1. Tedious
   

   Image courtesy of jscreationzs/freedigitalphotos.net

2. Time-consuming
3. Necessary.

It’s because of that last one we all have to press on and continue to build links if we want to get noticed.

How Popular Are You?

In webspeak, “link popularity” is the number of websites that link to your website. If you want to know how popular your website is, you can go to www.linkpopularity.com and use their free tool to check out your popularity on Google, Bing and Yahoo. But be warned…your results may bring on high school flashbacks of that feeling of standing outside the popular crowd looking in. Still, it’s a great way to track your popularity as you build links.

Go for Quality Over Quantity

If your link popularity is dismally low, it is in your power to change your status. However, you won’t boost your popularity by linking to hundreds of unrelated sites. Search engines are smart enough to recognize quality links. A quality link would be defined as a link that has been around for a while, produces high quality web content, sees a lot of web traffic, etc.

Where to Start?

If you haven’t done any link building, a good place to start is within your own sphere on the web. You can link your website to your business Facebook page, LinkIn profile, a professional association of which you are a member, etc.

Once you’re connected to these sites, you might want to check out your competitors’ links. For example, if you run a natural foods business, you can type your competitors’ sites into the linkpopularity.com tool and see which sites link to them. In doing so, you’ll find websites with relevant content that are obviously willing to link to other relevant sites. Check out the sites to make sure they’re high quality links. Link up to their site and then send off a personalized email requesting a reciprocal link.

Other Good Link Building Strategies

1. Submit your website to free or paid directory sites specific to your industry. Make sure they’re high quality directories!

1. Offer to write a guest post (as an authority on a particular topic) on a relevant blog in return for a link back to your site. Not a writer? Hire someone to do it for you.

1. Participate in discussions on blogs and forums related to your industry.

1. Submit relevant link-building articles to online article directories.

1. Set up a Squidoo page. Publish useful information on your page and link it back to your site.

1. Leave a testimonial for a product or service you like on another site. You never know…it might bring some traffic from people who also like that product or service.

1. Put linkable content on your site (i.e. articles that are helpful, solve real problems and really give people the info they’re looking for). Linkable content is content that other sites would want to link to.

1. Create a blog. It’s a good place to put that linkable, useful content. Update it regularly. Request links to relevant blogs. Make valuable comments on relevant blogs.

1. Make use of sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati. Don’t know how these sites work? Check out my upcoming articles on Del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati.

Need a health writer to help you with all this link building writing? I can help. Contact me to discuss your writing needs.

Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan

Climbing your way up the search engine rankings can seem like a daunting task when there are countless other websites in your industry vying for top rankings as well.

If you don’t have the funds to hire a reputable SEO company to help you, there are a few simple (and cheap) ways you can improve your search engine visibility on your own.

1. Provide Your Website Visitors with Useful Content

If you give your readers the information they’re looking for, they’ll likely be back to visit your site again. Web readers tend to be impatient readers, so your site should also be easy to navigate so people can find the information they need quickly. Welcome pages with music, videos or “Click to Enter” buttons are more annoying than welcoming because they’re a barrier (albeit a small one) between your reader and your website’s information.

2. Choose the Right Keyword Phrases

It’s best to start off with just one, maybe two, keyword phrases for your site. You’ll want to use these keywords throughout your site’s web pages, but not so often that your site could be flagged for “keyword stuffing”. Generally, the more specific your keyword phrase, the higher you’ll rank.

For example, when I chose the keyword phrase for my site, I chose “health writer” over other related terms because although “health writer” had fewer global monthly searches than related terms, it also had less competition, meaning that I have a better chance of ranking higher in the search engines with that term. Try to avoid high competition keyword phrases.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) is an excellent keyword tool that tells you the number of monthly searches for your keyword phrase, the competition for that keyword phrase and the breakdown by country of where those searches are coming from.

3. Good Keyword Placement

Your keyword phrases should be smattered throughout the text on your website, but they should be really prominent in your titles and meta descriptions.

4. Make External Links to Similar Sites

You can link externally to your own web pages (i.e. your business Facebook page) or to other sites in your industry. There are hundreds of ways to build links and link building remains a necessary evil for increasing your visibility on the web.

Check out my next post, “Link Building: How to Become More Popular” for some good tips on building links.

Image courtesy of "nuttakit" of freedigitalphotos.net

To sell a product effectively, you must sell the benefits to the customer, not the product itself. Your customer is far more concerned with what your product or service will do for them than its features.

Sometimes, the difference between advertising a feature and advertising a benefit is just a little rewording of the text. For example, one-stop shopping is a feature, but saving time is the benefit to the customer.

Three Steps to Selling Benefits

The best way to sell the benefits of a product or service is to:

1. Identify a need.

1. Make the potential customer aware of the need.

1. Demonstrate that your product or service will fill the need by emphasizing the benefit to the client.

For example, if you’re in the health business and you’re selling a natural product that improves sleep, the formula would work as follows:

The Need

Sleep.

The Awareness

According to the U.S. National Sleep Foundation, adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. You’re not getting that…no wonder you’re tired all the time!

Your Product’s Benefits

Giving you back the energy you need to enjoy your busy lifestyle.

Need help selling the benefits of your product or service? As a professional health writer, I can help. Visit my Contact page for my full contact information.

The Internet allows brand marketers to advertise and sell their products to an audience that is global in scope.  Yet, at the same time we are living in an era of eco-enlightenment.

People are choosing to live lifestyles that are more sustainable.  They are wielding their consumer power to purchase products and services that are unique, sustainable, and found locally.

Even as your company goes global with the Internet, it is important to stay in tune with these trends.  In promoting your product locally you will engage local customers and build a social media community around your business.

This will give you invaluable branding insights into the mind of your market.

