A Five Minute Guide to Copywriting

Posted on December 26, 2011

As many copywiters seemingly love to beat into everyones head, copy should move the people that read it to do something. What it moves them to do is not really the important part here, it’s how the copy is thought out and written that is.

Getting the important part down

So what makes some copy so great while others are stuck at blah? Well for starters whoever wrote it probably sat down and thought who they were writing for. Depending on who the audience is, will or at least should determine how a piece is written. If you were writing to a group of younger kids you probably shouldn’t use academic language on them, this will only lead to their fustration and cause them to not even pay attention long enought to read what exactly it was that you had to say. On the flip side if you were writing a piece of copy for an academic newsletter, it would be important that you use “bigger” words that would be commonly used in a field like this in order to keep their attention and let them know that you do in fact know what you are talking about.

What else is important?

When it comes down to it there are other things that are important besides for just using the proper language. You should also keep things planned out, meaning you shouldn’t just slap something together and expect that it will be good enough. In fact most pieces of good copy can take hours upon hours to create to maybe even a few days.

In most cases it probably starts as an outline where you or a team can put down ideas of what’s thought to be important for the copy. After enough ideas are put down, they can start being arranged in an order in which they will make sense to the reader. Once these first two parts are done to current satisfaction, the actually copy can start coming together. This will probably only end up being a rough/first draft, something to read over and get a feel for how this will turn out. After reading through it a couple times and making corrections it should be about done. Maybe find and add in some approiate pictures to help farther the mind set of the reader, and place them in just the right spot so it really greets the reader with maximum impact.

Conclusion

I know what you’re thinking, “this will take far longer than 5 minutes!” Well, you’re right good copy just doesn’t happen in five minutes. In fact it’s a long thoughtful process in which you have to consider the intended audience, gather ideas, select the best ideas and start molding them into what will become the final copy. This whole process may take some time to get down but once you do it will be one of the most rewarding accomplishments ever.

Posted in Content Creation | Leave a comment

Five Steps to Becoming a Better Salesperson

Posted on April 19, 2011

Let’s face it, pretty much everybody that’s in business today depends on making sales, and would probably like to make more sales. The only setback being how does one go about increasing the amount of sales made. Today I would like to cover five simple things to keep in mind when trying to make a sale, if you do it will help increase to the amount of sales made, and also promote repeat sales in the future.

Remember To Act Appropriate

If you’ve ever been shopping I’m sure you’ve met your fare share of pushing salespeople, think back to them and how often did it help them make the sale? It probably didn’t. Remember this the next time you are trying to sell your product, if your customer is trying to make up their mind about buying your product or not don’t try to push them into buying instead, be honest with them and tell them why owning/purchasing your product/service would benefit them. However, don’t spend to much time trying this with the same customer if they are not interested you may be wasting your time and missing out on customers that are ready to buy.

Believe In your Product

If you’ve been selling for awhile, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually important when trying to make a sale. That is after some time on the job its possible that you will just start seeing your products as dollar signs. When this happens you’ll just start going through the motions of selling, blankly spewing some sales spiel at your potential customer, and believe me they will notice.
So instead take some time get (re)acquainted with the products/services you are selling, and really get behind them. Your customers will be able to pick up on your enthusiasm, and they too will become excited about your product/service and be that much more likely to buy.

Listen to your Customers

A lot of sales people like to talk, and this goes back to #1 on this list also. If you talk to much your customers might think that you are being pushy, and you’ll become “just another” salesperson to them. Instead try listening to them, hearing what they have to say. This will promote trust, in and turn you’ll go from being “just another” salesperson to an actual person.

Ask your Customers

If you’ve made a good connection with your customer(s) ask them if they know anybody else that might be interested in your product. This is a great way to increase your sales, if you’ve made a good impression they will likely tell their family and friends about you and your product. As an added bonus if you weren’t able to make a sale with the original customer, this will give you another chance to speak with them by letting them know someone they referred has bought from you.

