Tag Archives: Content Writing

Increase your sales and conversion rate by writing useful content

3 Replies

Content doesn’t just mean text full of numbers and hypothetical statements. It needs to solve a purpose, your visitors and prospects must find it useful. After all people don’t visit your website or blog out of some altruistic reason — they are always looking for something, whether it is information or entertainment. If they don’t find your content useful, if it doesn’t appeal to them, they are going to leave your website quickly without doing business with you, and they are never going to come back if they remember you or your website. Whenever somebody visit’s your website, he or she is thinking, "What’s in there for me?"

But how do you make your content useful; how do you make it cater to a particular need? It’s very simple — by putting your visitors’ interest first. This may seem like a cliché beaten to pulp by various "copywriting experts" but you know what, consider it a miracle, but it really works. Whenever you are creating content for your website, or whenever you are getting it written, keep in mind what you can offer in the best manner and how it can help your visitors. A few days ago I wrote about instilling confidence and trust with your copy. If your visitors can trust you and have confidence in what you have to say they are not apprehensive when they have to purchase a product or service from you. This trustworthiness can be established by encouraging your visitors to come to your website again and again, and this can only be achieved by providing something extremely useful and informative, and on a regular basis. Once trust is established they buy from you even if you don’t ask them to and simply mention that you offer a particular product or service.

Every product or service has a niche market and people are constantly looking for useful information.  Let us assume that you sell an accounting software. Instead of mentioning on every second page of your website or blog how great an account package you’ve got, you can publish interesting trivia about your product. Recognize your market and generate content accordingly.  If you are targeting small businesses with not much knowledge about accounting and bookkeeping you can publish lots of tips and tutorials on how to easily maintain books with your accounting software.  You can also talk about various accounting procedures and how your software tackles them. You can publish objective reviews of other accounting software products so that people can compare and make educated decisions. You can also publish cheatsheets that make it easier to use your software. Sky is the limit when it comes to creating useful content around your product.

The same goes for a service that you provide. Take for example my online content writing service. You may think what is the use of publishing content that helps others become better content writers and online copywriters? When  I am sharing my knowledge and experience I am establishing my authority. I agree…90% of my visitors must just be coming to learn content writing and copywriting, and I’m really glad, and humbled, that I can teach them something, but the remaining 10% can see how much I know about content writing. By going through various pages and blog posts  they can make out that I can improve their conversion rate as well as search engine rankings by my writing experience.  I may not be one of the best writers on the Internet but I definitely know what I’m doing and I abundantly share that on my website.

By constantly generating highly useful content I also increase my chances of getting linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers and consequently, increase traffic and search engine rankings.

Creating useful and valuable content may seem like an uphill task in the beginning but you will find in the end that it is genuinely rewarding. You increase your goodwill, you strengthen your brand, and you encourage people to pay close attention to what you’re saying and offering.

Instilling confidence and trust with your copy

4 Replies

This excellent post at Copyblogger talks about imaginary trolls that stop your customers and clients from doing business with you.

It is a bad, bad world isn’t it? Especially so on the Internet where every unscrupulous element can quickly set up a website and start executing his or her spurious activities to deprive you of your money. The situation is worsened by the fact that the Internet has no geographical boundaries and it is not bound by local jurisdictions. So someone in America can easily cheat someone in India and vice versa.

As rightly mentioned in the Copyblogger link, we are all haunted by our previous experiences whenever we want to buy something or subscribe to something. The imminent fraud is amplified when money is involved; you feel more stupid when you pay for something that you don’t get.

A person trying to sell a product or service on the Internet has to overcome a greater challenge compared to the actual world. On the Internet the only mode of communication is your website. You are not just fighting with mistrust you are also fighting with a zillion distractions. In order to the business on the Internet your website copy has to:

  • Engage the prospect
  • Dispel his or her fears and apprehensions
  • Lead him or her to carry out the transaction

How can you do that?

Have lots of quality content

The first thing that you can do is have lots of quality content on your website. Having lots of quality content on your website means that you are really putting your money and effort where your mouth is. You will put so much effort only if you are serious about your work and feel confident about delivering.

Aside from establishing a sense of confidence high quality content also helps you attract targeted traffic from search engines, blogs and social media websites.

Provide all possible solutions

When a prospect arrives at your website he or she is full of questions not only regarding what he or she wants but also regarding how well you can deliver. You need to answer all the questions your visitor can possibly come up with. Take for instance these questions:

  • Are you for real? Display your contact information prominently. A photograph may also help. A regularly updated blog is quite reassuring and if you are constantly interacting with your visitors, nothing like it. Create a strong social media presence so that your customer or client knows that your reputation is at stake if you don’t perform.
  • Is my money safe? How do I make sure that I will receive the product or the service once I have paid? Properly explain this procedure on your website and also clearly specify what your refund policy is in case something bad happens and the customer is unable to receive the product on the service.
  • Are you easily reachable? Make sure that you are just one call away in case the customer or the client needs to call you.