Find out what people want…then give it to them. 

That’s marketing in its simplest form.  If you don’t offer people something they want, you’re not going to make any money.

But it’s not just enough to offer people something they want.  You have to offer it to them on their terms.

I know of a man who wanted to open a breakfast restaurant in a small town.  That town already had a popular breakfast spot, but this man figured that there was enough business to go around so he opened up his restaurant.  He charged $10 for a breakfast and promptly went out of business.

This man was right about people in that town wanting to eat breakfast.  What he didn’t realize was that the popular breakfast place only charged $3-4 for a hearty breakfast.  People weren’t willing to pay $10 for a breakfast they could get for $3.  If he had of done his market research, he would have realized that.

 Market research allows you to find out if your target market wants your product or service and how much they’re willing to pay for it.  You’ll save yourself a lot of time and expense by taking this one crucial step before you set up shop.

 Once your market has defined the parameters then you can start advertising your product to them.

But it’s not just a theory.  Content marketing can hold customer attention and boost brand loyalty in a way that traditional marketing techniques can not.

It’s not enough to post your content and wait for your potential customers to come clamoring to your site as the mecca of their frenzied content search.

You need to get the content out to your target audience!  There are likely hundreds of ways to do that, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Develop a free e-course or e-book that offers a tantalizing taste of your product or service.  This will show people they are important enough for you to go out of your way to reach them.  You can use the free gift to thank loyal customers and attract new ones.

2. Send out an e-newsletter offering genuinely useful information and/or discount offers on your product or service.  People don’t want you to bother them with junk e-mail, but they will pay attention to genuine savings.

3. Make a You tube video with some of your best and more interesting information.  You might find you reach a whole new segment of your target audience.  Link it to your site.

4. Write a blog that answers the questions people are asking.  Search engines love new content, but if your content is relevant to your audience’s needs, they’ll love it too.  Offer something extra special to those who subscribe.

5. Create a FAQs page on your site to answer all the questions people are asking about your product or service.  People want information at their fingertips…not on the other end of the phone after holding for 20 minutes.  A FAQs page is where you can spend some time and detail explaining why your product or service really does live up to all the claims you’re making.

6. Be ridiculous.  An off-the-wall blog post headline or a quirky comparison between your business and the latest blockbuster movie storyline can draw lots of attention from new directions.

7. Record a session with an expert in your field and post it on your site as an audio or video file.  An expert will lend credibility to your business.

8. Follow-up email surveys are a great way to get clients thinking about you.  Surveys are usually considered time-wasters…unless the survey-taker is rewarded with a free gift for their efforts.  Make the survey short and to the point and make the free gift worthwhile.  Consider giving away a free trial of your product or service.

9. Press releases are not just for business start-ups.  You can write and submit a press release every time something even semi-significant happens in your business – a location change, a new staff member, etc.  Don’t make the press release primarily about you.  It needs to be interesting enough to be newsworthy.

10. Use your imagination.  These are all relatively cost-effective, tried-and-true content marketing schemes but there are hundreds of untried methods out there.  Take some time out for a long brainstorming session.  There’s a good chance it’ll pay off in the end.

Think of it this way…if you owned a car dealership, you wouldn’t want to hire just anyone to be on your sales team because you know that not everyone is going to be equally good at the job.  You don’t want to hire someone who will ignore your customers and sit behind the counter, texting their friends until their shift is over.  You want to hire the person who is a natural with people and has a passion for the job.

In the same way, you could get just anyone to write your marketing materials but why would you?  It is, quite simply, a bad business decision to get a friend or relative to do all your copywriting for you so you can save money.

Your marketing materials are vital to the success of your business.  They are your business’ image…survival kit…pulse….  They are how you communicate with your customers and potential customers.  With so many other companies out there competing for buyers’ attention, you have a small window of opportunity to gain that attention.

But it doesn’t just end there.  You have to keep the buyer’s attention long enough to demonstrate how your product or service will solve their problems and convince them to buy from you rather than from your competitor.  That is not an easy task for anyone, which is why it is best left in the hands of someone who is trained to do just that – a professional copywriter, passionate about their craft.

That’s my plug for copywriters.  I hope I’ve convinced you.  See my mainpage for all the reasons you should choose me for the job.

“Rights to the copy!! It’s ownership of a design or idea.”

Cold.

“Copywriting sounds like the action of copying a writing of some sort, be it your own or somebody else’s.”

Colder.

“If you are referring to intellectual property rights, I would feel the need to have a week long seminar on the abuse of the system by the evil corporate world.”

The angry intellectual property rights activist is cold.

“Well, if you mean “copyrighting” I offer you the definition as given in the ” Britannica World Language Edition Of Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary”: “Cop’-y-right” (noun) “The exclusive legal right of authors, composers, playwrights, and artists to publish and dispose of their works for a limited time.”

Please play again.

“Writing a commercial.”

Getting warmer.

So what is copywriting?

“Copywriting”, in its most basic form, is writing with the intent to sell. Copywriting gains the attention of potential buyers by appealing directly to their wants and needs. All this is accomplished through very strategically-communicated words and concepts.

Copywriting is everywhere. You see copywriting on print ads, posters, internet banner ads, brochures, flyers, sales letters, press releases, product descriptions, business tag lines, radio ad scripts, commercial scripts, newsletters, direct mail advertisements delivered to your door…the list is virtually endless.

What copywriting is not

Copywriting is not coming up with a funny or clever idea…unless of course that idea will sell your product or service. Copywriting is not bragging about the features of your business. People won’t care about your business until they see clearly that it will be a benefit to them.

Copywriting is, essentially, professional advertising.

I want to use this blog to help YOU solve YOUR marketing problems.  So feel free to let me know what they are.

I’ll do my best to help.