Stay Positive

Being a salesperson it’s important that you remember they’ll be good days and bad days. When having a bad day don’t make it worse by taking it out on potential customers. Instead keep positive and try to turn that bad around, after all who wants to buy from a salesperson in a foul mood.

Keeping these five tips in mind will go along way when it comes to making day to day sales with customers. And if you keep at it, it may also turn some of your customers into your best sales(partners).

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Creating Quality Content

Posted on April 8, 2011

Having getting or creating good quality content is the backbone of any search engine optimization strategy or at least it should be. Even if you have the best product in your particular niche and on top of that you have a terrific website but if your content isn’t up to par your SEO strategy will likely fall short. Making it critical to have a good content creation system in order for your search engine optimization strategy to pay off and to increase your rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

I spend alot of time on the internet and during this time I come across a great many websites that contain a lot of content but unfortunatly a great deal of it won’t help with their SEO efforts because it’s too focused on selling a product or service. And in turn it really does nothing to inform or educate a potential customer before trying to make the sale.

In this day and age with all the information available at a consumers finger tips, making them much more sophisticated. Making them much more likely to make a purchase after they have been well informed rather than sold on a product. Search engine engineers keep this in mind and have been designing their algorithms with this in mind so you will have to please them in order to rank well. This means that the bulk of your content should be focused on information and less on sales.

I would like to discuss the three major points when it comes to SEO content creation; which are the effective use of keywords, back linking and article submissions.

Effective use of Keywords

Google, and other search engines, look for unique, informative, well written content on your site. If you use the same keyword over and over again (sometimes called “keyword stuffing”) the search engines will detect that the article is “spam” and not unique or informative.

Google does this so well due to a indexing and retrieval method known as “latent semantic indexing”. This method looks at patterns within a group of text. For this reason, it’s important to use different variations of a keyword in your content while providing useful information at the same time.

The basic guideline for keyword density is to place your main keyword in the first sentence, once in each paragraph and near the end of your article or post. Use variations of the keyword elsewhere in the article, if needed.

If you have trouble writing, or don’t have the time, you can outsource your content creation by hiring a freelance writer or do a Google search for “content creation services”. You will find that there are a great many options out there, and should be able to find the perfect solution to create the content you are looking for.

Back Linking

Another reason why it’s critical to create effective content is so that other webmasters will want to link to your site and let others know about you. This creates a lot of inbound links to your website. Google finds these inbound links and will rank your site higher in the search results.

You can actively seek out other webmasters and offer to exchange links or they will come to you as your site grows in popularity.

Another method of getting back links is to post comments on blogs, social networking sites and in discussion forums related to your product’s niche. The same rules of content creation for your website apply when posting comments on other sites.

You want your comments to be unique, informative, well written and interesting. They should add something to the discussion on not just come off as a sales pitch. Obviously, the comments should be relevant to the niche of the particular site you’re posting on. If you follow these guidelines, people will like what you have to say and click through to your website.

Article Submissions

You will be creating unique and informative articles as you would for your own website but you will be submitting them to article databases like webproguide.com and Ezinearticles.com. You can also place them on other relevant blogs in your niche as a “guest blogger”.

These articles have to be different from the articles you place on your own site or the search engines will detect them as duplicate content. These articles will also serve to provide backlinks to your site since you will be able to place a link in your article and in the resource box.

Other webmasters will also find these articles and link to them if the content is good.

Again, you can outsource the writing of these articles if you find it to be a more effective use of your time.

This is just a general overview of the basic methods of effective SEO content creation. There are many more details I couldn’t cover in the scope of this article so I’d like to hear from you. What are some tips and tricks of your own that you can share?

Posted in Content Creation, Keywords, Link Building, SEO, Social Media | Leave a comment

Measuring Customer Satisfaction With Surveys

Posted on April 5, 2011

If you are looking to improve a websites user experience one step more then you find that is possible with analytics data it might be time to incorporate a brief survey that will help to determine weak areas that need improvement. As I already mentioned you should make this a brief questionnaire, and I would also highly recommend that you make taking this optional process (more on this in a minute).

