The Hip Zone

Writing for Online Readers

Tony — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:37:58 +0000

The Problem with Online Readers

Online readers are not tucked up in bed reading your website with a nice cup of hot chocolate with all the time in the world. They are:

Annoyed
On-line readers are often annoyed by the struggle to find the information they need. There are confusing menus, distracting adverts and weird layouts.
Uncomfortable
They may also be uncomfortable with tired eyes from staring at the screen for too long or trying to access the web on their phone.
In a hurry
Web readers are often in a hurry with a few minutes snatched during a lunch break, for example, to find the information that they need to know.
Confused
The people visiting your site are often confused as they do not know where they are. They may not have arrived at your home page and followed the journey you planned for them. They could have popped up absolutely anywhere.

How to Write Online

To address the problem outlined above you need to consider the following when writing for the web:

Appropriate Headings and Summaries
These must accurately reflect the content and include the either the key message or a summary of the article.
Use Plain English
Your sentences should be short, jargon free with a simple structure. For example:

“It would be appreciated if all those who choose to comment on this post would be create a Gravatar for themselves.”

Compared to

“Commenters please create an avatar using Gravatar“

Gain Credibility and Trust
Your readers are sceptical as they know that anyone can create a web site in a matter of minutes. You need to build credibility and trust with your audience.
1. Provide the author’s name and information about the author
2. Make sure there is real address, e-mail address and phone number
3. Write material that is factually correct.
4. Use all the tips in this guide.
5. Every single page needs to tell the reader who owns the website and what the purpose of the page is. Remember a visitor may pop up anywhere on a web site and will not always start from the home page.
You also need to consider other areas that are nothing to do with writing. These include the site design, layout and ease of navigation.
Help Skim Readers
The majority of reader will skim a page first. If you have an article which is three hundred words of dense text, then the chances are they will hit the back button. Remember your site is just one click away from the rest of the web. To help skim readers you should provide clear headings, summaries, break up the text into paragraphs with meaningful subheadings and use link formatting that stands out.
Search Engines
To help people searching the web you should write unique content and restrict each page to a specific topic. This will help the search engines to categorise your page and help the searcher find what they expected. Content is an important aspect of search engine optimisation.
Accessible Content
Accessibility is about making your website available for any reader regardless of their abilities, disabilities or the device they are using to access your site. Not everybody is using that latest version of Internet Explore and not everyone has 20:20 vision. This is quite a big area which I will cover later, but from a writing perspective you should check that your pages look OK in a variety of different web browsers with a variety of different window sizes.
What Next
On many pages you will just expect a reader to read the content, but what then. Think about what might be an appropriate next action. Suggest some more pages to read, suggest they buy a product or service, fill in a form, or perhaps make a comment. If you liked this article or have anything to add, leave a comment below : )

Networking for Success

Tony — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:43:17 +0000

Like in the real world, assuming the Internet is not part of the real world, networking is vital to making it as an entrepreneur.

Networking is essentially making friends for mutual success and like in the real world there are some people who are cheats and exploit these relationships without giving much back - luckily it is usually quite easy to spot people like this.

I would recommend finding a forum in your sector and joining it, but think about what you want to get out of it and what you can give back. For UK webmasters I would recommend a webmaster forum that I am a member of UKWebmasterWorld and of course this blog is a community too with six (wow) members. Be warned, dropping a comment on a forum or a blog with the sole purpose of prompting you or your site and never visiting again is “cheating” and a form of spam, remember to give something back.

Of course there are now the social networks that support your real world networks and bridge the gap between the real and the avirtual, the two bigs ones in the UK are facebook.com and linkedin.com

May 17, 2008 -- SEO 102: Social Networking (3)

Bidding Directories - A thriving fork of traditional web directories

temi — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:52:21 +0000

Some fads on the Internet do fade very quickly, others fade slowly, while some remain, prosper and evolve to become a permanent feature of the Internet landscape. Small web directories (these are usually directories owned by an individual with little or no authority or recognition in the wider Internet community) is a good example of a fad that has evolved and prospered.

A typical web directory, created using one of the dozen or so directory scripts on the market, usually contain various categories and sub-categories. The sites are listed in a category or sub category, in alphabetically order, sometimes on a first come first served basis. Some directories are based on a theme or a niche.

Most directory themes or niches seem to have been exhausted, leading to the emergence of a new kind of directory: bid for position directory. The idea behind bid for position is quite simple, the more money you bid for your site listing, the higher your site is listed, the top ten or so highest bidders are even listed on the homepage of the directory.

This is a dramatic departure from the first come first serve basis of the traditional directory, where you pay a flat fee for your site listing but you cannot influence how highly your site is listed. Bidding directories still use categories to determine where your site is listed, but the more you bid for your listing, the higher your site is listed on the category you choose.

