Working Web Copy

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.

Over the past few months, I’ve managed interns both for my own business and for other websites that I work for. It has come to my attention that while a lot of businesses treat interns well and actually teach them things, others don’t treat them well at all. I learned this from direct experience when I “rescued” an intern from what was frankly gross mistreatment at the hands of a large media conglomerate. I’ve drawn up this list of what you owe your interns for those of you who are considering hiring them.

1. An Education

Your interns come to you as a credit towards their graduation. That means in the short time that they are with you, you are their teachers. You have an obligation to actually teach them something over and above throwing them in a chair and telling them to go to it. If they can’t write headlines, sit down with them and show them how rather than just correcting them. If they have a hard time finding sources for a story, help them find those sources and teach them how to do so. This is time-consuming, but it is your obligation.

2. Treat Them Like Human Beings

They are not gutter snipes. They are human beings, albeit usually younger ones. This means that they are likely to get distracted and may care more about what’s happening on Facebook than what is happening in your business, but give them a chance and they will do excellent work for you.

3. Remember That They are Working for Free

While your contract with the intern means that they are working for you as an employee, they are nonetheless working for free. This means if they want to spend a little extra time on Facebook, you may want to ease off the urge to block access. You do need to give interns specific tasks to complete in a certain period of time, otherwise you are the failure, not the intern.

4. Evaluations are not the Place for Revenge Fantasies

Like any other employee, your personal views on the intern and their character don’t belong in a review. Look only at the job that they did, and keep #3 heavily in mind. The performance review may go towards their grades, so don’t give them a negative review unless they really deserve it, and that would be under some circumstance like they didn’t show up half the time or didn’t do a good job with their work. In the case of the intern I poached from Big Media, she was given bad marks because she had a “lack of creativity”, something that was laughably ironic considering the publication it came from.

5. Don’t Hire Interns Unless you are Prepared to Work With Them

Interns are not “hit the ground running” people. They are trained with basic journalism skills and that is all. Rarely do they come to you with anything close to the kind of experience that you are used to an employee having. That is why they are there. You will have to edit their work more thoroughly and spend actual time with them. If you can’t commit to that, don’t do it to start with.

There is far too much time spent on what interns owe the companies that they work for and not nearly enough time spent talking about what we owe them. Without interns, most large media companies may actually not be able to meet payroll, or at the very least would have to pay people for the tasks that interns currently accomplish. Here’s to the interns, and a happy graduation to all of you.

A couple of weeks ago, I was meeting a prospective (now current) client in a Starbucks. Behind me, there were two gentlemen discussing how they found it impossible to “sell” their clients on Twitter. Once I left, I started thinking up methods that they could have used.

1. Find Articles in Business Magazines
Business people trust business magazines and magazine websites more than anything else except the advice of their colleagues. Within seconds of searching, I found this excellent article on Twitter at Entrepreneur.com. Put together a print dossier of 2-3 business magazine articles to send to your clients who are still on the fence about Twitter.

2. Take a Deep Breath
Web designers and other digital media professionals are early adopters. We have often spent so much time researching these things for ourselves that we are amazed when others don’t “come around” the way that we do. With Twitter, you have the added bonus of people actually getting mad about being told that they should adopt it, with the oft-cited phrase “I don’t have time!”. If you have time to play Farmville on Facebook, you’ve got time to tweet. Problem being, you can’t say this to your clients. Just take a deep breath when someone gives you attitude about Twitter, and move on with the facts. You can still “sell” them on Twitter, just keep in mind that they need to go through a different process than you did.

3. Go Tweet Yourself
The best way to “sell” anyone on anything is to consistently use it well yourself. Change your e-mail signature to include your Twitter username. Do the same with your business cards. Then tweet whenever you have anything interesting to add to a conversation or to say to the world at large. You can then point to your own profile and give your own testimonials about how Twitter worked for you.

The client I was meeting in that Starbucks? I direct messaged them on Twitter and I have undertaken two copy projects for them so far, with a third on the way.

Twitter works. All you need to do is show your client results and they’ll be sold.

There have been some rather sloppy standards that have sprung up in the last couple of years in regards to the use of proper spelling and grammar on the internet. News organizations tell themselves that “it’s OK” to have bad spelling and grammar because their bottom lines are enriched from outsourcing their copy editors to Asia.

