All Posts, Content & Copywriting, Marketing
Focus on Client Needs – The whole point of writing content for your clients is to provide value whether on their website, via their print marketing materials or on a billboard.
#1. Know their needs – spend time with your client obtaining relevant industry information, current marketing materials and noting their business insight into the industry (if it’s unfamiliar) and lastly, their company’s goals & desires.
#2. Know & Convey How Your Services Can Make Their Company Better – Be clear yourself and then convey to the client the benefits your services can provide them. Most importantly here is to establish a trustworthy relationship with them by making sure they know that:
- they have a professional who has the talent and experience to fulfill their needs. Provide references and previous examples of your work if needed. AND
- by connecting that experience & expertise to their content needs and how you can improve their professional credibility and financial line.
Stay Focused! – We may have our own ideas about a particular industry, political topic or the like, but you are being hired to do the job THEY want you to do. You have been hired to 
write about this client’s business, needs, ideas and standpoints-not your own. No matter how well you may write, you need to keep your writing focused on their area of expertise, products and/or services.
The Key to Keywords
#1. Remember to talk & write in the same industry language of your customers. A good tactic to employ here is to do some keyword research.
#2. Figure out how your customers (and their competition) think and how to write from that same level of expertise. See more from one of my previous articles http://bit.ly/Nsuub4 .
#3. Use a business based thesaurus. Here you will find other related words for a particular term that will showcase your assumed business prowess as well as increasing your clients SEO success.
I hope these few tidbits have been helpful. I’d love to hear what’s in your content writing toolbox and what tools you employ that I can add to sharpen my own content writing skills.
All Posts, Web Design, Web Development
Ever have a client talk to you in a way that made it seem like you were a wizard at design? Ever have a project with very little resources from the owner, yet expected to deliver an award-winning experience? We’ve all been there, and for those of you who haven’t, know that you will soon enough. Having a potential client tell you they want the moon is a pretty funny experience. If you’re not ready, you’ll be taken back by all the requests. You may even think they’re accurate in their assumptions that flash is better than HTML5 or that having more images and no text is perfectly fine for a their entire website.
Let me first point out some of the warning signs:
- A client that has no content, marketing plans, or media
- You not having an up to date pricing list
- If they’ve never seen your portfolio of work
- The client thinks your prices are too high
- The project needs to be done yesterday (already late)
- There are unrealistic expectations
- You not having a workflow
- No contract
Sure these are just a few warnings, but they are with a lot of cause. When a potential client has expectations that do not seem to line up with your sense of reality, you’ll need to reach a middle point with them. One of the biggest mistakes you can do is promise the world when you’re in negotiations, then produce disappointments during development. You’re not going to want to keep calling or emailing them with bad news, and they’re not going to appreciate having to pay you for things their not going to get.
The idea of a magically grown project comes from misconception at the start. I know when I first got started, I would ask the client what they wanted. After a few years of experience, I now ask them what they do. After then tell me what they do, how their business works, I then tell them how a website we create for them will help. Either by plugging holes in their marketing, sales force, lead generation, brand recognition, social media, etc. By taking control of the expectations up front I get to set the scale for what the project will be. Even if I have my own limitations, I can still play within those limitations while the client essentially gets what they wanted.
Keep your clients on a schedule. It may be daily or weekly, but give them a clear set of action items or goals they need to achieve so that all parties can see the project “grow.” Also inform them when they’re behind on deliverable, and be honest about your hangups. This transparency helps to keep tensions on the ground instead of elevating to stressful levels. At the end of the day, it always comes down to customer service. You’re not a store at the mall, but you do need to have great service skills to ensure quality and future work.
One last time I have to create some checks and balances with your clients and your projects. Make sure everyone is accountable to either clear deadlines, or to someone else on the same team. This helps eliminate procrastination and even losses in translations. Clear goals and milestones post production will also help ensure a successful website.
All Posts, Branding, Content & Copywriting, Marketing, Social Media, Web Design
What in the world is Link Baiting?
