#1. No Attention Grabbing Headline and Poor Lead

Headlines can make or break your conversion efforts. A great headline has the potential to grab your prospect’s attention, lead him into reading your copy, convince and convert him to become a loyal customer. The first step towards that conversion is the humble headline. Copyblogger has some great tips on the art of crafting great headlines.

The next step is to capture your prospects’ attention with a powerful lead. The first few lines of text need to paint the big picture and must be compelling and captivating so that they stay engaged and read the rest of your copy.

A successful headline will capture your prospects’ attention and get that first click. An effective lead will guarantee their engagement with the rest of your copy.

#2. Not enough WIIFM (What’s in it for me)

I learned this lesson early in my web career. I was engaged in web development at the time. The client had all the buzz words (according to me) in his website copy: We are the leading agency…We handle the top accounts…. Prospects just weren’t converting. He finally brought in an expert who transformed his content so that it spoke directly to his customers’ needs. His conversion rates skyrocketed and were up by close to 80% all because he spoke in terms of the WIIFM angle.

Your sale’s copy must tell me what are the benefits to me? Will it make my life simpler? Will I lose weight, get richer, save money or look younger? Is your product cheaper or newer than other products on the market?

Unique angle

What is so unique about your product? Why is it so different from the 10 other products on the market? In other words, why should I buy from you?
• For example if I want to buy seo tools for my website, why are yours different from the free ones on the market?
• If you are an electronics retailer, what makes your online store different for the 1000 other stores that sell electronics?

#3. No Calls to Action

“It’s your company’s website where your prospect makes a buying decision and the sale actually takes place. Each webpage needs to provide prospects with a compelling reason to do business with you, including calls to action that gently direct them down the sales funnel, getting them to convert, “buy now” or contact you. While an unprofessional website will derail the best web marketing campaign, a well-designed site is a powerful conversion tool that will continually deliver high-quality leads.”
-Rich Brooks, President of Flyte New Media

While It’s the job of the rest of your content to attract, engage and sell the benefits, the call to action needs to get your prospects to take the action you want them to right now.

Be direct. Tell people what to do. It could be to buy a product, sign up for a webinar or subscribe to your newsletter.

Very often your prospects really WANT you to give them a final push. Help them out by using language that propels them forward.

A powerful headline, strong lead, compelling WIIFM and direct calls to action are all important aspects of website copy. They all need to collaboratively perform well for that all important conversion. These important power elements if done correctly will work every time guaranteed as long as these essential elements of writing for the web are met.

What are the top content mistakes that that have cost you conversions? Please share your thoughts.

How to Optimize Your Content for Social Media [Slideshow]

January 26, 2012 by Gazalla Gaya

Did you know that YouTube has reached a milestone of over 4 billion global video views per day? Mind boggling statistics such as these on social media usage prompted me to create this slideshow. The first couple of slides explain why you should optimize your content for social media (for most people this part is elementary, but I’ve included it in for the fun factor and the mind boggling statistics). I’ve also included different steps that you can take so that your audience can easily share your content across their varied networks.

I recently uploaded this slideshow on SlideShare and am pleasantly surprised at how many views it has already received. SlideShare is a social media channel that enjoys a loyal viewership base and is an extremely powerful medium. If you haven’t already, I recommend that you share your content on SlideShare to increase awareness for your brand or product.

How to Optimize your Content for Social Media

View more presentations from gazalla

What are you doing to optimize your content for social media? Please share your thoughts and ideas.

Style Guide – An Essential Tool to Your Web Content Strategy

January 10, 2012 by Gazalla Gaya

I shared this article with my LinkedIn group recently and was pleased and also a little amazed at how passionate the web content community’s reactions were to this topic. This post generated a lively discussion and some of the comments were the size of blog posts. Here is a screenshot:

If you are a content writer or blogger, you need to make these key editorial decisions everyday:

How will you treat every day web terms: website, web-site or web site? Email or e-mail?
How will you handle headlines? Will you capitalize every word or only the first word?
Will you address your audience in a conversational style or will you use a more formal approach?

At any given time, creating an editorial style guide will take the guess work out of all these decisions and will set the overall tone, look and feel of your site.