Gradually, the bidding directory has gain prominence in the directory market, carving out a unique niche for itself on the Internet. There are now several thousands examples of bidding directories online, mostly powered by one of the leading bidding directory scripts on the market. The most widely used is a free PHP based bid directory script called Link Bid Script. Link Bid Script is search engine friendly out of the box, It is free to download, install and use. It comes with extensive support including free installation. Link Bid Script is supported via its support forum where you can register and post your support enquiries.

If you every decide to be a part of an evolving established Internet fad of starting a bidding directory, Link Bid Script could be your vehicle, you can download it free of charge from the bidding directory script download page.

Case Study: Making Money with Blogger

Tony — Sun, 18 May 2008 20:17:07 +0000

In an earlier post on making money online I argued that the best way to get started was with a free blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com and I promised to put my money where my mouth is and demonstrate how it is done.

I haven’t done any major research into keywords and finding a profitable niche, but I did choose something I can write about - stuff I have bought for myself or someone else, and stuff that I want. I have started to monetise it already with Adsense and some affiliate scripts, but I didn’t need to worry about this just yet because without any significant content or targetted traffic it just makes the site look pretty. (I will explain what these are in later posts)

In terms of time it took me about two hours to put together and to be honest I am quite pleased withthe results. Now all I have to do is start building some inbound links - I had better read ny excellent link building guide. ; )

I almost forgot the site is called “The Best Kit Money Can Buy“, which sounded quite good at the time, but now I think it is a bit naff.

SEO 102: Social Networking

Tony — Sat, 17 May 2008 12:22:38 +0000

I am not an epxert on social networking from an internet marketing perspective, but I came across someone that is spending a small fortune doing it and who is now my friend on digg.com - it is none other than Barack Obama (I nearly wrote Osama then, probably would have resulted in black helicopters circling my house). I doubt he will every accept my offer of friendship : (

Anyway, this is his Digg site, notice all the links to his other social network sites - Facebook, Flickr, Myspace etc. Should be easy enough to copy.

June 8, 2008 -- Networking for Success (2)

SEO 101: Google Adwords Top Tips

Tony — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:40:56 +0000

Google Adwords is the system used to power the sponsored text ads returned by Google when you do a search. These are the highlighted ads that sometimes appear above the organic results and more usually to the right of them down the side of the page. It is also the system used to provide contextual adverts on literally millions of websites globally – these are usually text ads, but more recently Google has allowed advertisers to use banners and video adverts in these slots.

Adwords is an extremely effective way to market your web site online and get immediate results and it only costs £5 to get started. However, care needs to be taken as it is possible to blow an enormous amount of cash if you are a newbie and configure your campaigns incorrectly – you have been warned.

This short guide will provide you with ten top tips for managing your Google Adwords campaign.

Set a daily budget, this is a safety valve and will stop your campaign costing you a small fortune. Start small say £10 per day.
Remember you have to bid for position, so set a cost per click that gets you above the fold i.e. in the top 5 otherwise you will get very few clicks.
Measure conversion rates. The Adwords system provides a small piece of code that you can put on your website to measure conversions and will give you a cost per conversion. It is even better if you can work out the value of a conversion. You can also integrate this with Google Analytics, but that is the subject of another post me thinks.
Target Long Tail keywords. According to the Adwords system it will cost you £3-£6 to get your site in the top three for “Home Information Packs” and several visitors per day, but this search “cheap home information packs” will be much cheaper per click, more targeted and will convert better if it is applicable to you. The volume of searches and traffic will be much lower though (too low for Google to provide useful data), the other thing to consider is the geographic terms such as “Home Information Packs Bolton”
Optimise your titles and your descriptions. You should create multiple ads for each keyword you are bidding on. Click through rates improve by including the keyword in the title, description and the URL as these are highlighted when the search results are changed. You can automate this by using this curly brackets in the title and descriptions to return the search term e.g. try {KeyWord: Home Information Packs} as the title.
Optimise your landing page. Many people do not realise that Google monitor the relevance of the landing page. For example, if you are bidding on the keyword “Home Information Packs” and the landing page is about Energy Performance Certificates you are going to pay more per click for a given position. This might involve the creation of specially written landing pages.
More advanced users may want to experiment with a/b testing. This allows you to set multiple landing pages and compare which converts visitors to customers the best.
Use the Adwords data to feed into your organic search engine results. If a keyword is converting well for Adwords start optimisting your web site for these words to improve your organic rankings and to reduce the cost per click - remember point 5.
Apply the your knowledge to alternative contextual advertising systems such as Overture, MSN, Mirago and Miva. (I have found the conversion rates for the last two to be poor)
A significant number of clicks will be fraudulent clicks, so consider installing click fraud monitoring scripts. I have managed to get money back from Google using these scripts.
Try to calculate a value for each conversion and adjust your budgets accordingly. E.g. If you are making £100 and spending your £10 daily budget by lunchtime, consider increasing it.
Monitor at a keyword level and adjust your bids accordingly. Consider removing poor performing keywords.
Compare conversion rates between the content network ads and the Google search results ads.
Some will create a whole site excluded from the orangic results just for adwords traffic as it makes it easier to measure conversion. These kinds of sites would use different e-mail addresses and different phone numbers to faciliate this.

