Category Archives: Business Development

Something to keep in mind when it comes to paying your content writer

I am writing this blog post for the benefit of those clients who often wonder why they should pay the amount I’m asking for. In more than 90% cases it doesn’t happen, but I think even if 10% clients have some doubt it makes sense to explain to them, what they are paying for.

What is content writing basically?

Content writing is of many forms but what I provide is a service that should help you build your business and put your best foot forward. I’m not in the business of providing $3-articles to improve your search engine rankings (they rarely do, and even if they do, it is a fluke that sometimes work and most of the times doesn’t).

I help you convey your message in a manner that it convinces your customers and clients to put your trust into your product or service (and into you) and consequently, do business with you. What I provide is a mix of content writing and copywriting. I might not be an excellent writer (I am gradually getting there) but when you want to speak your mind and when you want to make the right impact, I can certainly help you.

My content writing is a mix of content writing and copywriting

The fundamental purpose of copywriting is to help you sell, whether it is your product, your service, or your ideology or idea. Content writing on the other hand educates and informs your present and prospective customers and clients and creates a ripe ground for the business to take place.

So the content on your business website must be a balanced cocktail of content writing and copywriting. This is especially true when I’m writing for your homepage. Think of your home page as your front office if you open a brick and mortar business. You would like it to look its best and you won’t decorate it with cheap stuff. Every item in your front office reeks of professionalism.

Your website is your online office and your homepage is your front office. Although unlike a brick and mortar office, there are as many entrances to your website as there are pages and blog posts under your domain, eventually, sooner or later, people reach your homepage and this is where the most critical impact is made. You need to inform your visitors. You need to educate them as laconically as possible. And then you have to turn them into paying customers and clients.

Just like home page, most of the links appearing in your top most navigation are highly critical and in fact, sometimes they are more important than your homepage (because it is not possible to pack every bit of crucial information into your homepage).

So when you’re paying your content writer who is practically creating an entire business presence for you and you are wondering why you are paying what you’re paying, think about how crucial his or her job is. If you’re getting your content written professionally, it means that you understand that it matters to your business what text there is on your website.

I’m not saying pay your content writer through your nose and pay him or her at the cost of your business infrastructure, but don’t go for as cheap content as possible. Believe me, whether you do business with me or not, this doesn’t work. It might cost you your business if just at the outset you try to save on the most crucial aspect of your online presence – your website content.

Generating content and being active on social media: striking a balance

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Life is getting tougher everyday for an online entrepreneur. There was a time when you could just have a website and do decent business. Then came in search engines and associated search engine optimization wars. Along came maintaining mailing lists and constantly promoting your website links on various forums and websites. Although initially blogging emerged as a leisure activity later on this too turned into a business promotion tool and hence you needed to spend lots of time maintaining and promoting your business blog.

As this was not enough now you have social media. You constantly need to engage your prospective and present customers and clients on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking and social media websites. As an online content writer I primarily focus on the following activities to continue getting work on the Internet:

Continuously generate new content on my website and my blog
Occasionally interact on other forums
Interact on Twitter and Facebook

So how do you strike a balance? Aside from taking care of your professional responsibilities (doing the actual business) you also need to remain active on social media and social networking websites and on top of that you need to constantly generate fresh and valuable content for your website and blog. There are 3 things that can help you

Planning
Persistence
Quality

Regularly plan your content writing and social media activities

Planning gives you a direction. Without a consistent plan you are clueless and end up wasting lots of time trying to figure out exactly what you want to do in order to promote your business. When you have a plan you know what you want to achieve and what all you need to do in order to achieve that. It helps you draw a clear picture of your activities and efforts.

Be persistent and have a schedule

It’s not necessary that you publish a new page or a new blog post every day. Similarly it is not necessary that you update your Twitter and Facebook profiles every hour and reply to every message. Just be persistent. If you have scheduled 2 new pages or blog posts every day then try to stick to this number. If you want to be active on social media and social networking websites for at least 1 hour every day at a particular time be there because your followers might be, unbeknownst to you, expecting updates from you.

Focus on quality rather than quantity

Quantity does matter when it comes to improving your search engine rankings quality always triumphs over quantity. Eventually it is quality that draws visitors to your website or blog and keeps bringing them back to you again and again. Even on social media and social networking websites don’t bother how many postings you publish; just focus on quality interactions and postings.

We end up wasting lots of time on content marketing and social media marketing by focusing on wrong or misplaced messages. Be persistent, do proper planning, and focus on quality and you can juggle multiple balls at the same time and get great results.

