Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 10 of April , 2008 at 2:30 pm Leave a comment
AIDA is the secret to writing compelling website copy or improving your existing website copywriting. Copywriting is not a new thing, its been around for years; actually much longer than the website that you are writing it for.
Copywriting was first employed in direct marking campaigns. You remember all those sales letters you used to get in the mailbox? You know before you acquired an email inbox? The same principles apply to your website that would have applied to the direct mail piece that you would have mailed before the internet. But what are the principles?
The first is attention; you have second to capture the attention of your reader. How many seconds? 5-7 seconds is the rule of thumb. Some people are slower to click out of the screen but not alot and they will click out if you don’t grab their attention and grab it quickly. That means that you have to write a headline that will leap off the screen and grab the reader, think about the Sunday paper, you check the headlines and read the stories that have attention grabbing headlines, websites are no different.
The next point is interest, you have to grab that attention and turn it into interest. Why would the reader want to stay on your site? Why are you any different than the other 100 companies that the search engine returned…write in a casual tone, just as if you are across the table.
Desire is the third part of the recipe. Put on the lawyer hat and build the case for your reader. Leave no doubt that they need your product or service. They must have it, no doubt about it.
The last portion is action. Don’t leave your reader with the impression that they can do anything other than click on the button. They have to act now not later. Encouraging visitors to take action works much better when coupled with “the right bait” or incentive.
Writing effective copy is not easy but it is something that you must have. Compelling web copy is what will set your site apart from the multitude that are already out there.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 15 of February , 2008 at 12:56 am Leave a comment
Today we are going to take a look at some simple website improvements that anyone can make which can easily be done in house. These website improvements are designed to improve the aesthetics, performance and search engine optimization of a website. They are true website improvements, but are relatively easy to put into place.
Add Some Fresh Content
Adding a little fresh content or rewriting some of your site text is one of the simplest website improvements that you can make. It does not take a great deal of time or effort to accomplish. Go through your site, pick out the weakest text sections that you can find and rewrite them. You will feel better afterwards and you might be giving your website a little search engine optimization boost.
Optimize your Images
Compress your images to the point that any further will make them look grainy. You want your images to look clear, but you don’t want them to cause slow load times on low bandwidth networks. If you want to include large product shots, you can turn each picture into a link which will take your visitor to a high resolution shot that is off the page. While you are optimizing your images, you might as well take the time to tag them all, this will help your website with image searches. There are not too many website improvements that can have a marked effect on site performance, but this will do it and your site will handle heavy traffic better too.
Add a Video
It doesn’t matter if you have to shoot your video with a webcam. All commercial websites should have at least one video. You can host your videos on YouTube. This is perhaps the easiest of the three website improvements that we have included today.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 2 of February , 2008 at 10:22 pm Leave a comment
Websites can always be improved and website improvements can be relatively easy to make. If you have a little bit of patience and admittedly a little free time, you can make any one of these website improvements yourself. This is great if you want to save a few bucks by keeping some of your website development in house.
- 1. Add a video. If you do not already have video on your site, you have to ask yourself why? Set up an account on YouTube and prepare a video for uploading there. On the YouTube site, you will find a wealth of materials that explain exactly what to do. Once you have your video on YouTube, embed it in your website. The first time around it will take a bit of time, but once you have some experience with YouTube, things will move more smoothly.
- 2. Optimize your key pages. If your key pages are already optimized then you might want to modify them a little bit. Fresh content is usually a nice thing to have on a site and can have an effect on relevance.
- 3. Add a blog. Blogs serve a number of purposes; they help to build your brand, educate your customers and help to draw search traffic. If you don’t have a blog, it is one of the more time consuming website improvements that you can make, but well worth the effort.
- 4. Add some buttons. If you have interesting content and want to encourage your readers to promote it, add some buttons for the more popular social bookmarking sites. I would suggest Reddit, Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and Digg as a minimum, but there is no reason that you cannot add more. This is one of the simplest website improvements that you can make.
- 5. Tag your images and video. How does tagging images and video count as a website improvement? With your images and video properly tagged, you can start picking up search traffic that comes looking for images and video. Properly tagged images are also used by screen readers for the visually impaired. This can be one of the most important website improvements that you will ever make.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 19 of January , 2008 at 9:03 pm Leave a comment
Of the endless varieties of website improvements that can be made, flash based improvements have supporters and detractors, but leave very few people sitting on the fence. It is a website improvement that some people love and others just love to hate, but why?
The benefits of Flash-based Website Improvements
There are some tangible benefits to including Flash on a website. Flash can really brighten up a site and make it so much more interactive. One might argue that the more interaction people have with a site, the more likely they are to stay there. Some websites take this to an extreme, none more so than Lego.com. The Flash-based games on the Lego website serve to promote their products very well indeed. There are games for all of their different themes, they are simple and for some people extremely entertaining. They are pitched right at the age groups that are likely to buy their products. Games, if you have the budget for them make a very interesting website improvement.
Flash can also be used to allow people to interact with images. Scroll around 360-degree views allow people to get a really good feel for a product that they are not able to touch or hold. You can look at a piece of sporting equipment from a variety of angles without sacrificing too much screen real estate. In such cases, Flash makes an extremely functional website improvement.
As an aesthetic website improvement, Flash serves a purpose too. There are all kinds of great visual effects that can be achieved, some with very limited work. If you commission a website designer that has a great deal of Flash experience, things get even easier.
The drawbacks of Flash-based Website Improvements
For all of the benefits of Flash-based website improvements, there are a few significant drawbacks that give the anti-Flash crowd significant ammunition.
