Sadly I’ve been spending my time on other ventures and have failed to keep my finger on the copywriting pulse. I’m going to be making some subtle changes this year to the site in an attempt to make it more user friendly and to help get more people to contact me for work. I’ve had numerous pieces of work throughout last year and I’m going to push on to try and increase the amount of work I get through here (fingers crossed). If this strategy becomes too much like hard work, I will be considering selling the site and giving it to an owner who will use it more than I do. Either way, there will be activity!!

Cheers,

Mike

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For the past year I’ve been endeavouring to rank this site as an SEO sandbox. To attain the high rankings I chose the most SEO friendly theme available WP Thesis. Thesis is for the fascist SEOers delivering your content with brutal coding and very little else. Search engines love the code as it delivers a no frills site with java no where to be seen.

Well for all the good it has done for my rankings, it has to be said that the blog is looking a little nasty. With my tag cloud (left) floating haphazardly and my twitter updates doing nothing more than filling space, it is time to give my blog a face lift and offer you some more than simple text on background.

My only concern is a drop in rankings, Google never tells you how firmly you hold the number 1 spot and how secure your ranking is. You are left with no other alternative than to take the plunge and slip a new frock on with the hope that everything stays as is.

So watch this space! I won’t be changing overnight but I’m sure you’ll notice when I blog about the success or failure of my theme transition.

Cheers

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Their time is precious, with many emails being viewed on their blackberry or iphone or simply by their secretary without getting any further.

The content needs to be direct and to the point as they can sense waffle and sales from a mile away.

A personal approach is ideal to get passed both the external and internal spam blocker. Although they know it is an automated send out, it’s nice to see that we tried to make it personal, that we made an effort. Copywriting has always had this difficult challenge, however targets of this calibre make a decision on even the smallest mistake.

So, focusing on title, content and call to action (CTA), I need to make sure the whole thing is compelling, informative and actionable.

Title
If you knew how to write the perfect subject line, you’d be the most successful writer in the world. Subject lines are often the first and largest hurdle to get over. You need a professional tone that is engaging and “clickable”, b2c tricks don’t work here, no “limited time only” or “save 25%” With b2b catchy titles just won’t do it, your message matters too, you just need them to read it.

Content   
Good content is paramount to a successful email strategy. High level communication has to be personal. CEOs and directors are people too, they are smart and can smell a sales pitch from a mile away. Being personal feels honest, a friendly approach, leaving jargon at the door to ensure you have their attention, not have them thinking a spam machine has been pumping out email after email.

A tidy CRM makes this job a lot easier, instead of “dear sir/madam” have “dear *first_name*”, sure they’ll know your CRM is getting used, but at least you tried to make your email personal, you’ll be surprised how far that goes.

Be honest. If you are inviting them to an event, be honest about the event, don’t lie about the panel or big up a speaker, directors and CEOs know each other, and often know each other well. The last thing you need is someone picking up on an extension of the truth.

Sent by
Let’s be honest, getting an email from a “sales officer” or “business development manager” or even “marketing manager” always has the sense that there is a hidden agenda (which there is). Try and get someone on a similar level to you targets to contact them, people respond well to equals and that is no different in the upper echelons of business. Send it from a director, a CEO or board member. Have a bit of guile.

Techy bits
- Have your email wired with analytics, find out bounce backs and click throughs to give you as much information to review your campaign.
- customise sent from addresses and names, don’t send it from salesgenerator@yourcompany.com or reply to sales@yourcompany.com. We have a natural spam filter and as soon as you see the word “sales” in an email that doesn’t appear to sell, you can kiss that contact goodbye.
- spelling punctuation and grammar! – I know this should be standard procedure but you’d be amazed how many emails manage to get sent out with spelling mistakes and wrong email addresses or phone numbers. Your email represents your business, if they think you can’t string a sentence together they are going to be brimming with confidence about your ability to deliver.     

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I think it’s slowly coming back! It started a couple of weeks ago when I decided to see where this page was ranking. Low and behold it’s numero uno for “professional copywriter” and “professional copywriting”. This was obviously a pleasant surprise as I already had Bing and Yahoo under my belt.

But what had i’d done to have influenced the positioning, in short, nothing. For weeks this site has only shown twitter updates and that’s about it.

If I ever needed proof that Google enjoys fresh content, this would be it.

I’ve noticed an increase in traffic 20-50 per day and I’m quite proud to be ruling the roost. Not only have I captured top stop it was almost done entirely automated.

I essentially did the following -

  – thought of a keyword phrase “professional copywriter”
  – bought a relevant domain (as above)
  – bought an SEO kick ass theme (wp thesis)
  – did the meta data dance (keyword optimize pages)
  – added the right plugins (basic seo compliancy and syndication/twitter tools)
  – linked my site from a couple of my personal pages (twitter, linkedin etc)
  – footer optimised
  – wrote 12+ articles on the train home on my android (like now)
  – set my blog to announce all my tweets on a weekly basis.