Why your business needs a content marketing strategy

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Content marketing fundamentally means spreading your thoughts and messages through targeted content. Strategy comes in when you create content knowing exactly what you want to achieve. Randomly creating articles and blog posts may give you lots of content and it may also get you more traffic but in terms of conversion you won’t see good results because when you don’t know what to do with your content, neither do your visitors. Publishing content without a strategy is like throwing darts in the darkness hoping that one of them will hit the bull’s-eye.

Unless you have a massive advertising and PR budget content marketing is the best tool you have got. It is certainly not a one-week affair. Creating and implementing a content strategy takes time and effort but it is more effective and provides long-lasting results. Your business needs a well-defined content marketing strategy because

It keeps your regular communication focused
It shows your active involvement in your field
It helps you build an attentive community around your business
It turns your website or blog into an information resource
It improves your search engine rankings
It improves your conversion rate
It gets you quality incoming/inbound links
It turns you into an authority figure (authority figures are more trusted)
It gives a reason to your prospective customers and clients to stay longer on your website or blog
It strengthens your brand
It creates new communication channels
It builds a target audience that quickly responds to your questions and business ideas
You get immediate feedback from your clients, customers and visitors
You develop a ready-made product-launch platform

What all must you consider in order to have a successful business blog

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Do you want to create a successful business blog? Any sort of blog that is published while keeping a sense of success in mind needs effort and dedication. As rightly mentioned on this thought-provoking Successful Blog post, a successful business blog takes

Successful Business Blog

Time
High-quality content
Clearly defined purpose
Identifiable personality
Unique individuality

I would also like to add strategy and marketing, and of course, perseverance, if you want to create and maintain a successful business blog. Many people think that marketing a blog means that you are trying to promote your blog just to increase traffic so that you can either sell affiliate products or ad clicks. Even when you are publishing a business blog you need to market it with ongoing effort so that it gets the exposure it deserves. After all you publish a successful business blog to attract people to your main business.

That is why it is prudent to get help in order to publish a successful business blog. It is better to outsource rather than trying to do it in-house. Of course you can hire a full-time writer/researcher in order to produce regular business blog content but he or she won’t come with an entire package the way a professional content writer who works independently does. Anyway, this decision depends on your overall business approach. The basic objective is running a successful business blog.

Starting a blog and then not managing it properly (for instance, having a bad design, or publishing blog posts irregularly and intermittently) can be counter-productive because it can sully your brand – in fact it is better having no blog at all. On the other hand a well-managed blog can bring you unprecedented business dividends. So you have to chalk out a strategy before starting a blog.

As mentioned above you must realize that once you start publishing a business blog you will need to dedicate some time to it in order to make it a success. You cannot simply generate a post in just 15 minutes and that too on an ongoing basis unless you are a prodigy. Individual posts may take up anywhere between 1-2 hours.

The most important ingredient of your successful business blog is going to be the content that you publish. Blogs are known by the sort of content they have. It should be relevant, well-written and engaging. People should find it useful and relevant. This also covers the purpose of your blog: you have to figure out why you want to publish a business blog in the first place.

You want to communicate to your visitors regularly?
You want to update them about your latest offerings?
You want to keep the buzz alive around your business?
You want to educate your prospective customers and clients?
You want to solidify your social media presence?
You want to improve your search engine rankings?

In fact all the points mentioned above are important and they give a purpose to your business blog.

Personality and individuality always help. People rather prefer to interact with people and not unknown business representatives. Talk to your visitors as a person.

Finally, whenever you plan to start a business blog just start it, don’t think of success or failure for at least 5-6 months. Many business representatives find sharing their thoughts on their business blogs intimidating but it is actually quite fun. You get to know some great people, you make new friends and you create new business opportunities for your visitors as well as yourself. Let it evolve gradually. Every day you will learn something new even if you hire a content writer for your blog.

A successful business blog also requires a sustained effort. Even if you cannot produce quality content always, it is your persistence that eventually pays. In fact your blog readers don’t expect you to produce exceptional blog posts all the time. They just want you to be there in one form or another. Sometimes you can create blog posts of more than 1000 words. Sometimes you have just 100 words to say. Sometimes you just want to post a photograph or share a video. In order to create a successful business blog, there should always be something happening over there.