Easily measure customer satisfaction

Creating a customer service survey will help you to quickly and easily measure your customers over all feelings about shopping on your website. Insights from quality and value, to the ease of access to your products and product information, innovation and much more.

When to ask them to take the survey

I mentioned above that you should make taking this survey optional, but what is the best way to deliver it? There are a number of methods you could use, one of them being at the end of the checkout process meaning that after the customer has completed a purchase you can redirect them or provide a popup asking them to complete a short survey in order to help improve their next experience on your site. You may also chose to send the survey to them in an email, stating that they have recently purchased an item from your site and you would like them to complete a short survey about the experience.

Getting the maximum amount of response

You may find that you are not getting as much response to the survey as you expected or would have liked to receive. Response to these tends not to be as great as one would expect as people lead busy life’s and typically don’t want to waste their time on such things. However there are a few measures you can take to improve the number of responses your survey receives, you could offer them a free gift or enter them in a drawing for a gift certificate for your store or some other such prize. By provided your customers some added incentive for filling out the survey will help a lot when it comes to the responses you get. Don’t worry providing some small prizes in order to get this valuable advice will more then pay for itself when it comes to the knowledge you will gain and the improvements you will be able to make.

Some basic must include questions

You may be thinking well this sounds great but what kind of questions should I ask my customers? Well I am glad you asked, as there are a few basic questions that you could/should use in your survey. You can change them around a bit so that they fit your needs, or so that they provoke more or less thought from your customers which ever you prefer. Below you will find a list of these basic questions to include:

  • How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?
    Answers should be on a scale from 0 to 10.
  • What other products or services should we offer?
    Your customers can be a great source of ideas for new products or services.
  • How would you describe us to a friend?
    This will help you uncover why your customers like you.
  • Do you use us for all your [ProductType] or do you also use alternative companies?
    and
    If so, why?
    This will help you to determine how loyal your customers are.
  • What would persuade you to use us more often?
    Easily find out how to try your customers into repeat buyers.

There is a possibility of many other questions but these are some very good seemingly simply questions, but they will help to provide you a great deal of insight into what your customers think about you and how you can gain more customer plus retain the old, etc. etc.

I hope this post provides you with some good information and insight into creating surveys and how you can use the information provided from them to improve your website. If you have something you would like to add are discus please feel free to leave it in the comments below.

Posted in Content Creation, Marketing | Leave a comment

Choosing The Right Analytics Suite

Posted on April 4, 2011

Finding and implementing the analytics program that fits your needs and the needs of your site the best can prove to be a daunting task. There are many choices out there everything from free hosted solutions to paid hosted solutions, and on to the other side of the spectrum open source analytics software to paid analytics software. As you can see there are already quite a few selections in front of us, but wait there’s more… Well let me cover that later, first let’s get into what specific things each of them do, and what kind of metrics will best be utilized for your site.

First let me talk about the whole analytics market, as you can see from above and if you have done any searching around you probably have noticed that there is no shortage of vendors out there. So what’s the difference between all of these services? Well to be brutally honest there is not much difference between, they are all pretty much the same thing wrapped in different packages. Although some may offer a few different tracking metrics, and others may not have the ability to track visitors without JavaScript. If you are looking to track mobile visitors that’s a whole other subject altogether, I’ll have to cover that in another post.

When it comes down to choosing the right analytics solution for your site, this should be an in depth process, and then implementing it within your site becomes a whole other thing as well. But let’s not get off track here, when choosing a solution you should look into each in depth to see what specific features each offer. Through this process you should be able to find the one that offers all the metrics that you will need to analyze your site, where your visitors come from where there go and which sites deliver you the most traffic. I would recommend to you, that you only choose one program as it’s hard enough to get one implemented and working correctly let alone two, and if you have all that much more data to sift through compiling reports can even prove that much more difficult. Just imagine if you were (or maybe you are) putting these reports for someone else that may not understand all this data, this could potentially do more harm then it would good. So in these cases I think that you would be much better off by selecting and implementing just one solution.