Leave for 2 months until ready. Still pink on the inside.

This military style keyword optimising with very little linking (check using seoquake) was all I needed to dominate a niche.

The next thing on my list is SERP domination. Position 2,3,4 here I come!

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…Authority and reputation!

Good blogging in B2B can be an incredibly powerful and pursuasive tool. If you have authority and reputation online you are in the driving seat. You could be a small business, but if your online presence is fighting above it’s weight, you instantly become an industry figure and one which usually is able to provide a service with lower overhead costs.

Your online reputation takes time to create and requires consistant commitment for it to succeed.

How to build Authority
Building authority is therefore the aim of the game. If you become an authority online, it is the quickest and highest ROI return for your companies brand.

So how do you build it?

You simply need to produce quality content and contribute to the industry better than anything else.
If your company provides a service, write about it, tell people industry secrets and report about any industry news. Equally interact with other industry blogs. If you disagree with a particular article someone has written, write a reply and link to it from the original post.

People won’t know who you are if you don’t put yourself out there!

Quality Content
The importance of quality content cannot be emphasised enough in B2B blogging. If you can consistantly produce content which is valued by the industry, they will continue to come back for more. Generating this content requires skill and knowledge, your entire team needs to show that they have the ability and technical know how to be industry leaders.

Ultimate Linkbait

Linkbait is a term used in the blogosphere to describe content that gets people talking and linking. This linking can occur if something is funny and shocking, people want to tell their friends about it and do so through links. In B2B you can’t tell jokes all of the time. The best way to link build within an industry community is to produce content that the community want to read, watch or listen to.
If you produce quality content you will gather links from industry sites. For SEOers out there, we don’t have to think a lot about how much of a good thing that is.

Regularly creating useful content is the best way of becoming bigger.

Conversation
Who do you notice at a party, the quiet guy in the corner or the guy talking to everyone about interesting topics, not only is he smart but he values your opinion and agrees and disagrees with confidence. Being a social commentator online requires a lot of industry knowledge and interaction and people can recognise that in comments, articles and tweets etc.

Be the guy everyone wants to talk to. Don’t open your mouth and sound like a fool, but equally, don’t eavesdrop on peoples conversation and remain silent. How many times have you read an article, had an opinion and then not put any comments. Contribute! (Preferably below)

If you want to discuss your business contact me today through the contact us form or leave a comment. Bloggers don’t bite!

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For SEOers it is vital that each of these pages is different*.

*different being
No generic metadata.
No duplicate content
No generic image names
No generic copy.

For usabilty and SEO it is important to have information on the product displayed on the page. If you have 30+ products of a similar nature, this is more difficult than it sounds. The content needs to be keyword focused pushing that particular product.
The product title needs to reflect the products individual terms rather than a generic e.g. batman deluxe costume instead of batman costume1 batman costume 2. This adds to the user experience and also means that 2 of your pages aren’t competing on exact terms.

you maybe thinking that successful retail sites such as amazon.com and play.com don’t practice this strategy, and you’d be right, however they have something you don’t, millions of pages, millions of backlink, millions of affiliates and more content than you can shake a stick at. They don’t need to focus on keywords, they naturally rank well.

However focusing on long tail keywords can often show you your marketplace and the potential of keyword focussing.

Recently I did some keyword research for a client of mine, looking to sell shoes online. He makes great margins and was looking at the best way of selling. He had a problem. He only sold mens leather shoes.
So I took off doing KW research looking at competition for his terms.
Now this is what I found, type in “mens shoes” into google and/or look at the keyword tool. Apparently the term gets 1.5 million local searches per month!

As you’d expect, the big boys schuh, asos etc were ranking for that term, they have more money and people to throw at SEO than my client (sadly) I then looked for “leather shoes” which gets roughly 800,000 monthly searches (still a lot) and the sites ranking were small companies occupy the space, no big brands, no high street stores. Just independant companies.

The big boys tend to ignore the lesser keywords, and Google tends to benefit this set up. By that I mean, you wouldn’t get a brilliant user experience if one site was ranking organically for every variation of a given term I.e. if Schuh ranked for every shoe term, Google could seem bias by ranking mega brands everywhere.

Google’s willingness to give users choice over different terms gives you the opportunity to get a slice of the pie, and forces big brands to focus on the big terms and you get the crumbs, potentially large crumbs.

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As a result of this strong focus, the meta data and onsite copy is often very similar with very little informative content. With this in mind it does create issues with the effectiveness of the site. If people land and read some KW copy they will quickly deduce that the content isn’t the works Billy Shakespeare.

