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Web Copywriting Fundamentals

For online marketers (even those who aren’t strong writers) some of the basics around creating compelling, skimmable content are basically second-nature. I think this often causes those of us steeped in this world to under-explain to these good writers with limited Web experience five key fundamentals.

1. Your Visitors are Your Prospects

It seems pretty basic, but you’d be surprised by how many new-to-the-Web copywriters – smart people who understand on some level that they’re writing to generate sales – don’t take compelling a site visitor to act into account in crafting Web copy. This is obviously a crucial mind-set for the copywriter, and encouraging them to think about the nature of persuasion and to stay focused on the action they’re trying to induce is vital.

2. Brevity is Your Friend: Get Out of Your Own Way!

Short copy doesn’t always win, but it’s important to emphasize the value of leaving gratuitous turns of phrase and unnecessary preambles out of your direct response copywriting repertoire. A clear emphasis on the fact that brevity is your friend is vital. I think often explaining the concept of bounce rate and the sheer volume of people who leave a site quickly and never come back can be helpful and compelling here.

3. Web Visitors Skim

Many of you reading this likely know that the use of headlines, bold, and bullets are commonplace in strong Web content, but often individuals with more of an academic writing background need to be instructed to break up large chunks of content. I find a good way to emphasize the importance here is just to have a couple of Word documents – one with rambling paragraphs and another with liberal use of bold, bullets, headlines and line breaks. When put in the already established context that:

• We’re trying to sell something to a swath of different types of prospects coming to the site
• Lots of people give you small amounts of attention and bounce immediately
• Economy of language gives you the shortest possible path to conversion

This side-by-side visual will usually resonate (looking instantaneously, which is more aesthetically appealing?)

4. No One Cares About You!

Obviously we’ll want our green copywriter to understand the benefits of benefits. I think a good way of explaining this is to ask them to think about conversion as a conversation: what makes a great conversationalist? It’s not someone who talks about themselves, but rather someone who can relate to the other person in the conversation, is engaging and interesting, and conveys a sense of credibility (smart, funny, likable). It’s similar with creating great Web copy – it’s not about you, you need to be engaging and interesting, and you need to establish trust and authority to sell effectively on the Web.

5. You Need to Be Willing to Compete

Whether it’s AdWords or Facebook or even AdCenter, PPC platforms are getting more and more competitive. This means you need to have anyone crafting ad copy for you in the mindset that they’ll need to compete. A good way to orient them to this idea is to get their mind wrapped around click-through rates – in many industries 1% is actually pretty good! That means your competitors and the organic results are grabbing the rest – to increase your CTR you need steal back some of that share. Explaining things in this way will help them start to think about how they can differentiate their copy from the competition, and hopefully will get their competitive juices flowing and get them thinking about creative strategies for driving clicks and conversions.

What Am I Missing?

Beyond turning them loose on great copywriting blogs like Copy Blogger what else do you tell copy writers who are new to pay-per click? Drop a comment if there’s anything you’ve found to be particularly crucial/effective advice.

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A ClearChannel spokesman said that it was an “unfortunate juxtaposition.” He apologized and said the sign would be removed. The funeralcare owner expressed his displeasure saying that when the space was leased, he was assured that nothing “inappropriate” would be featured there.

It’s unlikely that anyone at ClearChannel made the connection between the sign placement and the next-door neighbor. If they did, then it was a person with a wicked sense of humor who signed off on it. Or maybe it was an advertising genius. Obviously, the people who put up the sign weren’t concerned or maybe they simply didn’t walk around to the other side of the building.

But let’s pretend that ClearChannel knew exactly what it was doing. Was it a smart move? They’ve certainly gotten more than their share of press out of the situation. Some people thought it was in poor taste, but some found it funny (cough *Groupon Super Bowl ad* cough).

Given that “The Walking Dead” appeals to a trendy audience with a love of all things gruesome, would you take the chance and put up the sign next to a funeral home or a cemetery? And do you think this was a brilliant marketing move or a major oops?

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Why? And what now? Fortune has the “why” covered. They’ve just published an extensive article that looks at the history of the company and the roadblocks they’ve faced. If you want all the gory details, it’s a good read.