Paid is not always better

A trap that most people often fall into is thinking that paid is always better this however is simply not the case at least not always. Most of the paid tools will deliver you the same metrics as the free ones, with some exceptions in there of course.

In most cases the only difference is the wording, the paid companies use sales and marketing tactics to make there products sound special so that you spend your hard earned money on their product that you could possibly have gotten for free. Another problem with paid analytics is once again that they are trying to sell you on there product, meaning that getting some of the new cutting edge features may cost you some extra money, where as a program like Google or Yahoo analytics would possibly be offering these some features for free very soon.

These paid solutions can become quite pricey depending on the size of your site and how much traffic you receive. Prices can be starting as low as a few hundred dollars, but are more likely to be in the thousands or even possibly into the millions! That is a lot of money to be spending on website analysis, and if it’s not helping to improve the site by leaps and bounds that’s unnecessary money coming out of your paycheck!

If you are just starting to venture into the wonderful world of web analytics I would highly recommend that you start out with a free solution either hosted or you host it yourself and experiment with what it has to offer. I think that you will find that the free programs that are out there are powerful enough to retrieve the data you need to make the necessary changes to your site and your marketing plan.

Case studies or just do it?

Another problem that you may run into if you are working for a company, is cost and implementation problems. Business owners always want case studies to prove that doing something will be cost effective and of course increase the overall profit of the business. While this is often times a good idea, it may not be so in this case. If you are having trouble selling your boss on the idea of web analytics, of course you should probably go the route of the free solution, but also try to make your boss understand that he has nothing to lose except some of your time while you get everthing implemented and working properly. Also let your boss know how much you and the rest of the team (if you have a team) will be able to improve the site, get more (targeted) visitors, and increase the amount of time people spend on the site. Hearing that should excite your boss enough so that they will now allow you to start using analytics on the site.

One man army or something else?

If you are just running a small site and have a small budget this may not be for you, but in this world it’s always good to have someone else there with you to keep your ideas and everything fresh. If you are not constantly coming up with new ideas and methods to track your visitors your site will probably not see any significant gains in conversions.

If you have a small budget and can not afford to hire anyone else on, you have other options. You could hire a professional consultant to help look over your data with you and recommend changes, or finding new sources of traffic for your website. If you choose to go this route it’s important that you make sure that whoever you choose has some experience with web analysis, and that they are current with everything that’s happen with web analytics. If they are not you should continue your search until you find someone who is, as you will not want to be wasting your hard earned money on someone that will not be of any great help.

Alright I am afraid that I may have gotten a little off topic there, but back to the point that I originally wanted to make. Most of the paid analytics solutions will offer you a set amount of consulting services, while this may sound great the consult that helps you out may not be the best qualified to help in analyzing your site. Don’t get me wrong these consultants are highly qualified (they have to be in order to hold that job), but what I am trying to get at is that they may not know your industry as well as you do and that may put a damper on the analysis they come up with.

Of course if you go the free web analytics route the money you save by not paying for the software could be spent on hiring a professional consultant. By taking this route you could also seek out someone that is not only highly qualified but they may also have experience working in your field, that in my opinion will make their analysis of your data that much better.

How is the data gathered

There are many different ways to go about gathering the analytics data for your website. Most of the programs use JavaScript tags to gather the data, which is fine unless your visitors have JavaScript turned off. In that case you will not be receiving any data or information about your visitors.
There are other solutions out there that collect the data in many different ways, some may use pixel tracking (a 1×1 pixel is printed onto the page in order to gather the necessary data for the program to produce data).
Others may monitor the networks activity either through the port or some other method, allow you to accurately track your visitors even if they have all there JavaScript turned off. This is also a good way to track mobile users.
Deciding what audience you have and whether or not their browsers have JavaScript, should be an important consideration when looking for an analytics solution.