This content therefore gets them to act, whether it is to return to the SERPs or to click through!

Is there is an attractive call to action amidst the copy, this has a proportionately high chance of getting clicked on if the copy isn’t compelling! Sure the page ranks for a particular term but if the copy lacks information then they are left with only one option, action!

Now I’m not suggesting that copywriters should be producing spam content and creating dross copy for microsites, but what I am saying is that the negatives for SEO based content is ‘unclear’.

I appreciate that bad email content can have a negative response but with microsite click throughs, people appreciate that if Google determine a site deserves to be in the SERPs for a particular term, then the site must be trustworthy (which it is) therefore they instantly trust the site and the call to action which exists on that page!

It will be interesting to see the difference between evocative and well written copy to SEO content with excellent CTA.

Just a thought!

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Saw this video today from Dailymotion.com. In short, it rocks! It may have little to do with copywriting, in fact it has nothing to do with copywriting.

Enjoy!

When writing for clients, the most important part is their client base, their customers and the people they are looking to convert. Depending on the type of customers they keep depends on your writing style and inevitably effects your copy.

Writing b2c. (Business to customer) is predominantly an easier readership, than b2b(business to business) simply because the people reading your content are often the decision makers, they’re often the people who want what you sell and have the money in their pocket to buy it.

From a copywriting perspective this makes life a little easier, identifying why they want your product, what appeals to them and how they feel when they have your product is pretty easy to write, basic market research and demographic analysis will give you what you need to know.

Another big benefit of b2c is the fact that there is one person reading your copy, the same person wanting your product and the same person holding the money, in b2b it’s quite different.

In b2b the content has to show them the benefits of picking you, for everyone that reads it, both secretary, manager, buyer and director all need to see the benefits of picking you, each person has different needs and will have different views of your product.

Allow me to explain…

The secretary – these are the people you should focus on predominantly, not only are they your first port of call in communicating with a potential client, but they also tend to read the most copy. How many directors ask their secretary or PA to look for a particular service. “Find a decent web agency, decorator, restaurant, training provider, etc. You can name anything and at some point, a secretary has made the first decision in picking you. A recruiter friend of mine called secretaries “the gatekeepers” and I couldn’t agree more, they are your first way in and often all you need.

Managers – in larger organisations managers will often be looking to acquire a particular product and service. In the dog eat dog world of middle management you need to look after number 1, so much so it carries into how they read your copy.
When choosing you they want to make themselves look brilliant, make themselves look like they’ve done the job, bought the best product or got the right service. Here they might not actually care about what YOU do, but how it will make THEM look.

Copywriters the world over accept that sometimes your readers don’t care what you sell!

Directors – The big fish are often the trickiest, as now your copy has to please 2 readers at the same time. A director has asked their secretary to find a product or service, you’ve managed to get on their list of 5, the list is then emailed or handed to the director(s) for them to make their decision, you copy needs to please them too!
You need to determine the balance between quality and price that exists in your marketplace, how much do your clients like good value compared to high quality, try and give them both. In an ideal world writing for a director is very similar to b2c again, you just need to add facts and figures to emphasize you USPs.

B2b content is often more difficult to write, but the rewards are always greater, business sales and contracts are often large and in turn people are willing to pay more if you can help them get a sale.

I’d love to know your thoughts on b2c vs b2b and how it affects your marketing strategies.

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Writing seo friendly copy is all about getting the balance right, giving search engines what they want and getting your message across to readers. I’ll look at each party separately as they both need your undivided attention.

Google et al

Firstly, Google in particular are closing the gap between search engines and humans, trying to reach the holy grail which is, “what is good for search engines is equally good for readers” for example, they announced a while back that they have disregarded meta keywords as an seo attribute, yet still place a great deal of emphasis on meta descriptions, this is due to the fact that users see meta descriptions and not meta keywords, similarly Google are using page loading times to attribute SEO compliancy, again because users are browsing using mobile technology, where heavy java and chunky coding simply will take to long to load up.

The kind guys at search engine journal announced this boldly last week, although the rest of the SEO community found this in webmaster tools months ago!

With this in mind it is making copywriters focus on what the internet is all about, information! Original content, video and image media and social media has never had so much value under SEO, aligning both human need with search engine compliancy.

People with the money – humans

Writing for humans is the paramount of all online content, without which you wouldn’t be writing at all. This needs to have slightly higher priority than search engines in my opinion as the internet allows different channels to get traffic to your landing page. Your landing page better be good otherwise you won’t get goal conversions, no matter how many people visit your site.
Optimising media for humans is very similar to search engines. If you imagine that through browser issues, visitors cannot see images or video, only the text attached to the content, you’d want that content to contain information helpful for humans to still understand what the image/video contained. This form of media is as important as ever now that search engines are including the content in the SERPs.

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