotionally with Readers

By Patsi Krakoff
Friday, July 8th, 2011

How do you create an emotional connection with your readers? More importantly, how do you get them so inspired they want to take action, like join your list, opt-in, comment, or buy something? Here are some psychological secrets to keep in mind.

When writing on the web – either in a blog post, an ezine or other forms of content marketing, readers are more likely to respond to your offers of service or products if there is a resonance between you. An emotional connection is forged when your reader experiences being on the same ‘wave length’ as you. This can be done several ways.

I have to warn you: this is not always easy to do in an email, ezine or blog. Why? Because people are so different, and what is appealing on an emotional level to one is aversive to another.

Furthermore, the written word lacks the vocal intonation and body language that usually communicate meaning to your messages. So you have to be very clear when writing, more so than with speaking.

Remember, in another post I talked about 50 percent of people being ‘feelers’ and the other 50 percent ‘thinkers.’ So using emotional language will probably put off some people instead of connecting with them.

Don’t forget that even thinking type people have emotions. And emotional type people are also quite rational. So striking resonance means you have to show you care and show that you are logical at the same time.

Make no mistake: it’s not easy to successfully connect on an emotional level with a large subscribership. Here are my
suggestions for doing this:

  1. If you want to forge emotional ties, try reaching your readers on a level of their “humanness”… universal needs and wants of all human beings. We all want a sense of belonging, we all want to feel a part of life and society and we all seek meaning out of life. There are certain emotions that are common world-wide: loneliness, alienation, love, achievement, pride, shame—the paradox of being human means we are sometimes bad and sometimes wrong as well as good and right.
  2. Another way to connect on an emotional level is to share some of your own humanness. Mistakes are a great way to do this. When a reader reads about something stupid you did, they access a memory link to something similar that they did. When you then explain your lessons learned, you are teaching them indirectly how they can apply this lesson to their own lives, without actually telling them to do anything. They can feel a kinship to you because they know you are like they are.
  3. You can also create emotional pictures by using words that ask the reader to imagine something. Ask them to become aware of their feelings when they imagine something. This is called hypnotic suggestion. Since we know that people buy for emotional reasons and then find a rationale for their purchases afterwards, this makes sense, no? Read More→
Categories : Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web
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Are Your Content Readers Thinkers or Feelers?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

Have you ever read an e-newsletter or blog post and got a feeling of disappointment? Maybe it was just too subjective, airy-fairy and touchy-feely? If so, then you may be like me, a thought-processing person who wants facts and data when reading content online, an e-newsletter or blog post.

Several years ago, my friend John Agno published this review of personality types in his newsletter.  It contains important information to consider when writing your blog, e-newsletter or content marketing to attract clients, and it still applies today.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory is a method for helping people match their communication styles to others’ personalities.  Understanding Myers-Briggs allows you to foster the kind of interpersonal climate that paves the way toward better understanding.

One of the four Myers-Briggs dichotomies is Thinking/Feeling — that people use to assess their preferred ways of communicating, processing information, analyzing that information, and coming to a decision.

The population is evenly divided between thinkers and feelers. Two-thirds of men are thinkers and two-thirds of women are feelers, but 70% to 90% of businesspeople are thinkers, regardless of gender. The name of this dimension is slightly misleading. Thinkers aren’t unfeeling, and feelers aren’t fuzzy-headed. Both process information carefully. The difference is in what facts each group considers to be most salient. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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Serial Writing Formula: 1=5+2=7+1

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, June 30th, 2011

I’m no math genius, nor do I even think remotely like that in analytical terms. But once in a while I stumble upon something that makes sense, saves time, and produces exponential results.

I’m talking about serial writing. You take one main concept, break it down into a list of 5 key elements, write an introductory overview, write a concluding summary, and here’s what you get:

  • 1 longer article you can include on your website, ezine, and format into a PDF special report to sell or give away as a bonus.

1 idea = 5 points + intro + summary = 7 articles + 1 PDF report

Here’s why I like to do this:

I know that each week I need to come up with fresh content from my blogs and 2 ezines. That could be a struggle to keep fresh, yet stay focused and on topic. Or, it can get my creative juices flowing if I sit down and look at a concept from the stand point of this formula.

Here’s what I’m talking about. I learned this while I was doing it last week. I decided to try to encapsulate the main ingredients of successful online marketing systems – that was the main concept.

I made a list and came up with 6 key elements (actually only 5; the 6th one was recycling the first 5 steps).

I wrote an overview listing all 6 steps, then posted one point each day on our blogs. After the 7th posting, I wrote an 8th one summarizing the points, and including some additional information about the tools necessary for each step.

Then I edited each blog post to become a stand-alone article for submission to article directories. The goal here is to get these keywords out onto the Web in as many different ways as possible. I also am writing a press release with the 6 steps included.

Then I gathered all 8 articles together and edited them into one stand-alone special report and formatted it into a nice PDF file. This can be used as a free give-away for signing up or registering for something, or can be sold as an ebook.

We can also take the 8 articles and turn them into a series of autoresponder messages and call it a mini-course. This would be used to drive traffic to a landing page for selling a course or ebook or other program.

This week, as I wondered what to write about for my blogs, I remembered how easy it has been the last couple of weeks while completing the online success series.

So this is the start of another series: How to Write a Series of Articles for Marketing. Maybe I can find a catchier title, like Confessions of a Serial Writer…? Stay tuned as I walk my talk and show you how to make your writing life easier by multi-purposing.

Categories : About Blogs, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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How to Start a Blog Serial Writing Project

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, June 27th, 2011

Check_boxes
If you’ve been reading my blogs for any length of time, you know about my problem with writing:  I love to write, and I can write too much.  Anyone with a doctorate suffers from the same disease. Dissertation-itis. Nobody has time to read all those words anymore, especially not online.

Then, at some point in my writing career I got lazy. Or maybe I got smart. I started skipping the long research on a topic and reading up on its history. I just started making a list of main points and then writing out a couple of sentences on each item.

I think I got the idea from Jeff Herring, The Article Guy, who said if you can write a 7 item grocery list, you can write a good article. Now Jeff teaches article writing for people who struggle with writing and have a hard time coming up with stuff.

I fell in love with the “Make a List” writing school. Their theory is anything worth reading can be written in a list of bulleted points.

And now for my real confession:  I’ve taken the list building approach to an extreme. I’ve become a serial writer.

I wish I could say that it’s the cure for writer’s block, or that it’ll turn your work into Internet gold. I will proclaim it to be a rousing success for saving you time and energy whenever you’re faced with writing for your ezine, blog, web pages, press releases, and even white papers.

Here’s how to start a serial writing project (in list form, of course):

  1. Find an idea your readers want to know more about that will benefit them
  2. Make a list of 5 main points
  3. Write an overview of the idea with the 5 points listed and post it on your blog
  4. Each day for the next 5 days write a blog post about each of the 5 points
  5. Write a summary of the 5 points, reviewing them and reminding readers why this is important
  6. Edit each blog post into a stand alone article
  7. Compile the 7 articles into one full article. Read More→
Categories : Article Ideas, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Managing Your Ezine & Blog Tasks, On Writing Better, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content
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