5 Writing Tools No Internet Marketer Should Be Without

Writing compelling content is difficult at the best of times. You have to use a target audience’s hot buttons, emotions, and deepest needs to convince them to buy. But, unless you’ve got a real knack for this type of thing, it just isn’t as easy as it sounds. Thankfully, there are a few tools that can make it a whole lot easier.
Fair Warning: ‘easier’ does NOT mean these tools create ‘foolproof’ copy! (A hammer only works when you miss your finger!)

Once you’ve identified YOUR target audience, you need to learn from them, and who better to learn from than one of them? These Social Networks and searches make it easy to find someone in the perfect target market, learn a bit more about them, gather ideas, and see what the product or service’s competition is up to. You’ll even find it easier to write or sell because you can pretend you’re selling to one of them.

One of the best ways to learn how to write better copy is to practice writing and reading someone else’s sales copy. So, when I find a good piece of copy, I clip it and put it in on my desktop! Then, I can write them out and get to learn how to improve the results of my copy. These bits can also act as a guide while providing you with ideas for handling certain situations. Lastly, it’s also a good idea to keep information about the various products, services, and their competitors as well as examples of good titles and ideas.

ReadPlease

Finding mistakes is tough enough, but things such as awkwardly worded phrases can be almost impossible to find unless someone else reads the copy to you. That’s exactly what ReadPlease does. It’s robotic sounding, but you’d be amazed at how many mistakes you can catch with it.

Whether you choose an online whiteboard, or the more freeing real-life version, writers need a spot to track site structure, concepts, facts, and develop ideas. And with the freedom of a whiteboard, there are no limitations. Trust me, after using one to structure a piece of copy, you’ll wonder how you ever wrote something without it. (It’s also good for jotting down quick notes, but so is Sticky Notes, if you’re interested.)

WYSIWYG, Keyword Analyzer & Email

Off all the tools listed here, I rely on these three the most. The online WYSIWYG makes it pretty easy to code up your text and leaves it nice and clean. The keyword analysis tool is one of the select few online you can use to calculate keyword density simply by copy and pasting.

Your email program can also be extremely helpful. Now, I know you’re going ‘duh’, but it’s actually a great code cleaner. You see, MS Office has a habit of loading text full of useless code that seems almost impossible to get rid of. To fix this problem, email the file to yourself. Then, preview the file in the email program, select the text, copy, and paste it wherever you need it. You’ll find it keeps the HTML without all the junk.

Oh! One last thing! I’m testing out a Firefox addon called ‘After the Deadline’, which is a spelling, grammar, and style checker. You might like it!

BLaST Creative Web Design 101

Okay, so you have a name for your site and web hosting, are you ready for the next step? If so, then let’s go. What exactly do you want your website to do? What are you trying to achieve?

Set realistic goals that are achievable. Are you trying to sell a product? Or a service? Is your site going to be showoff family pictures or are you planning on using it for advocacy? It’s important that you only set one or two goals for your site. If you have an over abundance of goals, you’ll set yourself up for failure.

Your goal can assist you in the decision making process for your site, helping you to create the perfect site. Ask you make decisions for you site, make sure that they are inline with your goals. Stick to your goals.

Small text looks nicer, but larger text is more readable. Verdana font size 12, is the most easily read text on the net. Make sure that your headers are Bold and you have plenty of keywords that pertain to your site, but don’t do an overkill on the keywords.

Once you’ve done this, then you’ll need to decide who your targeted audience and create a call to action. If your site is for business, then you’ll want your customers to make a purchase. If your site is non-commercial, what exactly do you want your viewers to do?

How do you get your viewers to do what you want? That’s simple, you have to ask them and your request needs to be obvious. They have to see your call to action button, for more info click here, to buy, click here, it must clear to your viewer what you want them to do.

Your entire site, from the design to the writing, should be focused on getting your viewers to engage in the action that you’ve requested. For some sites like Amazon, the action they want the viewer to perform might be to make an online purchase, but for others it could simply be tempting your viewer to make a phone call or send an email.

No matter what you choose to have for your call to action, you need to understand your target audience in order to get them to perform it. It your targeted crowd is under 25, you can use abbreviated scripts like BTW for by the way, they are all texters and that is their language. If it’s for an older generation, they aren’t going to understand the lingo. So be sure that you are talking to your targeted audience in your script.

I hope that this information has been helpful. If you are interested in learning more about web design, web marketing, SEO or article marketing please email me for further information. I can provide copy that drives sales leads, online and off. Proven BLaST Creative strategies that work, from e-mail to Web to print. There will be less wasted time, you won’t be sending my copy back for endless rewrites or doing it yourself because it isn’t up to snuff. Project work delivered on time, every time.

BLaST Creative SEO Copywriting

If you type “web design” into Google, thousands of results will be generated, with links to everything from web designers to directories featuring web designers and ebooks and even this blog. However, only ten of those sites make it to the first page. If you want more options, you have to click to the next screen.

So how do those lucky 10 make it to the top of the ranking? A major influence on search engine rankings is what is called SEO copywriting. SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is simply a technique to finding and placing certain words and phrases in your copy that will help push the Web site to the top of the heap whenever someone types in a particular search phrase.

SEO techniques also include strategically placed text within the HTML code (the underlining code used to create most Web sites).

One of the most important aspects in SEO copywriting is integrating certain words and phrases into the text. This is called keyword placement. This sounds technical, but it’s really quite simple. For example, when writing a Web site to promote your freelance copywriting services, it’s a no-brainer that you’ll have to use the term “copywriter” somewhere in the copy. Otherwise, people looking for that kind of service never find you!

Search engine companies use software programs called spiders to regularly crawl the Internet and analyze web sites. Spiders glean information from each site visited, making judgments about the content and determining how best to categorize and describe the Web site in search engine results. This is the data that search engines use to rank a Web site.

SEO copywriters take this idea a lot further. They make sure that the most popular words and phrases typed into search engines by people who are looking for copywriters, or whatever product or service that is being promoted, are mentioned in the copy. To optimize a copywriter’s Web site, you would have to integrate the follow words into the text:

• Copywriter
• Copywriting
• Copywriting services
• Marketing communications
• Freelance copywriter
• Copy
• Marketing writer

If you are interested in learning more about web design, web marketing, SEO or article marketing please email me for further information. I can provide copy that drives sales leads, online and off. Proven BLaST Creative strategies that work, from e-mail to Web to print. There will be less wasted time, you won’t be sending my copy back for endless rewrites or doing it yourself because it isn’t up to snuff. Project work delivered on time, every time.