Here’s what caught my eye;

To be fair, Twitter’s founders didn’t set out to build the next Facebook: Consumers turned it into a social phenomenon and kept signing on to see what it was about. Dorsey, Stone, and Williams started the service as an experimental side project; it was never designed to accommodate the 200 million–plus registered accounts worldwide it now hosts.

Okay, but now it’s big so it’s fight or flight time. Personally, I usually choose the later, not the former, but that’s just me. Twitter, despite the correlation, isn’t in flight mode. They’ve come back with an updated dashboard. They’ve improved functionality and they’ve firmed up their advertising component. What more do people want?

What they want, is for Twitter to be something it’s not. It’s not made for conversation. It’s not made for long statements. It’s a bulletin board big enough for the whole world to see. It’s about telling the world what you’re watching right now, what you ate for breakfast and who ticked you off, big time. That’s what it is and that’s what it does.

Then we have UberMedia, makers of one of the lesser third-party Twitter interface apps. Rumor has it they’re finalizing a deal to buy TweetDeck which would put them in a very sweet place. TweetDeck and other similar apps are designed to make up for Twitter’s natural shortcomings. They let you look at multiple accounts easily (can you believe some people have more than one account!) and they allow you to post longer messages.

CNN says that UberMedia isn’t interested in being an attachment anymore, so they’re going to launch their own micro-blogging service. By the end of the article, they backpedal saying that the launch is a “backup plan” to save them if Twitter decides to cut off all third-party apps. Yeah, sure.

If anyone is going to be able to compete with Twitter it’s the people behind either TweetDeck or HootSuite. What they need to do is find a way to make a micro-blogging platform that is more about threaded conversations and less about the one-shot shout-out. That would be a viable model that could give Twitter a run for its money.

Can anyone compete with Twitter at this point? Or maybe the question is, should anyone even bother to try?

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On January 5, 2007, I was sitting out on my lanai looking out at the lake and golf course in Ft. Myers, Florida. I was officially and unexpectedly in between careers and jobs, living in a town where I literally knew one person. I had made a voluntary career transition in August 2006 and decided to embark on yet another adventure in my life–one that did not turn out the way I had anticipated.

I was stunned, uncertain and yet strangely excited. The question came into my head, “What do you really want to do, not what do you have to do?” I really wanted to start my own company using all of my gifts, talents, passion and expertise to help others and do what I do best: teach, guide and train. On February 4, 2007, I launched Train with Shane. I just celebrated 4 years in business.

That defining moment on the lanai led me on the most exciting, nerve-racking and challenging ride of my life.

My storyline?

“Deborah Shane is a tenacious ‘career revivalista’ who has transitioned through several careers. She has transformed herself from a rockin’ singer, published songwriter, teacher and award-winning radio sales professional to a gutsy author, entrepreneur, speaker, radio host and expert.”

We know that stories are the most powerful way for people to connect with each other. We all love stories because we all have them and can relate to them. The plot, the characters, the setting, the conflict, the resolution, the moral is the oldest from of telling and sharing experience, wisdom and history that we have. Today, storytelling is one of the most effective approaches to use in brand recognition and development.

Telling a story to drive home a theme or point is so powerful and lasting that it can cut through all the noise and clutter to grab someone’s attention very quickly.

Consider:

• The courage and perseverance of Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind adventurer to summit all seven of the planet’s highest mountain peaks.
• The innovation and vision of Ray Kroc of McDonald’s to revolutionize fast food.
• Sara Blakely getting over her fear of sales to make Spanx the success it is today.

There are thousands of these stories that come out of the lives of real people that drive home the lesson, principle and moment of clarity that come when we take that leap of faith to do what we are driven to do.

Here are 3 ways you can build a story and your brand connection with people at the same time:

1. Identify your life shapers and turning points. We all have specific moments in our lives when things shifted and changed–moments that shaped our ideas and were turning points in our lives. Think about five of those moments in your life and what lesson came out of each that makes you who you are today. Use that to craft a story.