There might be many more questions; it depends on the kind of product or service you are providing.

Put visitors’ interest first

Okay, this reminds me to change my copy to (I am constantly learning and sometimes I teach myself). Highlight benefits instead of features. Handle the most pertinent question in the very beginning: what is the greatest benefit of your product or service? For instance, if I write your copy how is it going to benefit your business or your presence on the Internet? There are two things I am confident about:

  • Increasing your conversion rate
  • Writing search engine optimized content to increase your search engine rankings

Now, a person shouldn’t be bothered about how well I write and how I can juggle around words and how well-read I am. Can I really solve your problem? If you want to increase your conversion rate can I achieve that for you through my copywriting services? If you want more traffic from search engines can I do that?

Put your visitors’ interest first instead of blowing your own horn and feeling gung ho about what a great offer you have got.

What do your existing customers and clients have to say about you and your business?

For this you need a testimonials page where you publish all the great things your customers and clients have to say about you and your business. In fact your testimonial page is one of the most important aspects of your website.

The basic idea is that your copy should communicate a sense of trustworthiness and accountability.

The value of your content in the context of social media

1 Reply

There was a time when in order to promote your content you had to focus on search engines and external links. Even today both these entities matter a lot but there is a third force that could prove to be far more penetrating when it comes to distributing your content: social media.

Some prominent examples of social media are blogging, Twitter.com, FaceBook.com, Ning.com, Youtube.com, Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Some of these are interactive tools and some are social bookmarking and recommendation websites but their basic function is helping people promote and generate content.

The compelling reason for having great content, and lots of it

These days it is an aberration if an organization or a professional individual providing services on the Internet does not publish a blog. A blog helps you communicate with your audience unhindered by geographical and technological barriers. Blogging has almost become a “traditional” content publishing platform as many people are quickly switching over to micro-blogging. Nevertheless, blogging still rules when it comes to publishing and promoting content; in fact most of the links being promoted on the social media and bookmarking websites belong to blogs.

So what is the value of your content in the context of social media and what all should you consider while creating and publishing content? It is very similar to creating a viral marketing campaign.

Your content on social media websites thrives upon the users’ tendency to recommend interesting and relevant links to their followers and friends. In fact some users produce no original content; they simply forward and promote other links with their own comments sprinkled here and there.

There are two interesting features of users active on social media websites:

  • They promote content
  • They discuss content

In order to leverage the power of social media, first of all you have to create content on a regular basis and the content must be interesting and valuable enough so that they feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers. On websites like Twitter.com people tweet your link and then their followers retweet it if they feel like it and that is how your content spreads. The same thing happens on FaceBook. On Digg.com the users “digg” your link if they like it and the more “diggs” your link can garner the more prominent spot it gets on the website. In the case of StumbleUpon the more thumbs-ups you can get, with greater frequency your link is put in front of its users.

In the case of bloggers if they like your content they link to it and write about it. From there, further, other bloggers and social media users can write about your content, link to it or promote it.

Does your content always have to be likeable and acceptable? Not always. Sometimes people will write about your content, link to it and promote it to show disagreement or express a totally different point of view. Just make sure that whenever you are publishing highly controversial and contradictory content you are sure of what you are doing. This is more important amidst social media websites where it takes a long time to build reputation and very little time to dismantle it.

The moot point is if you want to generate and publish content for the purpose of spreading your ideas and getting more business you have to work on it keeping social media in mind. The power of social media is so great that some Internet marketers have already started claiming that you no longer need the whimsical search engines to get quality traffic. In fact the traffic that you get from social media websites and blogs is more targeted because it is promoted by real people rather than ranking algorithms.

There was a time when the search engines like Google asked for more and more content so that that content could be indexed and ranked. There was a lot of talk, there still is, about creating content that is search engine friendly as well as human friendly. Sometimes if you didn’t face much competition you didn’t even have to generate lots of content. But this is not the case when you want to promote your website through social media websites. You constantly have to publish content that creates buzz among social media circles.

This trend spells trouble for organizations and individuals that have always been downplaying the value of quality content. On social media you cannot create a credible presence unless you have credible content.

Of course, by simply creating and publishing great content you cannot become a social media darling; you need to have a following. It is very hard to make people listen to you if they haven’t listened to you in the past, and that too, repetitively. People on Twitter and FaceBook sometimes have thousands of followers and they themselves are following thousands of people. This means a continuous stream of messages in front of them. How to develop a following that eagerly listens to you? This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post but yes it is an important part of leveraging social media. You cannot hack into that. Either you have to be a celebrity or a well-known person in your niche, or you have to build your followers from scratch and this may take many months. Collaborating with people who are already highly active on various social media websites may help.