In the simplest form, it is the act of creating any content within a website, advertisement or blog that is designed to gain attention and more importantly, encourages people to link to its original form. The goal of link baiting is to leverage content to become an extremely powerful form of marketing. Some feel it’s another tool to acquire the currency of SEO. Let’s talk about how it can be the biggest fish in the pond of SEO, why it’s important to get others hooked into it and then what it really reels in for you and your business.
To completely understand its meaning you have to understand what is at the heart of its composition. Link-baiting goes way beyond words within the content of your website, advertisement and/or blog. Aside from text, it can also be an image, audio or video clip. Any of these can be effective link baits as long as they are interesting enough to catch people’s attention. And once someone has clicked onto one of these vehicles, you want them to share it and hence great amount of traffic for your content. And that’s the goal-for some part of your content to become the Los Angeles freeway at 5pm. Think about how popular blogs have become that have infographics or videos. Videos gone viral on You Tube can take a no-name person or product and spread it like wildfire. Its all about engagement, the tantalizing, wiggly worm on the hook just waiting to be nibbled.
Now that you understand what it is, where & how do you use it?
What-For blogs you definitely need a strong & compelling headline to capture the readers’ attention and engage them. Take for instance this blog. “Link baiting” is a popular, strongly researched topic. So having a witty “hook” title will return good traffic once its out there. And while the “body” of the work needs to be strong and compelling to keep you entertained, its important to hook you right off the bat with the title. If a title doesn’t create intrigue then you won’t get the readership; and without readership, your content just floats along lonely in the sea of the worldwide web…you don’t want it to be Dory in Nemo singing “keep on swimming” – lol.
Where -You want your content on all major Social Media sites to ensure good dissemination. Period – it’s that simple.
How-A simple example is making sure to add links to your website and/or blog to a witty catch-phrase let’s say on Twitter. I plan to do it with this very blog so check me out on Twitter to see this concept hard at work. https://twitter.com/#!/Dt_Yvonne You can also add a video or audio clip to your content so that others will want to share it. http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com/why-website-content-is-important-video-interview/ For most businesses, the goal of disseminating information is to generate business as well as inform in some nature-whether it’s to sell shoes or trying to get elected as Mayor. Therefore the process of employing effective link baiting requires preparing the hook with the best content. Oh by the way- GOTCHYA!
If I didn’t persuade you enough, check out this listing from Wikipedia which offers some of the most common approaches to effective link baiting:
- Informational hooks – Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.
- News hooks – Provide fresh information and obtain citations and links as the news spreads.
- Humor hooks – Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait.
- Evil hooks – Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger.
- Tool hooks – Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.
- Widgets hooks – A badge or tool that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.
- Unique content hooks – This hook is intended for people that are in need of unique content or articles for traffic or AdSense revenue. This became popular after Google implemented Duplicate Contents Filter and sites with duplicate contents saw fall in traffic. To use this hook, you have to create unique content and give it out to bloggers and webmasters with an obligation to link back to your site.
- Curated hooks – A content that links out to other websites by citing them as resources naturally attracts linkers and have high chances of going viral as the mentioned sites in the link bait are most likely to link to the site and share it through their own networks.
Always remember that your content must be current (ripping something tantalizing from the headlines of major reporting forums such as nightly news, respectable magazines or newspapers) and is a great form of SEO currency. Don’t let your creativity dwindle when it comes to achieving this objective. Remember, the ultimate goal of all this is to create buzz and get people to share your content and its links – which hopefully hooks bank for your business.
Web Development
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to any website. Being able to show up in the top of search rankings heightens visitor traffic to your site and may have a significant impact on conversions–sales, subscriptions, and so on. While content has an enormous impact on a site’s ranking, one of the factors you may not consider is how the code itself may affect it. HTML5, while not fully supported in all browsers, can be helpful in getting search engine’s “spiders” to rank your content as more relevant.
What’s going on now?