Alright I hope that this post give you a little bit of insight into choosing the analytics software that’s right for you and your site. It’s hard to cover this topic in just a little blog post as there is so much information to be covered. I tried to give a broad and general overlook of which might be better for you in this post. I was thinking that I might compile a list of all the analytics software out there, with the features they offer as well as pricing information. Did I miss something that I should have covered? Feel free to add it in the comments below or let me know and I will get it added on, or create a new post covering it.

Posted in Analytics, SEO | Leave a comment

Measuring the success of your email marketing campaign

Posted on March 31, 2011

A while ago I wrote a post about email marketing and how powerful it can be for you company. While this is true you should also keep an eye on how successful you campaign is, as I mentioned at the end you should test. As with anything you should try a few different options to see which works the best, and in the this case what works best would be the one that drives the most visitors back to your site to buy your products or services.

In this post I am going to cover what key metrics you should be looking at when deciding how successful an email marketing campaign was for your business. If you don’t keep track you may end up wasting your precocious marketing budget. Let’s dive right in and get started by looking at which metrics you should be looking at and a brief explanation of each of them.

  1. Deliver-ability: This metric gives you the measure of how many emails were successfully sent to recipients. You may be thinking well shouldn’t this number be 100%, while this seems like a reasonable number it’s quite the opposite as it’s practically impossible to get every email delivered. There are many issues that result in this problem, anything ranging from the quality of your mailing list to ISP rejections, the recipient’s inbox is full, and this list could go on and on.If you choose to use a reputable email marketing service you should experience email deliver-ability rates of 95%+, with the future email campaigns doing successively better all the way up to the 99 percentile. However you probably won’t be experiencing any campaigns reaching 100% deliver-ability. If you are not getting numbers any where near this you may want to start asking some questions of your email marketing service, and see if you can sort out why you are not reaching a good number of the addresses.

    Alright now let’s move onto categorizing why your message wasn’t delivered. It can normally be put into one of the two categories; a hard bounce or soft bounce.

    Hard bounce: This is when a message has been returned as permanently undeliverable. This could be caused by a number of issues, from non-existent address, changed address, typo, etc.

    Soft bounce: This type gets all the way to the recipients server but for some reason cannot be delivered. Some of the reasons the email may not be deliverable may be that the inbox was full, the server was experiencing downtime or was overloaded with other messages, the message was to large, etc. In most cases the service should try to keep delivering the message for a few days but if it remains undeliverable it will be counted as a hard bounce.

    To measure deliverability:
    ((Number of Email Addresses Sent – Number of Email Addresses Bounced) /Number of Email Addresses Sent) * 100%

