Archive for Writing for the Web – Page 6

Writing Web Content: 5 Simple Steps for Results

Organize, simplify and get better results from your Web writing by asking 5 important questions:

  1. What is the problem (pain, predicament)?
  2. Why hasn’t this problem been solved?
  3. What is possible?
  4. What is different now?
  5. What should your readers do now?

As you compose your copy, you should write out several sentences to answer each question. This will keep you on task, and lead your readers through to action. I suppose it depends on what you’re writing, but I can’t think of many web pages, blog posts, articles where these 5 questions wouldn’t be appropriate.

I’ve been re-reading Maria Velosa’s Web Copy that Sells this week. Her blueprint for creating simple copy that works to market your products and services is clear. There’s a reason it’s organized this way.

Psychologically, we’re hard wired to sit up and pay attention to problems. This is why it’s a good idea to lead off with your headline and first paragraph addressing readers’ problems and pain. Negative emotions are strong enough to wake us up and get us to read the rest of the story.

There are two things you must realize about this seemingly obvious and simple question:

  1. People who are in your target audience may not realize they have a problem (or how bad it can get). It may seem surprising, but often people are in denial, are ignoring the bad stuff, and are overly optimistic.
  2. People need to know you fully understand their pain AND CARE before they will read anything you have to say about it

Write a few sentences out about the problem. You want your readers to say, Read More→

The B2B Manifesto: Trust Building Comes First

How good is your “trust-building?” I just read this term in a new digital release: The B2B Manifesto, just published by Velocity Partners in the UK.

Think about it. Before you can convert readers to clients, before you can get them to download your digital information and build your list, you’ve got to build trust.

The B2B Manifesto: 5 Imperatives and 6 Staples for Winning the Battle for Attention: page 19:

“You need to leverage trust-builders into each step of the (buying) journey:

  • case studies
  • awards
  • data
  • testimonials
  • analyst support
  • proof points”

I don’t think enough of you do a good job of trust building. Maybe you’ve not been properly taught or missed class that day? As for myself, I’ve never thought about “trust-building” as a defined goal, I’ve just always assumed I was doing it every step of the way. But am I? Maybe not as well as I could. Are you? Read More→

Writing Better Content: An Emotional Pathway

Writing quality content that markets your products and services online follows a logical progression, but it also follows an emotional pathway. You must engage the brains of your readers… as well as their hearts.

By that I mean, your content should follow a sequence, touching on the following emotions:

  • Negative, a painful problem, a fear
  • Positive, relief from a problem, benefits, imagine a better future
  • Neutral, rational, logical, analysis of facts
  • Curiosity, desire, imagination
  • Objections, reasons why and why not
  • Trust: social proof, statistics, case studies, personal stories
  • Scarcity, urgency, fear of consequences
  • Call to action, clear next steps, reassurances, guarantees, security

I been reviewing basic steps for writing quality content for the web that works to get you found, get known and get clients. According to Maria Veloso in Web Copy that Sells, there are 5 simple steps that will help you write quality content that connects and engages with readers: Read More→

Mental Skills Make Better Content Writers

Content marketing, even with a strategy and a plan, has a lot of decision points along the way. It’s easier with a map and a system, but there’s still a million choices that need to be made.

How do you decide what to write about? You’re a busy professional, you have a lot to say, you read a lot, you think a lot. You probably work with a lot of clients and they have problems that you try to help them solve. All that is good stuff to write about and publish on the Web so you’ll get found, get known, get clients.

Wait a minute, let me be clear about what I’m really asking you. The question is how do you decide, how do you make a decision? Do you experience options in your mind, preview consequences, and decide?

Do you observe your mental processes as they unfold? Some people do, and others don’t, they just operate impulsively and intuitively.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. But I think the ability to stand back and watch your mental processes unfold is interesting and informative.

For one thing, if you know a few things about how you make a decision, you can also imagine what goes on in the minds of some of your clients and readers. Not everybody’s exactly like you, but some of them are. This gives you insight into possibilities.

This is important when you’re writing on the Web, when your composing blog posts. And you already know how important it is to get in the shoes of readers when you’re composing a sales or landing page. Read More→

Ghost Blogging for Executive Coaches

If you’re a busy professional, you know how hard it is to run your business and provide quality services to clients, and have enough time to take care of your online marketing and publishing tasks.

You may be a thought leader in your field, but if you’re not publishing content on  the Web, you’re not going to get found, get known, and get clients.

You need to be blogging 2-3 times a week, submitting articles to directories, participating on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook… impossible for one person to manage and still have a life.

Somethings like social media updating and article submissions can be handled by a V.A. But others, like blog writing, needs to be very good so that it sounds like something you’d say, professional and informed.

There are a lot of outsourcing solutions but very few good ones. When it comes to quality content for executive coaches, I don’t recommend you hire anyone who doesn’t have experience in your field, a thorough understanding of your clients and target market and good Web knowledge and experience.