Critical Benefits of Web Style Guides

#1. Optimum User Experience

Consistency is the number one rule for creating an awesome user experience on your site. The primary goal of all web disciplines from web design to web development, from site architecture to content strategy is to create a consistent look and feel. A style guide sets standards that can be seamlessly maintained across every page and post of your site.

When I was consulting recently, for a large healthcare provider, I thought that it would set a friendly and helpful tone to the site if I followed the current trend of writing content in a conversational style. Upon further evaluation of all the client sites, I had to abandon that idea as it became clear to me that their multiple websites used a more formal approach. In order to maintain a consistent look and feel to my project, I had to use the same tone.

#2. Content Creation and Maintenance are Quicker, Easier and More Efficient

A style guide reduces the amount of thought, time and effort you need to put into the same tiny details on an ongoing basis. I know from personal experience that time and effort are both at a premium in a blogger’s life. You could use that additional time and effort on other essential activities such as blog promotion, site improvements, seo and social media optimization.
It’s a lot easier to read and comprehend information that is uniformly presented.

#3. Everyone Is on the Same Page

I think that my favorite reason to create a style guide is that it reduces confusion. If you are not sure how you handle even simple conventions such as naming files or dates, you could always go back and refer to your style guide.
From time to time, you could have different people working on your site or blog such as guest posters, freelancers, contractors or web designers. You will have a great resource guide that these multiple people could turn to for guidance.
A style guide serves as a tool for conflict resolution. As a rule, people are always more agreeable to follow a standard that’s already in place.

What Must You Include in Your Style Guide?
Your style guide’s primary function is to serve as a guide for anyone with web writing and editing responsibilities. At the macro level:

Your style guide must include the writing style you will use to set the overall tone of your site.
It must also contain a description of keywords that you are optimizing your site for and
It must include a quick overview of your content driven seo strategies.

Your style guide could be a very basic document or you could make it more detailed and be as granular as you like. Ideally, at the very least a good style guide should contain:

Official Reference Guides – CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), AP Stylebook (Associated Press) or any other reference guide
Grammar conventions
Syntax
Punctuation
Capitalization
Treatment of industry specific terms
Copyright issues
Treatment of numbers and numerals:
- Dates
- Numbers
- Measurements
- Currency
- Format for phone numbers
The more details you include in your style guide, the more consistent your website/blog will look and feel.

I hope that this primer is helpful. Stay tuned for my next post and a sample style guide that you could use on your website.

Sign up for my free newsletter and get this upcoming post and plenty of other tips sent directly to your inbox.

5 Ideas for Creating Original, High Quality Content

January 10, 2012 by Gazalla Gaya

It’s no secret that the best way to attract traffic and achieve higher rankings is by creating high quality content. High value content is ultimately what separates you from the millions of other sites and blogs in cyberspace and in the blogosphere.

Yet, the internet is exploding with thousands of pages of low value content. Most content creators look at the content on other sites, and rewrite some of those ideas and throw in a few keywords. This rehash has resulted in the internet being flooded with pages of low quality content.

So what is high quality content?
High quality content:

Is original and involves creating new ideas
Is created when you share your unique experience, your fresh and unique perspective with your community of readers.
Is created when you use your voice to give new life to the same copywriting formulae that writers have been using for decades.

If you are an affiliate marketer, it means researching and personally experiencing the benefits of the product that you are selling. Your review will be of value to your customers as you have spent the time and effort required instead of simply copying ad copy right out of your vendor’s website.

If you are a real estate agent, it means writing an honest review on why you love the area where you sell and why you feel it would be an attractive place to live.

Benefits of Creating High Value Content:

Unique content will engage and delight your customers and will keep them coming to your site for more ideas. Quality content along with these content writing tips will ensure audience engagement on your site.
Search engines give higher rankings to original and high quality content. A higher ranking in turn will drive more traffic to your site. Google’s early 2011 algorithm updates were specifically designed to penalize short and shallow articles and reward high-quality content.
Fresh ideas get the maximum shares on social media.

Here are 5 content ideas that are tried and tested marketing strategies. Use them with your voice to create content of a high quality and value.