  2. Detailed domain report: You should be getting a detailed report about your email campaign rather then consolidated report of emails delivered across all of the domains, as this simply isn’t enough information to give you any good insights. A detailed report should include metrics such as how many emails were successfully sent to each of the domains or ISPs (aol, gmail, msn, rediff, yahoo, etc.), how many were rejected, how many were blocked, and how many spam complaints there were, etc. Getting these numbers usually requires your email marketing software or provider to work with the ISPs. If they don’t have any contact with the ISPs you may consider looking for a new email service solution, as this is the basis for a number of actions you could make with your campaign. If you are a reltively new or small company getting complaints of your ISP could serverly hurt your reputation, and cause more damage then anything else, so you will want to make sure that your email marketing solution can provide this type of information.
  3. Opening rate: This metric gives you the number of recipients who opened the email message.
    You will want to find out what metric your email marketing service provider gives you, whether it’s the total number of emails opened or the unique number of openings, or possibly both. While both numbers are important, you should be more concerned with the total number of unique openings rather than the total number of openings.
    The standard email opening rate is between 8 to 10%. If your results are better than this number you are doing great, with your list. However if you are getting a number that is sub-par to this you should be seeking answers from your email marketing provider.
    Open rate metric = (Number of Emails Opened / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100%
  4. Click Through Rate (CTR): This metric is the measure of actions taken by recipients seeking more information by clicking through from the links embedded in the email message sent. This will help you to gauge the interest of the recipient. Although they have clicked through it may not always end in a sale.Your email marketing software or provider should give you the measure of both total number of link clicks (for all links, by each link) in the message and unique number of clicks for each link. You should be considering the total number of unique clicks more than the total clicks because a recipient may be clicking on the same link twice or more times, and this often times shouldn’t be counted as an marketing insight.
    The industry standard for click through rates are between 2 to 3%, If your results are better than this number you are doing great, with your list. However if you are getting a number that is sub-par to this you should be seeking answers from your email marketing provider.
    CTR = (Number of unique Emails clicked / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100%
  5. Unsubscribe Rate: This is the measure of the number of unique email addresses that do not want to receive any further emails from you, meaning that they didn’t have any interest in your message resulting in them unsubscribing. This is metric is key in recognizing whether or not the content including in your email was any good. You should also look into when people unsubscribe from your newsletter, whether it’s right after receiving the first one, or if they receive a few and then decide that the included information is not for them.
    Your email marketing provider should provide you the details of unsubscribing recipients. You should be able to react quickly to recipients unsubscribing, and it should be an automated process if not, you are dealing with lot of manual effort in unsubscription and may be not effectively taking actions on unsubscriptions. If you are not able to quickly take action on unsubscriptions, your next email marketing campaign could be marked as SPAM by the recipient and then of course complainants will be filed with the ISPs, which will hurt your reputation of being a good marketer.
    Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of Email Addresses who unsubscribed / (Number of Email Addresses Sent – Number of Email Addresses Bounced)) * 100%
  6. Viral Rate: When designing the content for your email marketing campaign you should make sure to include some viral content. This will provide you a means of being able to reach more people from forwarding of your message. It’s also important that your email marketing service be able to track this, as well as information such as the email addresses so you can look into this farther later.
    Viral Rate = (Number of Emails forwarded / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100%
  7. Conversions: This is the measure of unique email addresses that preformed an action because of your email, this could be something like registering or purchasing if you run a eCommerce site. Depending on what type of business you run you may end up measuring the conversion rate differently, but it all basically translates into how successful your call to action was. By watching this metric you should be able to hone in on which call to action works best in your emails.
    This metric of course depends on the earlier metrics, if you had a highly targeted mailing list and your deliver-ability metric was great then the chances of this metric being good increases greatly.
    Conversion Rate = (Number of unique Emails resulting in a Conversion / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100%
  8. Visual Reporting: If your email marketing service can provide you with this type of visualization of which links were actually clicked you will be able to better understand your readers and know where they are looking. When you know this type of information you will be able to fine tune the content of you email to suit your visitors and increase the number of clicks you receive from your campaigns.
  9. Time Distribution: This is also a combination of all the other metrics, plus some more testing. By changing the time of day you send the message out you may generate more of a response, and by sending your newsletters at different hours and tracking what kind of response you received you will be able to fine tune your campaigns for best response from your recipients.
    This type of marketing is all about relevance and timing. You will have to find the optimal time for your particular needs, but it’s important for you to think about things like what day of the week it is, what time of the day, and how time your recipient’s will have to spend reading personal emails. Timing may also effect how the spam filters treat the email, making the difference between making the inbox and the spam folder. A good email marketer should be able to time the email sending just right to ensure that as many people as possible will read and respond to the message.

I hope that this list of key metric will help you to better understand how to track the success of your email marketing campaign. By carefully tracking these metrics, testing different content, and testing different sending times you should be able to achieve very high success rates with your email marketing campaigns.

Posted in Email Marketing, Marketing | Leave a comment

The Number One Secret to Great Content…

Posted on March 22, 2011

The number one secret that leads to creating great copy is writing for your audience. I know that may sound lame, but it’s true. You need to take a step back and sometime to study your audience, understand what they are looking for, the writing style they would be most familiar with and create content that fits that bill.

First you have to figure out what good quality copy consists of, that may be something different to you than it is to most other people. So really take sometime and find out what’s really working out there. Once you have found it, take the time to study it and find out what makes it tick, how’s it written, who’s it addressing?

