Working Web Copy

I’ve been asked after about a month-long trial to be a regular contributor to PC World’s Business Center (and yes, Canadians, that is how it’s spelled south of our border). I’m extremely humbled by this and look forward to helping PC World business readers navigate through the choppy waters of tech. You can read all of my posts so far at http://www.pcworld.com/author/Angela-West.

I’ve also created a Facebook page as well. If you want to follow all of my posts, I’ll be posting them up there. The Facebook URL is http://www.facebook.com/angelawestwriter.

If you are a small business, I highly recommend checking out Business Center since the whole purpose of the site is to translate all the goings-on in tech into terms real business owners can understand, and all of the writers on the site do a great job of sticking to this mandate.

With services like Hootsuite, you can write your Tweets all at once and schedule them to publish on Twitter whenever you want. This is a huge time saver for people who like to curtail the time that they spend on social media. Depending on how frequently you want to tweet, you can take a few minutes at the beginning of your day and plan your tweets.

The only drawback to this is not being able to respond to people who ask you questions about your tweets throughout the day. Luckily, Twitter has a solution for this. Most of us pry ourselves away from social media throughout the day, but are always jacked in to our email. You can set your preferences in Twitter for Twitter to email you when someone responds to your tweets, saving you valuable checking time that can easily lead you away from your work. This way, you can just pop onto Hootsuite, respond to the person, and get back to what you were doing.

Take advantage of this feature by sounding more “real” through asking your followers questions and other things that make it look like you are on Twitter right now, breathlessly waiting to answer questions. Even if you are not.

If you need someone to manage your social media marketing, we do that. Contact us for a personalized quote for your business.

There’s a reason that I insist on starting most of my projects from scratch. I’ve seen copy from clients that is “overwritten”. I have to edit it down harshly without regard for the feelings of the client if we both want it to be effective.

Here are a few tips on how to recognize and fix overwritten copy.

Florid Language

I just rewrote a website that I’m convinced Chaucer worked on. While “forsooth” wasn’t being used, it was just a tiny hair away from entering the paragraph. If your language has more flowers than a royal garden, slash and burn until you are left with something a little less heady.

Example: “Our company purveys the utmost in shoe leathers, exquisite craftsmanship is our aim.”
Should be: “We sell expertly crafted shoe leathers.”

Lack of subheads

If your piece is online and lacking the subheadings you see throughout this post, go back and sprinkle them in where it makes sense to do so. This will break up the text and make it easier to scan online.

Slay your sacred cows

If you find yourself spending hours crafting a turn of phrase, chances are good that it will come off stilted and overwritten. “Inspired writing” is something to save for your first novel, not advertising copy.

Don’t be afraid to be casual

Old school corporate language was stilted and boring. It doesn’t translate well into web copy. The same stuff that worked for a bank’s website or marketing material even fifteen years ago will not work now. Clients are younger and hipper and enjoy a fresh perspective, and if you can give it to them you’ll have an edge over your corporatespeak competitors.

Have you got any overwritten or corporatespeak copy that you’d like to have fixed? Contact me and I’ll get you a free quote.

I am pleased to report that I am booked up completely until the end of March of 2011. During this time, I will continue to service existing clients, but will be unable to take on new ones.

If you require web copywriting services, please contact me anyway at info@workingwebcopy.com and I will be pleased to refer you to other web copywriting professionals.

Are you in the Hamilton area? If so, come see my presentation tomorrow night on “WordPress 101″. It isn’t so much a standing up and talking at you sort of thing as it is a hands-on help session with the CMS that we all know and love. If you need help getting your WordPress site off the ground, or have a particular technical bugaboo that is haunting you, consider this the magic bullet to getting it solved. There is a meager cover charge and it is taking place at Hamilton’s arts incubator, the Cossart Exchange. See you there!

I am taking a few minutes out of my busy day to write this post just to make sure you are all aware of something really, really important that is developing in the social media sphere. Reddit is now a vital part of the social media landscape.