Good luck - let me know how yo get on.

Create a web directory

benjohnson — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:52:25 +0000

When trying to find a business many turn to their local yellow pages phone book. In an effort to bring yellow page resources above and beyond a simple name and number list and to generate new income streams, many web developers are creating feature rich web directories. Niche directories or yellowpage style websites offer visitors many other features not found in your standard phone book such as graphics, extended descriptions, dynamic maps, and interactive features.

Developing such a website can often be a tedious task for web developers, but one solution is a pre-developed solution such as phpMyDirectory. phpMyDirectory offers web developers an easy way to jump start their yellow page style website with little effort. It includes features such as automatic sign ups and payments, content approval, business list importing, and many other features allowing the developer to make their directory unique.

March 13, 2008 -- SEO 102: Evaluating Web Directories (3)

Start making money online

Tony — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:14:06 +0000

I have been thinking long and hard about where I would recommend a complate newbie to this to start and came to the conclusion that a blog would be the ideal starting point. The main reasons for this are:

Blogs are really easy to use.
You can set one up for in five minutes for free on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com
There is loads of support sites for newbie bloggers.

I bet the question that is on your mind is this “What will it be about?”. And as this is your first blog the answer is simple - something that you find interesting. However, you need to balance this with something that is profitable. You need to choose your niche. I’ll write about researching niches later in more detail, but for now just think about who spends a lot on advertising in a topic area that interests you. Perhaps, your blog will be around one of these broad topic areas finance, property, DIY, technology, travel.

Now before you start to monetise your blog you need to write some content and begin to hone one of the most important skills required to succeed online - writing. I am planning a post about writing for the web, so check back here shortly. You should also start to market your blog and I recommend that you check out my section on search engine marketing.

The plan is this, once your blog is indexed i.e. in the search engine results we will sell blog posts, yes people will actually pay you to write about their products and services and once you start getting traffic to the site we can start to think about selling advertising or even products and services.

I am going to practice what I preach and I will report my progress on this blog, so I had better choose a niche.

BTW The web is full of get rich quick schemes. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is! You can become self-employed online, but it isn’t going to happen overnight without any effort.

HTC Touch Dual

Tony — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:08:45 +0000

I was planning to pay Orange £20 and unlock my Nokia N95 for use on another network. I had decided to move to T-mobile as they have something called Web’n'Talk which gives you unlimited internet access for £7.50 per month. Orange didn’t have anything similar, well that’s what I thought. When I phoned them up to tell them what I wanted to do they put me through to the retention department who told me they could give me 250mb of data per month (more than enough for mobile access) and any new phone I wanted. I really wan’t expecting that, but after a bit of indecision I decided to go for the HTC Dual Touch - and I must admit I have been really pleased with the phone. There are some niggles, but that is mostl because I am really fuzzy. I’ll write about these in a later post.

SEO 102: Article Marketing

Kingpin — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:06:25 +0000

Article Marketing is something that no internet marketer, blogger or even webmaster should go without strongly considering. Even if you have never written anything in your life, you can still reap the rewards from article marketing. Below is a “How To” do article writing and if you still think your not cut out for it, I’ll give you some options to get your article written. All you need to do is take your time.

Link Building

Marketing articles you have written is probably one of the best ways to get hundreds, if not thousands of one-way back links to your site from all across the Internet, not just from the article directories that you submitted them to. Article marketing helps with your websites optimisation as well so be sure to include this added value in as you decide how much time you plan to spend on writing articles. Of course it takes a little bit of time to write articles for this purpose, but you must look at is as an investment for your future and the benefits it will bring to your site. The articles don’t have to be like the loooong essays we used to write in school, when you are the author, you’re in control. Your article could be about your own opinion on a subject or just you simply telling the world about one of your own experiences or pretty much about anything you like!! (within reason of course).

The trick to getting the hundreds of back links is to write articles that have information in them that is new and fresh to readers. Everyone in your niche will want to use your good article on their site or blog and will in turn be giving you the link love we all need to help us rank better with our websites.

It’s Only As Hard As You Make It?

