Power of Words website

Power of Words - our Copywriting site

When business people think of getting a brochure or website developed, they often start by getting a quote from their favoured graphic designer, who then obliges and starts asking about the design. The designer makes a start, but then find he can’t go any further with the project without content.

Unfortunately, business owners are often juggling many balls – and the copy (words) gets overlooked and left… sometimes for months.  The reason for this could be lack of time (busy on earning activities), or lack of knowledge of how to approach the writing.

Either way, the business owner or marketer should not be the sole person who is responsible for the copy and content. Just as designers exist to ensure artwork is balanced, attractive and print ready (or web ready), editors exist to ensure your grammar is perfect, consistent, and correct in voice. People wanting professional material hire an editor.

But if you struggle to write, the solution is hire a copy-writer (that’s a writer of copy). A copywriter is trained to write to get results – so the approach is a little different. If sales conversion from written collateral is important to you, the solution is… a copywriter. Making a document compelling to read is what makes our heart sing.

All you will need to supply is info on your target market, your business proposition, benefits to customers (these can often be found in client testimonials), product features, what you will use the brochure for, and what you want to achieve. Even the desired length and form of the piece can be worked out collaboratively from what you say about its purpose (with a mind for practical things like posting through the mail and printing costs).

Building a Theme with Niche Keywords

Many people have a simplistic view of keywords. Just putting two word phrases commonly searched for onto your website isn’t enough. You need to attract the right visitors from the right selection of keywords.  Search engines are actually quite clever at working out themes through indexing methods, saving you the job of over-thinking keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing method that identifies patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts. Words used within the same context (i.e. ‘new computers’ and ‘MacBook Pro’) have a relationship. With this relationship in mind, you can organise a keyword list into themes of related keywords. It’s pretty much how our mind likes to work anyway.

From those themes, your site’s best structure and content will start to emerge.

Tools to Help You

If you don’t have the benefit of your own consumer research, there are tools to help derive keyword relationships, like Google’s Wonderwheel. Wonderwheel, listed on the left side of Google.com search results, shows related keyword phrases that can be used to build subpages within each of your categories. (Just click to show the wheel’s results).

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book ‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ explains the theory that its best to concentrate on the smaller, more focused end of the customer movements/sales chart (i.e. the long thin tail). Since this book come out, every Internet guru has been talking about how to apply this methodology to internet search (keyword research).

As you assign related keywords based on their relationships, it may be you end up with several long-tail keyword phrases. This is a good thing. Achieving rankings for one or two-word queries (e.g. ‘web design, ‘landscape gardeners’, ‘car sales’) are important, but most experienced marketers have found they  generate the MOST targeted clicks and BEST sales conversions from three- to five-word queries (web design Brisbane, landscape design Sydney).

What I do is use the Market Samurai tool to investigate more three-word or longer keyword phrases. If you’ve got money on the line, then I suggest spending some time to research current market trends and keyword searches… it’s better than fumbling in the Internet darkness.

To understand why site structure – navigation and linking – is so important, first we must understand Page Rank. At Google, the algorithms measure the “authority” that a domain builds up over time, mainly through linking.

Link Building. If other sites link to a particular site, this is a prime indicator to the search engines of that site’s importance. It doesn’t matter whether this has been a natural occurrence or the web manager has helped it along a little with correct linking strategies. And if many sites in a particular niche hyperlink to the website (i.e. it’s not a paid ad), this tells the search engines that the site is important in that industry.

Getting relevant incoming links is important.

Page rank flows like a river. Any page with authority (good links, been around for a while) can also pass on authority, both to external sites and to other pages within the same website. Now imagine the best possible relevant pages which could recommend you… leaders in their/your field, bloggers, advertising giants, creative genie, etc.

This work will lead you to know where to go to get links back… links that improve both search traffic and page ranking. Their authority can boost your pages’ and domain’s authority.

See part 2 of this post in “Building Themes with Niche Keywords”.

As a recipient of a barrage of daily emails, all requested, it’s easy to come up with ten common email mistakes from Businesses trying to sell me something…

  1. Promoting a live event but not mentioning WHERE it is in the email… hello, I don’t want to get on a plane for a two hour seminar?
  2. Jabbering on about yourself first, and burying the goodies for ME (that is, the reader) way down the email. (Had one today about Ms Entrepreneur’s exciting trip overseas; a benefit for the reader was four paragraphs in).
  3. Not using bold and headings, if using HTML. Studies show that readers prefer use of boldface and colours actually.
  4. Only using graphics, as some of us can’t be bothered downloading the graphics if we don’t know what it’s all about. Try to have ‘alt’ text for every image.
  5. Forgetting to put your business PHONE number and general location, with no links to website. Call to action anybody?
  6. Assuming people will remember you (especially if they signed up from a free offer). Make it easier for them with perhaps a head & shoulders picture of yourself and a standardised header/logo (with a tagline to explain what it’s all about). It’s easy to put in the line “You signed up for Read By Design newsletter at www.information.com.au” at the top.
  7. Not bothering to READ your own email, which possibly contains typos. I suggest you print out the email and have your other half read it, especially if grammar is not a strong point.
  8. Not testing your email in different viewers (Gmail, Outlook, Entourage) and not ‘spam testing’ the words – all can be done inside Email Marketer or similar (an email marketing system here in Australia).
  9. Blasting untargeted emails out with offers, and forgetting to build relationships through great value advice. Also get feedback about desired communication frequency.
  10. Forgetting to test and measure the campaigns. Which newsletters had the best open rate? Test your email subject lines (e.g. half with your standard type of subject lines, and half with intriguing but not misleading subject lines).

Thanks for reading, and remember the copywriting code: What’s in It For Me?

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