Is email marketing content different from web marketing content?

3 Replies

Of late I’ve been getting plenty of assignments that involve writing content for email marketing campaigns. Intermittently a few clients want to know what is the difference between writing content for marketing on the web and through e-mail. I’m sure they want to know whether I know the difference or not and I am writing this blog post to share my thoughts on the subject of writing content for email marketing as well as web marketing.

Fundamental difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing

Let me tell this at the outset that I am not writing this as a marketing person; I am a content writer who knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. Most of the things that I know have been learned by constantly working and interacting on the Internet with other professionals and also with clients hailing from different fields.

Marketing, as we will all agree, is an exercise to promote a product or service in order to increase business. It may involve running advertising campaigns, organizing events and distributing content that makes the recipients aware of the product or the service and its features. Of course I will be talking from the perspective of a content writer.

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign cannot be easily reused

An e-mail marketing campaign is most of the time a one-time affair, or there have to be long intervals before you send the same e-mail to the same recipients. Do it with regularity and it becomes spam. E-mail marketing is kind of push marketing even if you are using an opt-in e-mail list. It normally survives on numbers unless the targeting is phenomenal. The content for an e-mail marketing campaign, most of the times, is not reusable – you cannot send the same e-mail again and again. Every time you send an e-mail, there must be something new in it.

E-mail marketing content must always be to the point

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign must be concise, to the point, and use as direct a language as possible. Say your thing and get done with it. Remember that the person opening your e-mail would be having scores of unread messages in his or her inbox and it just takes one click to open another message.

This makes it more important to highlight the greatest benefits of your product or service at the top of the message. There should be minimal scope for confusion and misunderstanding.

It is debatable what should be the length of an e-mail marketing campaign. It depends upon what you want to convey and who is your target market. For instance if you are a real estate company selling real estate property then your customers will naturally prefer to read more and more before deciding to call you. On the other hand a less important product (for instance, an MP3 player) may not demand that much attention to detail. So write your content according to your market and the product or service you are offering.

E-mail marketing content should be personal

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign also needs to be personal because an e-mail is a personnel message. It is like knocking at somebody’s door in order to convey something. So the least you can do is address that person by his or her name. Even if the e-mail is going to a business e-mail address it will be opened by a person. Create a sense of familiarity.

Content for a web marketing campaign

A web marketing campaign stays where it is as long as you keep it. The content written for a web marketing campaign performs for a longer time. I am not implying that you don’t need to update your web content; I just mean to say it can stay up there for a longer period of time.

You don’t need to be as personnel as in the case of an e-mail marketing campaign because when it comes to your website it is not you who are knocking at people’s door but the other way round. People coming to your website are already inclined towards reading what you have published on your website. They have either found you on a search engine or have clicked a link on another website.

According to me the greatest difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing is that web marketing content is re-usable and it performs for a longer period of time whereas e-mail marketing content is usually created for a one-time affair so you have to make the maximum impact in the very first attempt otherwise it all goes waste. Web marketing content can be altered and tweaked according to the response you are getting; you cannot do this with e-mail marketing content, it’s like the bullet that has been fired and now you can do nothing about it.

More on content and branding

1 Reply

A month ago I had written about how to control your branding by writing or generating customized content. As it is rightly mentioned in this blog post aptly titled how to improve your branding with your content, on the Internet, you are what you write.  Your words are your greatest representatives on the Internet because they communicate with your visitors in your absence.

You can strengthen your brand by carefully creating your content strategy. You have to create content that highlights your main strengths and leverages them to get you more clients and customers ultimately. I have seen many websites and blogs in a great hurry to generate content so that they can quickly get traffic from the search engines and sometimes such flukes really work but sooner or later they end-up causing damage to their brand because the right message conveyed through right content is more important than getting random traffic from search engines through haphazardly generate and published content.

Similarly, if there is no substance in your content you cannot instill confidence among your readers and prospective customers and clients. It’s like the real world: no matter in what environment you move, you have to establish respect and authority in order to make people listen to you, pay attention to you, and take the action you want them to take.

How do you instill that confidence? Share with them as much information as possible. Instead of selling a product or a service through your content, try to help them make an educated decision. I know in the end we all want to earn more business, but don’t turn this aspiration into a desperate and grotesque exercise. Write to inform, write to put your point across, and definitely write to convince, but don’t use verbal tricks to entice your customers and clients. Once they trust you, once they trust your brand, they will definitely want to do business with you.

Every word matters, and so does every sentence. This is especially important with the advent of social media because when you are interacting through social media you are leaving your inherent footprints all over the Internet. The more you interact, the more content you generate, the more people become aware of you.