- Flash is expensive - Becoming part of the Adobe package did not make Flash any cheaper. It is an expensive program to buy and Flash designers tend to make website improvements cost a lot too.
- Flash is time consuming - It takes an incredibly long time to put together a Flash based website, much longer than some simple HTML code. For this reason many people agree that it is better to limit its use to a few website improvements rather than a whole site. If you have the budget go for it, but most people don’t.
- Flash-based website improvements do not work with “out of the box” browsers - What can be more annoying than a “you need to download additional software to view this website,” message. There are definite advantages to having something that works on web browsers everywhere, without additional program components.
Flash is a mixed bag
There are some definite benefits in sprucing up a site with a few Flash-based website improvements. These website improvements should always be made with a mind to creating sites that can be viewed and enjoyed by as many people as possible. It is often advisable to offer both a Flash and non-Flash version of any web marketing site. It is getting to the point that Flash has enough saturation to go Flash-only, but spare a thought for those that lack the technical expertise to get it running.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 30 of December , 2007 at 10:05 pm Leave a comment
There are literally hundreds of potential website improvements that people can make, but there are a few that I believe are best avoided. They can make a site look better, but can translate into poorer performance.
Flash intros - There is nothing worse than watching the same commercial on TV again and again, why would you want to do it on a website?
Java script heavy menus - A bit of Java script on a site is fine, but you do need to remember that a lot of people run no-script plug-ins for security reasons. Make sure people can navigate your site without it.
Dark color schemes - These are only good if you have a niche market that is young. Older folks don’t like the gray on black, so why bother?
Excessive advertising - Yeah, you might turn a few bucks from advertising, but if your core business is selling then don’t bother. It looks like a money grab.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 18 of December , 2007 at 7:49 am Leave a comment
If you are aiming to pick up some extra traffic, a blog is a simple website improvement that can accomplish it. Blogs need to be used a little bit differently to regular SEO content. For one thing, your blog articles are likely to be significantly shorter than your regular content. The trick to blog articles is to focus all of your SEO energies into a few short paragraphs. Do that and you will see some search benefits.
A blog is about one of the simplest website improvements you can make. One of the most popular blog scripts for this purpose is Wordpress. It is well set up, there are a ton of plug-ins and improvements and you will find any number of free templates out there. While there are other content management scripts that cover blog functions, Wordpress outdoes any that I have seen, it is easy to set up and if you use Go Daddy, it gets even easier as they will set it up for you free of charge.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 7 of December , 2007 at 9:37 am Leave a comment
A recent article on Web Pro News features forty things that you can do to improve the search engine optimization of your site. Some of these website improvements are mere common sense and do not need repeating, but there were a few gems of wisdom that many people do not consider:
Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
Many people do not consider updating their content. Keeping the content fresh and keeping your site active can give your ratings an unbelievable boost. Updated content is one of the most important website improvements you can make. Updates will not necessarily improve the look or feel of your site, but it will increase your relevancy.
Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
Build those links and use those connections to do it. Blogs are a great way to pick up links from other sites. Forums are also viable as long as they are well ranked. Use social bookmarking sites to get content read and encourage links to develop naturally. These are not website improvements in so much as they are reputation improvements. They will improve the quantity of traffic to your site.
If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
I once found one of the sites I was running had a blacklisted IP. It was next to impossible to send legitimate emails from my site. I found it very frustrating, still it was part of the learning process. Check those blacklists each and every time. If you find yourself on a blacklist, pony up the extra dollars and get your own I.P. Or you could try hosting yourself. Your own I.P. does not seem like an obvious website improvement, but if it improves your reputation, it can be.
If you are looking for simple website improvements that you can make to improve your search relevancy, please contact us at Brick Marketing.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 4 of December , 2007 at 4:54 am Leave a comment
There are literally hundreds of hacks and tweaks that people can use on their websites to make them look and function better. If you are considering making any website improvements, the first question that you need to ask yourself is, “Is this a good fit for my site?” Quite often you will find sites that look like a mishmash of unrelated components, it is messy and to be honest, we don’t like it and chances are that their customers don’t either.
If web design is not your thing, or you are simply too busy to handle updating your site, you can always bring it to us here at Brick Marketing. Among our many marketing services we also offer web design and website improvement services. We can get your site looking and functioning as it should to keep people coming back for more. For more information about our website improvements services, do not hesitate to contact us at Brick Marketing.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 27 of November , 2007 at 10:23 am Leave a comment
Do you have music on your website? This is one of my pet peeves. I browse the Internet now with my volume on mute because I can’t stand to land on a website that immediately starts blaring out music. It might be Mozart or Guns N Roses, two of my favorites, but I don’t want to hear it on your website. Especially if it’s a business website.
If you do have music on your website, there are two ways you can improve your website immediately. The first way is to take your music completely off. Most of your prospects aren’t going to have the same tastes in music that you have. Those that do won’t want to hear music while they are there.
If you feel like you need music on your website then at least give me control over whether to turn it on or not. Don’t force me to listen to your music. Have an audio file in a visible location on the website that allows me to turn the music on if I want to hear it. That way, if I want to hear the music then I can turn it on. Otherwise, I can enjoy your website without the music.
The only time I can see having music on your website is if you are a music website, retail site that sells music, or you are in the music business in some capacity. Then you can play the music, but in that case I would say don’t just play the same song over and over again. Use as much variety in the music as you can so that people who stay on your website can hear what all you have to offer. This is perhaps the best website improvement some people can make to their website.
Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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Category: Website Improvements
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