Good help is hard to find, as they say. If you’re an executive coach, let me know if I can help you. If you’re in another field I probably can’t write for you, but I can revise what you’ve written, edit it, make it suitable for Web publications.

Click here for more information.

Content Marketing Tips: Seth Godin on Tim Burton

Are you finding writing slow and tedious? Is your content marketing and blog writing as creative as possible? Are you discovering your unique genius as you go?

What can we learn from really creative people like Tim Burton and Seth Godin? First of all, we know they are really creative because they produce a lot of unique products – films, books, and blog posts that grab our attention.

Both these two professionals are examples of people who’ve found their genius. But we wouldn’t know that if they didn’t “ship.” If they didn’t complete projects and get them out the door.

And that’s the difference between wanna be’s, also-rans, and those who get noticed. In order to be successful, you have to get it out the door. Publish. Produce. And publicize.

My husband, affectionately known as Attila the Honey, decided to write a book about 18 months ago. I watched him do his first novel…then a second. And I just finished editing the third book.  His book blog is here. Read More→

Get Search Engine Optimized- Fast

How do you know if your blog posts are optimized for search engines?

Good question… and no  easy answer… well, except for one which I’m going to share with you here!  Here are a few options for optimizing your content for search marketing:

  1. Study Google and search engine optimization (time-consuming)
  2. Hire an SEO person to do some optimization for your web content (expensive)
  3. Become a subscriber to a service called Scribe Content Optimizer (easy, instant & affordable)

Here’s how it works. You go here, you sign up, you install it to your WordPress blog. You start using a free plug in called All-in-One SEO Pack.

You write a blog post, you fill in the information on the SEO plug in, you click the Scribe analyze button, wait a few seconds and get a review of how well your content will do with search engines. You then get a list of things you can do to raise your search engine optimization score.

Okay, seeing is better than me telling you. Here’s a snapshot of a blog post that didn’t score well, and here’s one that got a perfect score. You can see for yourself that the Scribe report tells me what I can do to raise my score, to improve my search engine optimization.

And here is a screen capture of a post that got a perfect score: Read More→

Blog or Website: Do You Use WordPress as a Website?

Do you use WordPress for your business website? Many people do.  And I’d like to know if you do, how long you have used it as a website, and what your opinion of it is. Leave a comment if you’d like, since the poll only gives you a yes/no choice.

My content business, ContentforCoachesandConsultants.com, is built on a blog platform, although I don’t use it as a blog. I use it as a traditional website for my business, with product pages, etc.

I see a trend here. Many independent professionals want to be in control of their sites, without having to go through a webmaster, and without learning coding or programming.

WordPress makes it easy for anyone to update their own site. You can create pages, just like a website. It can be customized to look like a traditional website for any business, or you can get something customized specifically for your needs.

There are a multitude of talented web people available for customizing it for your needs. Once set up, you can easily publish fresh content, write sales copy, add product pages, and benefit from the facility with which WordPress works with the search engines. Smooth.

I stopped using Dreamweaver software for my websites over two years ago, and started afresh using a custom-designed WordPress platform. Together with my merchant cart, KickStartCart, it gives me everything I need to run an online business, build my marketing database, provide digital products and attract clients with content that’s optimized for search engines.

And, trust me, I’m not someone with a lot of tech skills. I didn’t grow up in the computer age. Demographically, I’m probably in the cohort of  “techno-old-farts.”

Please vote, either yes or no. The results will be shared as we gather more opinions. And if you’ve got a WordPress story to share with us, tell us in the comments how you’re using it for your business, please share your url so we can come check it out!

Writing on the Web: Letting Go of the Words

I think the Web is fascinating, don’t you? Yet frustrating. So much information, so many ways to entertain yourself, so many ways to get sucked into a time machine fantasy world.

Twelve billion web pages… and most of them talking about themselves, saying nothing that’s easy to understand in a blink…

It’s not unlike Alice in Wonderland, it can be anything you want it to be. I’m reading a good book called Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish.

This is a really good book for anyone charged with writing on the Web. In fact, it’s a must-read for anyone with a website or blog. If you’re a fan of usability and you’d like to improve your site’s performance with better writing, definitely get this book.

Here’s what two really smart people who know the web well say about this book: Read More→

Search Engines Are Stupid… Help Them Out

Are you spread too thin? Over-committed? Is your blog too confusing, too many topics, too many choices for readers to make?

Oh, and by the way, how are your search engine results? Do you come up on the first page when people do a search for the problems you solve?

I’ve been told by someone who knows business blogging that I’m “diluted.” No, not “deluded,” in the psychological sense, although that might also play into it. “Diluted” in that it’s not clear. At least, I think that’s what he means.

I don’t think I’m the only self-employed entrepreneur that suffers from the problem of trying to cover too many bases, of trying to attract too many kinds of people, of offering too many products and services.

The key point my expert was trying to drive home is that online, you can’t afford to be “all over the map.” Why? Because search engines are stupid. They don’t understand variety and nuances. Read More→