Before, Reddit was a nice to have. I used to like to call it “Digg for adults” until the new Digg caused Digg’s user base to migrate to something where they could do something that was the equivalent of the “Bury” function. While this sounds like a negative, this means that there are many more eyeballs on Reddit now than there were just a few months ago and as such you need to make sure that it is in your social media toolkit.

How do you do this? Install a plugin on your blog or website to ensure that users can submit to Reddit. I wouldn’t take away your Digg button just yet but you may want to give it less prominence than it had before. After you write a post, make sure you submit it to Reddit using your submission button. Try to do this daily to become a respected Redditor.

Make sure you submit other items to Reddit as well in addition to your own properties, and participate by commenting in the community. This will mean that your own stories are less likely to be voted down by an individual.

I have noticed real results from promoting client blogs and my own blogs on Reddit. One of them is up by 15% in overall visitors, and that is no accident. Submission to Reddit is the only thing that has significantly changed. Couldn’t you use a 15% boost to your traffic?

Check it out at http://www.reddit.com

No matter how small your business is, you can always commit a small budget to Google Adwords or other forms of online advertising. In my case, I have the princely budget of $100.00 a month. It isn’t a lot, but consistently putting myself in front of people who are searching for the services I offer is a completely necessary marketing expense. Here are some tips for running an effective PPC campaign for a one or two person small business.

1. Sign up for Adsense
Start a blog in an area that interests you or an area that you feel you are qualified to give expertise in. Then, sign up for Adsense and start reaping in some small profits by displaying Google ads on your site. It puts you on Google’s radar and drives them to send you coupons for free Adwords credits.

2. Get Google Coupons for Adwords
Once you’ve been an Adsense user for at least a few months, you’ll inevitably get a coupon for a free credit of $50.00 to $100.00 to start up an Adwords account with them. You could see if you could just skip the wait by e-mailing or calling them, but I found that the coupon offers were fairly regular, and the amount went up the longer I held out. For the record, I haven’t seen a coupon for more than $100.00.

3. Use the Credit to Learn
Use Google’s money to learn how to manage an effective PPC campaign. The first thing you’ll want to do is set a daily budget, so that your account isn’t drained within minutes. Then, make sure to exclude sites that you don’t want your ads appearing on. In my case, I don’t want ads to appear on freelance writing sites, since I don’t want other freelance writers clicking on my ads to check out my business model, so I blocked all the top ones and used my credit to block any more that I saw consistent traffic from. Don’t pay to have people in your industry check out your business model, go where your clients are.

4. Profit
I have obtained a few clients through internet searches, which may or may not have included viewing of my PPC ads. Remember that an ad says “I care enough about my business to advertise” and clients are more likely to take you seriously as a result. Advertising attracts the right kind of clients; the kind that respect that you are a business.

I recently completed an in-depth feature on buying your first cottage, published in this month’s edition of Buying Your First Home magazine. It is available at any Chapters or Indigo in Canada, or anywhere you usually pick up magazines beyond your local variety store.

For this feature, I interviewed several real estate agents, a real estate lawyer, mortgage professionals, and many others to garner tips on how to go about buying your first cottage. I think you’ll love it, particularly if a cottage is a dream that you think is far-off; check out the advice given in the article, it may not be as far off as you think.

Their website: http://www.yourfirsthomecanada.ca/.

We hear it every day in the world of the internet – how are you creating value online? Are you participating in conversations on Twitter? Are you engaging with the internet community by commenting on other blogs? Are you participating?

Participation is important, but you shouldn’t stop there. If you are actively trying to run a business, any business, you should have a “giveback”; basically something that helps out other people, for no other reason than just to help. Mine is a blog on freelance writing jobs that pays me the princely sum of $100.00 every few months through Google ads, and will likely never pay more than that. Yes, I am toiling at it for about $1.00 an hour, but it helps people. And it makes me a solid, trusted member of writing communities that I will never sell my services to.