By drawing your inspiration from other great copy you should be able to improve your own writing technique and be able to put together an effective piece in short order.

What do professional copywriters do?

Professional copywriters usually put together something call a “swipe file“, which is a collection of tested and proven advertising and sales letters. These collections may also often include headline collections, and other bits and pieces of copy that have been proven to be big money makers in the past.

This collection of carefully selected content is the perfect starting point for most campaigns. Often the tricky part of this whole process is applying the right techniques to the right situation.

Many writers will and often do go astray here, which of course make the copy ineffective.

Listening to your ..readers?

We are very fortunate to live in a day and age with so much information available at are finger tips. Some of which you may not realise is even there, but it is and it’s right in front of you..potentially.

As we all know social media is huge right now, which makes this a great place to study your potential customers. To listen and find out what words they are using to talk about your product(s) or service(s).

So don’t make the mistake of thinking that social media is just for spreading your message, but instead use and harness it’s power to laser focus in on your prospects and deliver what they want to hear.

Go ahead and get a swipe file together for yourself, study it, learn from it. But before writing to your potential prospects, listen to what they are saying through all the available social media channels, and write what you think will work to attract them.

Posted in Content Creation, Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

Getting more people to read your post

Posted on March 18, 2011

We already know that the post title is the most important part of any blog post, but what’s second?

The opening paragraph is second, if your readers are turned off by the opening paragraph because it failed to deliver the same excitement as the title your it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the post is, it has failed.

Let’s go ahead and cover a few simple ways to craft the opening of your blog post that will capture your readers attention and pull them in to read the rest of the post.

Ask them a question?

If you decide to use this method it should invoke thought in your readers mind getting them curious enough to read the rest of the post. If you can get them thinking about your post, you have your audience engaged which = good.

Open with a quote or anecdote

If you open with a recognizable quote from an authority figure or a famous person, it’s almost like casting a magic spell on your readers grabbing their attention and coaxing them on to read more of your post. If you decide to use an anecdote, it should be short and sweet, something that quickly conveys the point of the post, and possibly causes your readers to lol.

Open their mind’s eye

If you can write something that causes your readers to produce a mental image, go ahead and do so. This is one of the most powerful forms of engagement that you can have with your readers through your writing, and in being so it can be an awesome opening technique.

Shocking Statistic(s)

If you can find a statistic that is relevant to your story, it can be a wonderful technique to great people’s attention. That’s because people love to learn about new interesting data, so if you can find something that is unique or maybe even a little shocking this would be a great way to open up a post.

I would like to thank Carly Wood (Super Carly) for the inspiration for todays post, as I was browsing around the Internet I found her post “How to write a ‘lead’ for your blog (like newspapers do)“. After this I began researching some other great ways to open up blog post in order to make them more interesting for readers, and thought I would share what I found out.

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Do you have the content your visitors are looking for?

Posted on March 16, 2011

If you have an internal site search system (if you don’t you should), it will be fairly easy for you to determine what your visitors are looking for. Using the statistics from your sites internal search can help you determine many different things, today I thought we would cover a few to show off the power of having internal site search and why you should see what your visitors are looking for.

If you have internal site search but no way of tracking what your visitors are searching for with it, don’t worry as long as you have the ability to add third party analytics tracking code to your pages you should be able to figure out what your visitors are searching for and if your website is delivering.

Step 1. Understand what your visitors are searching for

The first thing you need to do is find out what your visitors are searching for, this is easily done by logging the keywords they use when searching your site. If you are using an analytics program to do this tracking you could also easily figure out how many people are actually using your sites internal search system. Depending on what type of a site you are running, you would be able to use this later method to determine it your sites navigation is working as it should or if it’s broken. That is if a high number of your visitors are using your sites search to all find the same thing, maybe this is something you should move into a navigation menu so your visitors would be able to easily click through to that particular page on your site.

(By the way I would suggest using the analytics method of tracking your sites searches, or if possible a combination of both. Both would be ideal as some searches might not get picked up from users without JavaScript support, where as  backend search logging system would log every search that went through the system.)

