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!

Writing Articles for SEO

There has been much speculation about writing articles for SEO or search engine optimization. Writing articles is a GREAT way to get backlinks and drive traffic to your site.

There are a couple of ways that you can utilize this marketing tool. The first is by creating a blog for your site. There is no better "EXPERT" about your business then you. Write what you KNOW!

You can also signup for numerous ezine accounts online. You can publish your articles their and add great backlinks to your site. Remember to use backlinks for every page of your site and not just the home page. Also remember that if you do have a blog that you are using, use backlinks on the blog as well.

One of the biggest things that I see happening with blogs and article submission is that people forget to fill in the little box that says "Keywords."
Keywords are important, this where you want your site and your articles listed under in the search engines. Don't leave this box empty!

If you have social networking accounts, most online ezines have direct feeds to these accounts so that your article can be posted directly to your Facebook, Twitter, etc accounts.

So create your accounts, design your blog and take a few moments to walk back through the backroads of your mind and WRITE what you KNOW!

For more information on article marketing or SEO Services, please contact BLaST creative today!

Monitoring Site Uptime

Site Uptime Monitoring can be done by a variety of services to check websites availability and uptime. What does it mean?

While monitoring your site, These services will periodically query your hosting server to see if it responds readily. These requests are similar to those sent by a Web browser when a common visitor types the URL of your site in the browser address bar and presses "enter" to see one of your Web pages.

These queries are sent from several monitoring centers (to ensure that the error response is really caused by your hosting server downtime, not by connection problems between our monitoring center and your host). The frequency of the monitoring queries depends on the service plan you select and can vary from 5 minutes to 2 hours.

As soon as your server is reported experiencing troubles, our monitoring centers send notifications to the e-mail addresses you specify and start querying your host every minute to find out when the server recovers and calculate the estimated downtime. You may also choose to be sent notifications as soon as the host recovers.

These web monitoring tools are also useful to evaluate time needed for an average visitor to get through to your pages. Actually, when a user's browser sends an HTTP request, this request is routed through many hosts in the Internet before it reaches the destination.

Custom ports monitoring
Usually, traffic flows on the server are organized through different ports, each port being responsible for a separate type of data, most commonly termed as a protocol. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is one of the most widespread protocols on the Web, through which Web pages are commonly served to the user's browser. As a rule (but not always), port 80 (or 8080) is responsible for the HTTP protocol. Another popular protocol is POP (Post Office Protocol) which uses port 110 by default.

What does all this mean? You can connect to one and the same host (IP address) through different ports to communicate different kinds of data between your machine and the server. If you connect to 129.34.54.674 through the 80 th port, it expects you to request and retrieve Web pages, and if you connect through the 110 th port, it expects you to look for mail messages.

In case your server allows for additional ports to be used in custom purposes (i.e. your hosting package includes the ability to establish your own e-mail accounts on the server), you can monitor the availability of those ports as well.

Speed test
Speed test allows you to immediately check how long it takes either of our monitoring centers to download a certain amount of information from your host (more specifically, how much information could be downloaded in one second to each of the monitoring centers). The higher the connection speed, the more information there is available to download per second.

Content monitoring
The content monitoring option warns you when text (a word or phrase) is missing on a certain page of your site or vice versa, when a certain text you don't want appears on your pages. The first can mean that your content has been changed without your permission (and as such this is an intrusion alert). The second can be used to track the appearance of the error / warning texts (e.g. "Host not found" or "Server busy"). The second also can be used to debug server-side scripts (the alert text may be " CGI script error", "Fatal error" etc).

To summarize all you can use site uptime monitoring to see if you're losing a considerable amount of traffic you have earned as a result of your SEO / SEM campaigns, and decide if your server's performance gives you a reason to change the hosting service. To determine whether your pages are being served slowly and damaging your usability Monitor the DNS resolve and host ping average speed, as well as content download speed, to find out whether your pages appear slower than they should to the average visitor, thus damaging the overall usability grade of your site.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and Web Design, please contact BLaST creative today!

BLaST Creative Web Design-Grab People With Headlines

When you get up in the morning and reach for the newspaper, what’s the first thing that you do? I don’t know about you, but me, I skim all of the headlines to see which stories I want to read. Well, the same is true online.

We are creatures of habit, we scan websites, reading headlines or what we in the design world call “headings” to help us decide if want to read or stay on this site or not. If you want to give your copy a chance to be read or if you want your visitors to stay, you need to make sure that you use punchy, descriptive headlines.

Your headlines should be a summary of your web content on each specific page, it should be a hook, making people want to read more. Try to use as few words as possible, but make them SNAPY!

And don’t ever pass up the opportunity to use keywords in your headlines. One way that search engines rank you is by looking at the text on your page and especially your headlines. If you want to be listed in “BMW Repair in Billings MT,” it will help if you include those words in your headline, “Metric Wrench offers BMW Repair in Billings MT.”

At BLaST Creative we are certified in Internet Marketing and can assist you with all of your Internet Marketing needs. For more assistance, please contact BLaST Creative.

BLaST Creative Web Design

Here are for more handy tips about web design from BLaST Creative.
A key element in web design are your headers, you want to get the attention of your visitors with killer headlines.

Think about it, when you are standing in line at the grocery store, what attracts you to all of those magazines? Isn’t it the killer headlines? You pick one up and skim through it, reading all of the headlines, deciding if you want to purchase it.

Well, the same is true with web sites. The majority of us scan websites, using headlines or what we in the design business call headers. Headers will help your visitors decide if they want to read what you have to say, purchase your products or go elsewhere. If you want your content to be read, you need to make sure that you use attention grabbing, descriptive headlines.

Your headers/headlines should tell about the contents on your web page and at the same time HOOK your visitors’ attention so that they want to read more. Try to say as much as you can using as few words as possible.

Another thing that you can do that will help your rankings with the search engines is to use keywords in your headlines. An important element about search engine optimization that you should know, is that search engines rank your pages by reading the text on your page, especially your HEADERS!

For more information about web design or seo services, contact BLaST Creative.