How Not To Depend Much On Search Engines

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95% of my writing business depends on search engine traffic. This is a dangerous situation. What if something happens – some change in the ranking algorithms, something that is not liked at my website – and my listings vanish from the search engine result pages? Does this mean I should pack my bags? Although I can start all over again and try to get back into the search engine results but this is a very shaky situation and I am sure many of you too are faced with the same dilemma. What is the best way to deal with such a situation?

Let us accept that the search engines are very powerful promotional tools and they should never be excluded from your Internet marketing effort, but they should never be the sole suppliers of your traffic. With millions of websites scattered all over the Internet it is not too ambitious to try to get some traffic from these websites directly. I will again emphasize that you can get the best traffic from search engines because when people come from search engines they are already looking for a specific search term and this may not happen if they are coming directly from a website. But then the advantage of getting traffic from a website is that a person clicks on your link fully knowing where he or she is heading to. So how can you generate traffic outside of the search engines? Here are a few thoughts; you are welcome to add yours.

Publish a blog

Regularly publishing a blog is the best way of driving high-quality traffic to your website without having to depend on search engines. Although blogs get tons of traffic from search engines due to the way they are published, a lot of traffic also comes from other websites and blogs and this is an advantage not enjoyed by conventional websites. People are constantly linking to blog posts, commenting about them, commenting on them and recommending them to their readers and friends. There are even many social bookmarking websites just to promote blog content among various readers and blog publishers. In few instances some bloggers have been blocked by the search engines (that is, their links didn’t show up on the search result pages) for violating various rules but the blockage didn’t affect them much although they did notice it and wrote about it. The mere act of writing about the blockage got them hundreds of thousands of hits from other blogs and websites. They couldn’t have generated such massive traffic merely from search engines. Once your blog has crossed the popularity threshold you don’t have to worry much about search engine traffic.

Have quality content on your website or blog

Interesting content draws crowds to your blog or website. People not only read the content they also like to link to it whenever possible, and if they are really impressed they put a permanent link to your blog on their blog or website. Quality content also enhances your credibility and people begin to trust you for your opinion. You get tons of repeat traffic. Great content also encourages your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds and this also helps you increase and maintain your readership – this readership doesn’t have to depend on search engines to find your blog and consume your content and consequently, generate business for you.

Be active on social media websites, online forums and blogs

We live in a conversation economy; lots of business is generated by encouraging conversation between buyers and sellers. But this is just one small aspect of social media marketing. What you are actually doing is establishing long-lasting relationships with different individuals. You don’t necessarily have to do it for a selfish reason because being social means giving more than taking. Be useful to people and people will be useful to you. Be an interesting person, be a resourceful person and people won’t take you as a business bug. Try to interact with people through Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Often it is not possible to track conversations on all social media websites so just focus on a couple or even a single website but do it thoroughly and establish yourself there as an authority. Network with as many people as possible.

Similarly, constructively interact on various online forums because you can get lots of quality traffic from these forums. Don’t spam and don’t leave meaningless comments just to leave your links because this doesn’t work; people don’t click your link if they don’t like what you have written. You should also leave comments on other blogs to let people know about the existence of your blog or website. But make sure that you add value to the ongoing discussion and this means read the content present on the blog or website carefully, think about it, and only then add your opinion.

Distribute your content to blogs and websites

There are many blogs that would eagerly accept your guest posts provided you have written something really worth reading and captivating. When these bloggers publish your blog post, what is known as guest blog post, they often put a small profile of yours under the post or over it with the link connecting to your blog or website.

Similarly you can submit succinct, useful articles to various websites and article submission websites. These article submission websites draw lots of traffic from search engines; this way you can get indirect traffic from search engines in case your own website or blog vanishes from there.

Include your link in your e-mail signature

This might not look like much but you never know where your e-mail may end up and who might click on the link you have included in your signature. And anyway having a link is a lot better than not having it. This can be really effective if you send out lots of e-mails on a regular basis.

Publish a newsletter

In terms of the Internet this is one of the oldest surviving modes of communicating with your visitors. When they visit your website encourage investors to subscribe to your newsletter so that they can receive regular updates from you. Although this can be same as subscribing to your RSS feeds but your newsletter is a bit different – people don’t need an RSS reader first of all to read your updates, and second, it will be difficult for you to publish everything on your blog; sometimes you need to communicate only through e-mail. Publishing a newsletter is one of the greatest ways of getting tons of highly targeted traffic to your website without having to depend on search engines.

Do share on this blog if you are aware of more methods of generating targeted traffic to your website or blog without search engines.