I could go on about karma and all of that hippie stuff, but in the end it comes down to this – the more you put out, the more you get back. Doesn’t matter what it is – if you are donating even a fraction of your profits to organizations like kiva.org, or volunteering at a local senior’s home or food bank, you’re giving back. If you have employees, take an afternoon off once a month and volunteer together as a team for a team-building exercise that beats the pants off of paintball.

If I am donating money as a private individual, I ask for it to be done anonymously. There are two reasons for this – one, I don’t want to end up on any donor lists. My VOIP phone number is happily not present on any phone directories that telemarketers can get their paws on – yet – I’m sure the day will come. Secondly, I don’t want to be named. True charity has no name.

However, if you are donating time and/or money on behalf of a business, certainly make a note of it in your marketing. People like me who recognize the community value of givebacks will give you props and have more trust in your business as a result. The era of faceless corporations is done, and everything is just a little more personal now in the world of business.

How can you get started? One, pick a charity or local community effort. Political parties are great to support as a private individual, but as a business you risk turning off half of your customers. Secondly, commit to an amount that you know you can manage. If 1% of profits is all you can definitively promise, that is fine. Anything is better than nothing. Thirdly, make sure that you are tastefully mentioning your efforts rather than full-on advertising them. If you are going too far with advertising charity donations it looks disingenuous.

Start slowly, and you may find that your cause becomes your passion, and your business and team become better for it.

If you have a Twitter account, you by now know what a “social media expert” is. They profess endless knowledge of the search engines while sporting a minimal client base and a dubious background. I’m often asked about social media, having a bit of background in this field, so here are some hard facts about it and myths that need to be dispelled.

1. Nobody Can Guarantee Results in the Top 20

The search engine results pages are like waves on the ocean. Any effort at search engine optimization will raise your results, but nobody can guarantee top 20 results without using dubious methods, such as spammy directory listings and reciprocal link programs where your site is being linked to 500 others without your knowledge.

The only thing that an SEO company should be guaranteeing is that they will be spending a certain amount of time on your account for a certain amount of money; it is this time, and not simply entry into their spam database, that will yield solid and lasting results.

2. Black Hat Methods Are Short Term

Black Hat refers to methods such as the ones used above. Some businesses will actively seek out black hat SEO companies in order to get good results, as they want them at any cost. In the end, that “any cost” may be too high. Sure, if you are just selling a flash-in-the-pan ebook or are marketing for a event that takes place on a certain date, Black Hat SEO may actually be your friend. For the average business that wants to rank more highly on a consistent basis, you should not be actively seeking this kind of firm out.

3. White Hats May Actually Be Black Hats with a Mask

Some white hatters do legitimately use methods that may be considered “grey”. Realistically, there is nothing wrong with that unless you are sitting firmly on a very high horse. However, there are some companies out there who market that they exclusively use “white hat” SEO methods when they are actually anything but when you check out their business.

To see if there is some shadiness going on, check out their client sites, and if they won’t let you see their client sites, that is a red flag right there. Check for any links to website directories; a common method used to gain rankings is to turn all of your client sites into a giant link farm that may help client rankings, but will bleed valuable Google Page Rank away from your site because you are linking to an untrustworthy internet ghetto rather than a lovely, trustworthy neighbourhood.

Check also for consistent keyword-stuffed copy on site pages. This was a common early 00′s method to raise website rankings, and many SEO companies still use this outdated and much frowned-upon method. If your words are not human readable, your site is not trustworthy, and people will not buy from you.

4. Real Social Media Experts Offer to Train You

Social media is not a mysterious beast that only a chosen few can master. If you can surf the internet, you can use social media. A real social media expert won’t set themselves up as being a master of an occult art; rather they will be approachable and offer to educate you on how to do it yourself, sometimes for a fee, sometimes as a part of the project that they are working on for you. Granted, not everyone is tech-savvy, but they will at least try to put the tools in your hands that you need to succeed with social media.

In the end, good use of social media such as Reddit, Stumble Upon, Twitter and the rest in conjunction with well-written content will win over both customers and search engines. There are back-end code issues that may be affecting your search engine optimization efforts, and any good web design firm will be able to sort those out for you. If you want me to recommend any, just drop me a line.