2. Think of random situations or occurrences you were involved in or witnessed that greatly moved you and why. Craft a story around what you saw, thought, felt or learned.

3. Talk about things, issues, causes that you are passionate about and why. We all have charities, causes and things that we want to be a part of and align ourselves with. Craft a story around how these led you to do something.

What’s your story? Find it, tell it, share it and celebrate it.

From Small Business Trends

Let Your Story Cut Through the Noise and Clutter

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Here are 4 ways to optimize your funnel for when people come through the search engines and stumble upon your blog posts

1. Add Email Captures at the end of blog posts

After you’ve given them some free value, which comes from your awesome blog posts, you can create an email capture box and offer your visitor some more value in exchange for their email, whether it be a whitepaper, case study, or even a discount on your product since you’ll have had a warm lead that appreciated the value you offered them first, which was your informative blog post, and they would be more likely to bite if the offer is relevant to what they searched for and what they’re hoping to get.

2. Plugging Ads to specific products your business offers in your sidebar

This won’t seem too spammy, considering you would be placing ads to your own site rather than other products sold by third parties, and a little self-promotion doesn’t hurt anyone. So, when people clickthrough from the SERPs to your blog post, they’ll see the nice ads in the sidebar for products related to the blog post they’re about to read, which is related to their original search query.

3. Strategic Internal Linking within your posts

This is a less obvious method of funneling them through to what your business offers, because you can be sneaky and insert links readers will want to click within your posts, which will lead them to product pages or email capture pages so they can either explore your products and purchase, or so they can give up their personal information in exchange for some more free value.

4. Having an in-frame Pop-Up Offer in exchange for emails

This is a bit different from just adding email captures since it’s a far bolder move that might be seen as a bit invasive and forward, but it works really well when you have incredibly compelling offers like steep discounts on product, free things, or the promise of tremendous value in some other form.

With these different methods, you can ensure you’re capturing more leads and are converting more sales, rather than having visitors read your blog posts, think, “I learned a lot just now,” and exiting out and moving on with their lives since you didn’t funnel them to share their email or make a purchase.

Does anyone else have recommendations for ways to optimize the long-tail SEO funnel?

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4 Ways to Optimize the SEO Funnel for your Long Tail Keywords

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The question I have is about the use (or dare I say popularity) of the in-house SEO model. In-house SEO’s are just that: staffers on a company payroll that have the job of search engine optimization for an organization’s particular needs. SEO agencies ran the show for the start of the SEO era but as more and more people became skilled in the SEO arts more companies decided to bring that function in house. The chart below, however, shows the cycle might be possibly changing again.

The number of companies polled using less than 10% of their SEO budgets for agencies (which is virtually a complete in-house play) dropped from 62% to 50% from 2010 to 2011.

So does this mean that the in-house model is dead? Not by a long shot but it could indicate that the cost of carrying an in-house team has been a focus of cost conscious companies during the recent economic times. Companies may be willing to give up a lot of control (and many would argue quality) by going back to agencies because carrying pay rolled employees is bigger than just a salary and supplies. Most companies add at least 35% of an employee’s total salary to get the total cost of carrying that person with the extra money representing benefits etc.

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Everything in life and business is cyclical so maybe this is just the natural order of the SEO game. We really have so little history of the industry to make any conclusions about how these cycles might play out but in the hyper accelerated world of the Internet maybe we are there already.

One other thing the report pointed out is what SEO’s of all stripes consider to be important with regard to doing their jobs.

The rise of the mobile net is on the mind of the most search marketers with nearly 80% saying it is significant to their efforts. The biggest ‘non-issue’? The Bingahoo alliance with 55% of the respondents saying that it was not significant to them. Looks like Bing has their work cut out for them.

So what is your take on the in-house SEO vs agency issue? Is the cost of the in-house play worth the return one can get from having dedicated resources for the mission critical SEO play? Should a company look at just the cost of having staff or should they be a bit more discerning about what the value is as opposed to just the expense? Is it that maybe in-house teams aren’t returning the results that were promised? Is it that the sample for the study is not representative (in your opinion)?

Let’s hear your voice on this one.

You can get a sample of the report or purchase the full report here.

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