Don’t follow the model of the news organizations. Personally, I’ve sworn off of msnbc.com and cnn.com because they constantly have mistakes in their copy, and that makes me question the validity of their journalism. I only read cbc.ca and bbc.co.uk for my news now.

There is no doubt that outsourcing anything to Asia is attractive. There are certain professions that can be easily outsourced with minimal impact to the quality of the work done. Writing is not one of them. You will not get, keep and maintain readership interest if your content is riddled with copy errors, poor research, or grammatical mistakes. Think about what you like to read on the internet; do you trust eHow.com articles to give you good information? Do you immediately click off of Yahoo Answers if you click on it by accident?

There is no better way to convey professionalism than to have a site with proper spelling and grammar, especially when you are dealing with business web copy. The argument that a page with spelling mistakes feels more “real” and “personable” doesn’t quite hold up, even for a blog posting. The better your writing is, the more trust your customers will have for your brand and your product.

That is a very good question. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) writing is really what anyone who has been writing for the web for a while does; this is just the industry term for it. What exactly goes into proper SEO writing?

Keyword Analysis
There are several tools you can use to do keyword analysis; the only one I use is the Google Keyword Tool. Before you start writing your page or blog posting, you use the tool to develop a short list of short tail and long tail keywords. I usually use two short tail phrases and about three long tail phrases. Short tail phrases are common searches, such as “green living”.

Long Tail Defined
Long tail phrases are more narrowly defined, and would be something like “organic web content writer”. You then use these phrases in your body copy, with long tail phrases at the top and bottom, without making them sound awkward. The keywords shape your copy, you don’t insert them into your copy. You can, but it ends up being more awkward if you do.

Writing in Digestible Chunks
Humans and search engines both like copy that is structured like this article; a headline followed by a paragraph. Don’t make your paragraphs too long either. This also allows readers to skip over areas which they feel they don’t need

Write Decent Headlines
This is especially important for blog posts; your readers are likely using an RSS feed to pick out the posts that they want to read, so make it engaging and don’t make it too short.

There is a lot more to SEO writing, and a lot more to SEO in general. One thing clients have to understand is that SEO does not stop at writing. Decent content is only part of the package; you also need clean code and a link building program. It is also the responsibility of people who do web copywriting for a living to forge relationships with web designers and SEO specialists who can further help clients with these areas of their website presence. It takes a village to make a good website and market it properly.

This week, I wrote a screed about content mills over at my freelance writing jobs site. One of their defenders wrote in a comment that they were advertising on my blog, so I took action; I removed them all from my Google Adsense.

What was left was stunning. There were relevant, interesting ads that I would have clicked on had I been allowed to do so. I wasn’t the only one who noticed; my CTR’s ballooned soon after.

Do you have a couple of “industry giants” who pay for the highest spot on PPC ads running ads on your Adsense? Take them off and see what happens. Hopefully, you’ll be as pleasantly surprised at the results as I was!

So you’ve gone and got yourself a blog because you realize that having one is intrinsic to participation in this “social media” thing all the kids are doing. First of all, pat yourself on the back. Go ahead, nobody can see you.

Your first question is probably how often you have to blog. This is a good question. You will get different answers to this question depending on who you ask. As someone who has maintained blogs for a while, this is mine.

The more often you blog, the more often you are feeding fresh content to Twitter and search engines. Once a day is ideal. If this is an impossible number for you, go for a few times a week. People will still appreciate that you are updating your content often, as will search engines.

Most companies only blog about once a week, on average. If this is the case with your company, try to make up for it by setting up a couple of trusted employees with access to a Twitter account and have them Tweet news pieces, interesting articles and generally anything that has to do with the business. These will probably be the best people to manage the blog postings as they will be more in touch with your customers.

I have been running a freelance writing jobs site for just over a year. In the first eight months or so, ad revenue was zero to very little, all because I believed the site was just gaining traction. After about a year and a healthy following, I noticed that ad revenue was completely flat. This led me to start troubleshooting. I made a very small change that has seemed to make all the difference; I started using whitespace around my ads.

Prior to that, I had my ads fill up one of my sidebars, which essentially made it blend in with the background of the design. Other sites use this technique, including theweathernetwork.ca. If you visit pages in their site, you will notice that they use about a half inch of whitespace on either side of their ads on the left sidebar. Same goes for my site at freelancewritingjobs.ca.

If you don’t think your ads are performing, make this small change and see what happens. Worked for me! I’d love to know how it worked for you if you want to e-mail me or leave a comment.