Step 2. What pages are your visitors searching from?

As we all know by now, most visitors to your website don’t start at the home page. They start from whatever page there keyword search sent them to, which leaves to question which pages are your visitors searching from? Not very many Content Management Systems have logging for something like this, so you will probably need analytics installed on your sites pages to track such metrics.

Once you understand (know) what pages your visitors are searching from, you can determine, what brought them to your site in the first place and whether or not you could improve the page in which they landed on. As mentioned about maybe you could change the navigation to help your visitors easily find what they are looking for, or you may want to conduct some split testing for a few of the offending pages to see if you could improve visitor satisfaction without them having to conduct searches on your site.

Step 3. How good does your internal search work?

Does your internal site search return relevant results for your visitors, or do they become frustrated and leave your site? You can determine this by tracking your visitors bounce rate from your sites internal search.

You already know what your visitors are searching for, but are they finding what there are looking for? By tracking their bounce rate from your search results you will be able to determine whether or not your visitors are finding what they are looking for.

Once you have found the terms which have the highest bounce rate, it’s time to figure out why this is so. First check out the search results for yourself, are the results relevant or maybe the content in which they are looking for doesn’t exist on your site. In the first case it should be high on your priority list to improve your sites search system so that it returns the most relevant results to the users queries. In the later case, is the content your visitors are looking for relevant to your site? If so, you should probably considered adding it to fill the hole, and keep your visitors satisfied and on your site longer.

In the worst case scenario the above three steps may not be the easiest implement on your website, but it will be well worth it in the end. Keeping visitors on your site longer gives you that much more of a chance and time to make the sale.

Posted in Design, Marketing, Search | Tagged | 2 Comments

New Site Theme and Link Search Tool

Posted on March 11, 2011

How’s everybody doing this afternoon? I’m doing a lot better myself, as I finally have an Internet connection back, and was able to update the sites theme and add a new SEO tool. The weather has been pretty rough lately all around the world, while we certainly have things a lot easier than some it’s still taken it’s toll especially on the Internets cable. Well anyway as you might already know I have been very busy the past couple of days anyway, redesigning the theme, writing a new tool, and a bunch of other projects that I have been working on.

New site theme

Well after looking at the old site theme for the past few days I decided that I didn’t really like it. Well, to be completely honest I didn’t like it from the get go, but I really didn’t have the time to do a whole new layout, so I just choose one that I thought would work best and went with it. But the other day I found that I had a few spare minutes to redesign things, so I decided to get a jump on things. First things first I knew that the site needed a better navigation system, as the old one had some links, but it didn’t link to everything that I thought it should. So the new theme has navigation that is many times better than the old one and should easily allow visitors to find what they are looking for (I hope). Next I wanted the text to be a little more reader friendly, the old themes text was a little small even for my tastes, and really strained my eyes while trying to read the text on the page. So the new theme, has bigger text and a much better font to boot (in my opinion anyway). By now I really needed to occupy more screen space, because certainly much more was being printed out to the screen, so I decided to give the rest of the theme an upgrade as well. I really like the results and couldn’t wait to get it put up. Let me know what you think of it.

New Link Search Tool

The other day I was thinking there has to be an easier way to search for sites that I might be able to get backlinks from. I mean I know how to use the search engines with their link operators but, remembering each and everyone of them every time becomes a real daunting task. I actually set something like this up quite a while ago but just used it as a file on my local machine, but with my downtime the other day I thought that I would bring it the Internet and that maybe everyone would be able to find it as useful as I do. It’s really a pretty simple script, just enter in some keywords that apply to your particular niche decide which search engine, and then start finding some potential link partners. You can check out the link search tool here.

That’s all I have for now, I have a lot of reading and writing to catch up on. So I hope you like the new site theme, and find the link search tool useful. Let me know your opinions either way, I would really appreciate the feedback.

Posted in Design, Link Building, Uncategorized | Leave a comment