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.

I am in the enviable but harried position of needing to turn away new clients. If you are looking for a top notch web copywriter, web designer or SEO expert, please do not hesitate to contact me for a referral. I will let you know in this space when I can once again open myself back up for business.

If you currently have a project underway with me, don’t worry; everything is full speed ahead. I’m just working on some big and wonderful things that I can’t wait to share with everyone; and everyone will know about them soon.

Best Regards,

Angela West

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 found Twitter search to be indispensable for my freelance writing business. Whenever I run up against a saturated keyword that has search engine results pages that are polluted by nothing but Yahoo Answers, paid search, and eHow articles, I turn to Twitter search to get some quality results.

One example is the term “green products” or “organic products”. I write a daily blog on green living and search for new and unique green products to share with my readers. I have all but given up on Google as a source now that I have discovered Twitter real time search. The products I find on Twitter are new, they are interesting, and best of all I don’t have to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant search results. They are ALL relevant. This allows me to drill down on my information within seconds, where before it would take me up to 30 minutes to find a good product to blog about.

I find traditional search results are getting clogged with bad content from content mills, enough that I have lost faith in the depth of material available to me on a traditional search. How many of you feel the same way? Here is a list of the sites I am talking about:

Yahoo Answers
eHow
Examiner.com
Suite101.com
hubpages.com

I have consistently found that pages from these sites return results with bad data and worse writing. Twitter search seems like a much more viable option to weed out these bad apples.

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.

While a group hasn’t taken direct responsiblity for the hacking of Twitter on December 17th, 2009, it is clear that it is a pro-Iran group. Techcrunch postulates that these incidents will be fewer and further between with the hiring of new security experts and engineers at Twitter.

Given its participatory nature, Twitter will always be a target of hackers. While the attempt could have been made by a pro-Iran cabal, it could have just as easily been any number of groups that may try to galvanize the other side of the issue with such an action. Who knows.

For me the big takeaway was that if you use your Twitter password for other accounts, now would be the time to change that password on those other accounts and Twitter. It took me a few minutes, but it is possible that it saved me a world of grief. I advise all of my clients and friends to do the same.

In all the cacophony of tweets and Twitter, we’ve forgotten about Facebook as anything more than a method of communication and a means to play some online games. Why should we still care about Facebook?

People in all age groups still log in to Facebook almost daily to keep up with friends, check messages and play games. Some are even using Facebook messages as the primary communication mode with family and friends over e-mail. This makes the audience large, captive, and easy to target.

If you have a small to medium-sized business, a Facebook group is still a good idea. If you have a larger company, a Facebook fan page in addition to a group is a good idea. If you are trying to reach customers within a specific geographic area and demographic, there is a lot to be said for advertising on Facebook to establish brand image and drive sales.

In the end, we produce more valuable and in-depth content and communication on Facebook than we have yet to realize on Twitter. While ads are probably the best avenue to explore on the popular networking site, a group and fan page are free to start.