Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.
Think “Post-Sale”
After you sell your product or service to a customer—the work was performed and paid for—he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages or cosmetic …

….but you’re not.  So remove the Latin abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc. from your writing.

Maybe you got used to using the Latin when you were writing term papers in college.   You’re in the business world now, communicating with customers and colleagues.

It’s time to express yourself in English. Why? Because:

• Writing to customers should be conversational, not a thesis.  Do you ever say  i.e. or e.g. out loud?
• Not all of your readers speak English as a first language. They might come from a country that doesn’t use Latin abbreviations in its educational system.
• You just might be using them incorrectly.  A lot …
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One of the types of reproduction that is allowed under the United States’ Fair Use laws is duplication for the purpose of parody, and as today is the 43rd anniversary of “Paperback Writer” reaching #1 on the American charts it also seemed an appropriate time to roll out this caution against banal and derivative blogging.

SEO writer

SEO writer (SEO writer)
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my blog?
It took me hours to write, will you give a slog?
It’s based on some posts by a man named Cutts
And I need a job, so I want to be a SEO writer,
SEO …

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You catch more flies with honey. Make sure readers stick to your web site!

We’ve talked about how to keep readers on your site longer. Now let’s look at how to get them to come back often.

Offer Your Expertise

You are an expert at what you do. Make your web site a resource of the useful, the informative or the entertaining: Reader will remember you. They’ll bookmark you. They’ll come back to your site—and to your business—and they’ll mention both to others.

Let’s say you’re promoting your restaurant. Post the menu and some ambience-expressive photos and you’ve …

Over the past couple of decades, Internet users have learned that not all websites are created equal. There are a few things that the web savvy browser will look for without even realizing it. If you do not provide the answer, your visitors will come to their own conclusions.

Who wrote this page?

Remember that not everyone will find your website by typing it’s URL directly into their web browser. Most new visitors will follow links from search engines or other sites. One of the first things they’ll want to learn upon arriving is whom they are …
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You catch more flies with honey. Make sure readers stick to your web site!

When last I blogged, I talked about using your site’s information to either make the sale or to move toward the sale. Now let’s look at how you can use information to keep readers on your site longer.

Little Links That Loop

None of us lingers on a site that isn’t keeping our attention. The more interesting we find a site, the longer we stay. The longer we stay, the more we remember the site—the business, the product, and the person.

Keep readers on …

Repetition can be a very good thing for Google.  It can also be a very bad thing.  It depends on what you are repeating and where you are repeating it.

As I discussed previously, anything that is worth saying once is worth saying again.  Google looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on the same page, and uses this to determine what the page is about.

Google also looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on multiple pages.  It uses this form of repetition to identify duplicate content, which it will then omit from its indexing.

This is actually …

Your web site is a valuable tool in making the sale. Information is a valuable tool in making the sale.

Where your web site fits into your sales cycle determines how to present information.

Information makes the sale

Let’s say you own a restaurant. People visit your web site to see what’s on the menu and what it costs. They also want to get a look at the photos, to see if your place suits their plans—be it for a business lunch, a family after-church-brunch, or a romantic dinner. Your web site falls at the …

Search engines like honesty.

If only one out of every three sites that Google returns on a search for Free Internet Consultation actually offers free internet consultations, it reflects poorly on Google, especially if another search engine can do better.

While it is certainly possible to stump the public with the truth (and the TV Show To Tell The Truth gives us plenty of examples), do you really want to convince your target audience that you’re exactly like the people who are pretending to do what you do?

Something Only an Expert Would Know

One of the things that the judges in To Tell …