HTML is not a programming language. It’s abbreviation gives it away as “hypertext markup language” which is a fancy way of saying that it tells your browser how to display the information–kind of like a graphic designer might layout a page, adding images and breaking text into paragraphs and headings. What search engine spiders (a.k.a. bots or crawlers) do is feed that information, gathering relevant bits of text so that the search engine can feed that, plus some other factors, into an algorithm which ranks your website accordingly.
In HTML4 –the version currently supported by all major browsers, though Internet Explorer is debatable sometimes (ha ha)— div tags are used to denote sections of the page–perhaps for styling reasons, or so the designer/developer can tell where he or she is. This is an example (though not the full markup for the page) and I have added comments to mark the end of divs:
<div id=”header”>
<h1>Page Title</h1>
<div id=”nav”>
<a href=”http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com”>Link to somewhere</a>
</div><!–end nav–>
</div><!–end header–>
<div class=”article”>
<p>This is some important main content–perhaps a blog post, or just the main portion of the website</p>
</div><!–end article–>
<div id=”sidebar”>
<p>This is not a portion of the main text.</p>
</div><!–end sidebar–>
<div id=”footer”>(c) 2012
</div><!–end footer–>
Did that take you a minute to get through? Imagine if I hadn’t commented–would you have been able to understand as quickly what was going on with the code? Admittedly, a spider is designed specifically to glean information off of a webpage, but it might not most relevant content. Also, in our example, our divs had relatively easy to understand names and was commented, which is not always the case and makes the interpreting job that much harder.
How does HTML5 change that?
With HTML5, the generic div is joined by a myriad other descriptive tags. These tags are used for areas found on most websites–like headers and footers . Here’s that same markup again in HTML5:
<header>
<h1>Page Title</h1>
<nav>
<a href=”http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com”>Link to somewhere</a>
</nav>
</header>
<article>
<p>This is some important main content–perhaps a blog post, or just the main portion of the website</p>
</article>
<aside>
<p>This is not a portion of the main text.*</p>
</aside>
<footer>(c) 2012</footer>
*Note the change from id=”sidebar” to <aside>. <aside> merely denotes an area that is not part of the main content, which could be a sidebar.
See how much easier that is to follow? The same is true for search engine spiders. They are able to identify exactly what is important and what might be lesser content on the page.
Because neither version of our example has any styling information, both would display (in an HTML5 supporting browser) as:
It has no impact on mere mortals not viewing the site’s source code, but can make life easier for developers and spiders alike.
It should be said that HTML5 is not yet supported in all browsers, so I wouldn’t recommend dropping HTML4 immediately. However, as browsers update to support these new tags, it is beneficial for business owners, site creators, and SEO ninjas alike to be aware that content might be king, but code is still the poet laureate.
All Posts, Web Development
What do you do if you accidentally put too much information on your website? If you use a content management system (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) or have access to your website you can take down excess or unneeded information fairly easily. Pages can be removed and information can be hidden but what can you do if the information is already showing up in search results? Or cached results? Here is a quick and easy method for removing a page from Google Search Results pages:
Removing a Page from Google Search Results
1. Access your Google Account (if you don’t have one, sign up)
If you have a Google account, you should be able to log into the Google’s Webmasters section. After your website it set up, you can use some of the many tools Google offers. The tool you need to remove a page is called “removals.” Here is a link to the removals page: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals.
2. Get the URL of the page you want removed from search results (e.g. www.mycompany.com/aboutus.html)
URLs include pages, images, documents, etc. Basically anything on your server. If you can access the content through your website, Google can find it too.
3. Move and/or delete the page
The page cannot exist on the URL you are requesting to be removed from the Google Search.
4. Remove the URL
Fill out and submit a removal request, follow the instructions and wait. It may take a little while before the URLs are completely removed.
As you can see, Google has made this a relatively quick and painless process. However, if you want to have multiple pages you want removed from Google, it may take some time.
Focus on Client Needs – The whole point of writing content for your clients is to provide value whether on their website, via their print marketing materials or on a billboard.
write about this client’s business, needs, ideas and standpoints-not your own. No matter how well you may write, you need to keep your writing focused on their area of expertise, products and/or services.