The chances are the products or service you are trying to sell or the reader base you are trying to grow will relate to what you already know and you will be able to just sit down and start typing an article out. When you get started writing your article, you’ll see the article take shape and come to life and can easily spruce up any areas of it that you see necessary as you write. Even if you’re not sure where you want to put a certain sentence but you know you want it included somewhere in your article. Type it out on the page before you forget it and build on it. Think of what else needs to be introduced before and after the sentence and soon you will have a well thought out article to start article marketing.

The way I write articles is pretty simple. Think of it as making a cake. You add layers to build up the cake right? Well the same principal applies with writing an article. Sure, you may go and edit it a few times to get it the way you want it but that’s only natural. Even the best authors have to go and change words about.

Become Established

You can make yourself appear to be an expert even if it is your very first article. Just because you know it’s your first article on the subject doesn’t mean anyone will know. Take a look at Ezine Articles, they give you an expert author status with your first published article so readers who found your article by searching Google are naturally going to want to go to your website as soon as they see you have one at the end of your article. You could turn that visitor who found your topic on the article directory into a RSS subscriber to your blog just because they like you and believe in what you are writing about.

Give your article the edge by putting a controversial spin on your writing that you use for article marketing to get some controversy going. Using your articles to spark the interest of readers is the best way to get someone to your blog to make a comment, and you can bet they will tell someone about it, which is all free advertising for you and your blog or website. This could be considered as “Link Bait”

When I say add a little controversy, I don’t mean writing an article slating someone or something that is Taboo. That could literally come back to haunt you in a bad way.

Article Targeting

If you are doing or planning on doing affiliate marketing, take the time to write an article on each of the products offered so that you can gain the links from those pages and to let people know that they can buy the products directly from you. Buy the product if you have to so that you can write a review of it to submit to article directories. Again, these are easily spun up to make a few articles that you can submit to the top article directories. Remember if people like you, they will want to buy the products and services they need from you instead of going elsewhere.

I once owned a “TV Blog” where I literally just wrote reviews on the TV’s that were out at that time. You would be amazed on how influential I was with people buying TV’s. It got to the point where I would literally have TV manufacturers call me up to ask me if I wanted to test a new TV for 30 days or so.

Can’t Write, Won’t Write?

If you are simply poor at writing, don‘t give up on article marketing just yet!! There are loads of ways to gain exposure from articles without you having to lift a finger. Just find someone else to do it! If you find yourself having mental blocks for words or you find that it is just to time consuming for you to do it, hire a ghostwriter who will do all the work for you. All you have to do is proofread it before submitting and come up with your own resource box. You can always take the ghostwriters copy and add to it if you want more information in the article. You can put in anything you would like but at least you have the ghostwriter’s work to start with similar to an outline, except most of it has already been written.

There are loads of excellent freelance writers out there and just for 2 or 3 pence per word who will write a really good article for you as a starting point. You can find these people pretty much anywhere, in forums, project sites like Guru.com and so on. You don’t even have to tell them what you will be doing with the copy they will be doing for you, you just need to have them write it and then tweak it for article marketing at will.

Syndication Tips

How many article submission sites should you submit to? Well that depends on how well your content is written. If you have excellent content you will only need to submit it to the most popular directory for your targeted niche and you will be given loads free links from the other webmasters and bloggers that like your content. The best thing to do is only submit each article you write to one article directory like ezinearticles.com or whatever one you prefer to use.

If you want to submit the article to more than one directory, you can always take your one article and spin it up so that it offers unique content in a different way and with different phrases. It’s not that hard to take one article and quickly turn it into 5 or 6 really good articles all with different outlines and wording. Then you can continue on writing articles on the other areas of your niche and do the same with them.

Topic Ideas

Look at your site and decide what pages you want to get more traffic to and write about whatever that page is about. It’s not hard to come up with ideas and topics for articles when you look over your website to see what information you are offering your readers there. Just elaborate on one of your products/services or tell some “teaser” information to get them to click on your resource link for more good quality information on the subject.

Don’t stop Writing

Never stop writing articles for marketing purposes. As you add new pages to your website or blog, write an article about it to submit to the article directories. This is the best way to stay on track with your article marketing and you should always have good information inside your article and on your site as well. You’ll soon find many of those people who found your article and then clicked through to your site will become regular readers who have bookmarked your site or subscribed to your RSS feed.

Read more from Kingpin on his search engine marketing blog.

April 13, 2008 -- Webmaster Tools (2)
March 6, 2008 -- SEO 101: Headings (0)
March 6, 2008 -- SEO 101: Meta Keywords and Descriptions (6)

The Hip Zone

Writing for Online Readers

The Problem with Online Readers

How to Write Online

Most Popular Posts

Networking for Success

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Bidding Directories - A thriving fork of traditional web directories

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Case Study: Making Money with Blogger

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SEO 102: Social Networking

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SEO 101: Google Adwords Top Tips

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Create a web directory

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Start making money online

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HTC Touch Dual

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SEO 102: Article Marketing

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