#1. Make Some Predictions

The New Year is always a perfect time to predict how 2012 will shape up for any number of industries such as the outlook for:

small businesses
cell phones
the economy
movies
web design
social media

The sky is the limit. Every product and industry lends itself to speculation, predictions and a future outlook. People love reading predictions. Make sure that the prediction that you make are purely from your perspective on the future of your market, service or product.

#2. Common Problems in Your Profession and Their Resolution:

Almost 60% of respondents to a recent Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) survey said that they used internet search as a way to solve problems. In fact, more people turn to the internet as a source or solution than consult experts, family members or friends to provide information and resources.

I came across a number of small technical issues while I was creating this blog. I kept a track of these issues knowing that other people who faced similar problems will be able to benefit from my experience. These problems and their solutions, I have no doubt, will turn out to be original, high quality blog posts.

#3. Before and After

People love to read about before and after stories, and the more dramatic the transformation the greater is the level of engagement; the more it gets shared on social media. Besides, before and after projects are also extremely well illustrated with some nifty graphics. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Every product and service has a before and after story in terms of why the product/service was created and the value it added to customers’ lives. Every client project, sales pitch, marketing effort has a before and after project story with: lessons learned; value created; and income earned. Other classic examples of before and after projects include:

before and after a makeover
a complete site redesign
before and after a social media strategy
before and after a home design project
before and after slimming diet or product
sales figures before and after a marketing campaign

#4. Write a Review

Early in 2011, Derek Halpern used this strategy by writing blog reviews of popular sites such as Chris Brogan and Think Traffic.

Review any product or service that is making waves in your industry that you have personally tried or experienced. Better yet, be among the first to review a new product or service.

#5. Do a Comparison

Give your unique perspective on 2-3 products or services in your industry. You could list the pros and cons and why you would recommend one over the other.

You could do side by side comparisons of any product or service under the sun: Cars; cell phone plans; tablet pcs; Digital cameras; and laptops are perfect niche markets for comparison tables that work wonders for ratings.

What are you doing to create original, high quality content? Please share your thoughts and ideas.

10 Free SEO Tools

October 22, 2011 by Gazalla Gaya

Seo (Search Engine Optimization)

There are a number of free seo tools which should be a part of any site owners toolkit. These tools provide site owners with valuable information to help them improve their search engine rankings and attract more visitors and business.

Let’s look at 10 of these free seo tools:

Google’s keyword research tools allow you to use keywords that customers are using when looking for a product. The tool has a number of search options from searching for keyword ideas using a combination of keywords, a web site and categories to comparing statistics for your keywords and filtering results by search volume (global monthly searches etc.) and competition types.
The Google analytics tool tracks how visitors are getting to your site and lets you analyze your traffic data. This tool will help you focus and write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.
Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker. The software lets you detect duplicate content and check if your articles are original.
InboundWriter is a new online tool that helps you optimize web content for search engines. The free version lets you optimize up to eight documents per month in search results. It helps you discover profitable keywords you’ve been missing out on and track rankings of your website for multiple keywords in all major search engines.
SEO ToolSet by Buce Clay Inc. has multiple free tools. The Search Engine Optimization/KSP Tool measures a keyword’s popularity by showing daily approximations of how often each keyword is searched in the major search engines, derived from monthly statistics. Use the Page Analyzer tool to research the competition. After you have found out who your competition is, see how many unique pages are ranked in the top ten in the major search engines. Then compare it with how many pages you have
MultiRank Checker by iWebtool.com is great to check the Google page rank and the Alexa ranking of multiple urls.
SEO for Firefox by SEOBook.com is good for a quick overview of many parameters including keyword density analysis, keyword suggestions and statistics, page comparison and link checking.
Google Optimizer, Google’s free web site testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing web sites and traffic. Use Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design. You can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI whether you’re new to marketing or an expert
Google Webmaster Central ensures that your site is search engine friendly. It will identify various issues, such as broken links, malware, crawling issues, etc., as well as providing data on search engine indexing and search traffic.
Hootsuite is a social media tool which will help you to monitor keywords, manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm and WordPress profiles and schedule messages.