Engage your readers. Empathize with them. They should feel your mood and gain your understanding through your words.

Test your readership. Share. Make it a two-way street. This is particularly important if you’re marketing. And remember – understand your traffic and reader-base. Let me say that again. Understand your traffic and reader-base. If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.

Be clear and targeted

Don’t try to be all things to all people.  Or all things to some people. Or even some things to all people.  Enough, already, I hear you say – you get it.  But set yourself a little test – whenever you feel yourself trying to be too ‘widely appealing’ when writing your copy (you will), make a tally of it. You’ll end up with a big count.  Learn from that.

Get into the head of your potential reader.  Really try to relate to him or her and understand precisely what he or she wants.

An excellent way of doing this is to survey existing readers/customers/users if you have them.  A superb industrial-quality survey tool which is used by small and large businesses is SurveyMonkey.  Of course there are lots of other ways to poll your readers (WordPress has more polls than you can shake a stick at).

Ask your users a few, focused questions about themselves.  Ask customers why they bought the product, what they like about it, what they don’t like, what they would suggest.  Obviously you can, in return, offer them a coupon or a free gift or something.  Whatever it is, get that feedback – it’s really very important and will be very valuable to you.

If you don’t have customers, there are still ways and means of getting information about your prospective customer base.  Or reader base.  Basically whoever you’re targeting.

Laser-focus on your offering

Let’s take an example of a typical sales situation.  Targeting readers is similar – there are core principles.  What is the single most important reason your target audience would want to buy it? You need to be able to empathize with your target market, identify their problems and show how your product solves that problem. If you think too generally about your target market, the passion is lost in your copy and it’s tough to get anyone excited about anything.

It can’t be said too often that you will sell more to a highly-targeted group of people than trying a lukewarm approach with the public in general. Leave general marketing to the big boys:  Amazon.com can focus their attention on “buyers of consumer electronics”, but you want to focus on, for example, buyers of a particular model of digital camera.

Though, do note, that Amazon is more than aware of how to target you as a specific customer.  If and when you buy something from them, you’ll notice they remember that, to such an extent that if you buy a particular type of product they will, on your next visit to their site, offer you similar or complimentary products. They’re very good at it.

Start writing a list of all the characteristics of your typical customer.

Use information gathered from customer surveys, as mentioned earlier in this section, and write at least 15-20 specific characteristics. This list will help you as you make your way through the forest with us.

Your USP

Sorry to break it to you, but if you don’t have a unique selling position for your blog, product or service then you could already be dead in the water. The USP is what sets you apart from your competition (essentially, the thing you offer that your competition is not offering).

Once you really understand your USP, or USPs, you can write good copy much more easily, focusing on the real benefits of your offering.

Of course, USPs vary from market to market, product to product, but here are just a few examples, by way of illustration:

• hiring expensive sports cars to rich drivers under the age of 25
• providing customer support via agents who have at least 5 years experience in your industry
• good value life insurance for skydivers
• sourcing hard-to-find products or services with a quick turnaround
• selling ice to Eskimos (sorry about this one)

USP is a concept that is often difficult for people to grasp initially because every business is different. You need to really sit down, brainstorm and figure out your USP because if you don’t, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd and compete in your market.  Again, mind-mapping can really help you in this area.

Yes, price may be a USP.  But, unless you really do “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” and you have a successful business model for this, the problem with this is that simply focusing on trying to sell for the lowest price is not often a profitable business model, especially for small.

Layout

The layout of your copy needs to be clear and to pack maximum punch.  Two really fundamental weapons of the copywriter are:

Headlines

Powerful copy is often based on a powerful headline. In the modern world, particularly in the online world, people are busy and you only have a tiny amount of time to grab their attention. Fact: they won’t read the ‘small print’ on your page if you don’t get their attention. A clear, benefit-oriented headline can help you do this.

You need to stand right in the shoes of your reader.  Imagine you’ve just gone online to buy something or check your email.  Would you take a minute to read your copy based on your headline?

There are some tried and tested ‘openings’ to headings.  Try these for size:

“Who Else Wants to…..”  This immediately steers the reader’s mind to a relationship. He or she thinks: people have already “done X” and now I, too can “do X”.

“Are You…..”  Similarly, the immediate impact is for the reader to relate to the writer.  For example, “Are You Constantly Tired?” – he writer understands the reader is, in fact, always tired and has a solution for him waiting around the corner.

“Give Me 1 Week and I’ll…..”  Provided that you can deliver, this is one of the most powerful messages.  It’s a promise.  “Give Me 1 Week and I’ll Build a Tailored Exercise Regime For You”.  But DO deliver.  In fact, as we explained earlier in this guide, you should in fact over-deliver.

Bullet points

Even short paragraphs of constant, line-by-line text are generally not recommended for good copy.  Of course, it depends who your target audience is, but breaking up the text and the message into nice, bite-size pieces is a well-used device for one reason: it works.

Pick your top five or so messages and set them out in nice short bullet points.  You can expand on the detail later, should you wish, but unless your reader is hooked from the start he or she won’t even get to the detail.

Always remember:

• Don’t be insular.  Look at other well-written headlines out there, whether online or in the print media, perhaps, and learn from them.  Look out for those ads which appear time and time again.  Why do you think they’re appearing time and time again? Because they’re successful.

Keep a ‘scrapbook’ (yes, of course it can be digital, not pieces of paper, but even today quite a lot of writers still like the latter) and use it for inspiration.

• Make the message compelling and easy for the reader to respond to with action.  You’re not just writing for fun.  You want action, you want results.

• Analyze and understand your copy. If you’re not getting the desired effect from it, don’t flog a dead horse.  Learn and adapt, just like you should and must with the rest of your business.

Just consider what might happen if there was a fire in your office, and all of your documents and computers were destroyed. Without your files, papers, and filing cabinets, as well as all of the documents that you’ve stored on your hard drive, would you be able to continue working where you left off? With all of the recent storms and tornadoes, if your computers were fried by a power surge, would it put you out of business? Losing your equipment may very well mean losing your livelihood.

These problems can certainly be averted if you have good office insurance in place. It will safeguard both the physical location of your work, but also your entire company and all of its assets. Retaining control over your organization, no matter how small or large, is vital during times of crisis, and when you have office insurance to cover all aspects of the workplace, including income for yourself and any other workers, and lease expenses for the physical plant. Office insurance should be viewed as a necessity and incorporated into your initial business plan and all subsequent budgetary meetings. Many people mistakenly believe that their homeowner’s insurance will cover losses and damages to their home office. Unfortunately, it typically will only pay very minimally; no business liability insurance, no coverage for damage or loss of your company’s records, no coverage for cyber-crime or business interruption.

A more specific type of coverage is errors and omissions insurance. One such type of insurance is the malpractice insurance that doctors, and doctor’s offices, arrange to protect themselves from claims that they did not do their job properly. It is insurance that you purchase hoping you will never need to use, but it gives you peace of mind knowing it is in place, as it can protect you from devastating financial losses.

Effective policies will cover a wide array of occurrences, from basic replacement of equipment for the office and repairs of office space to any physical harm to workers or embezzlement. Insurance companies attempt to offer comprehensive policies that cover almost any unfortunate circumstance that can arise. Likewise, the greater need for this type of insurance has spurred more companies to focus on it, and to offer policies which are a perfect fit for any business from a sole proprietorship to a large multi-national company. Proper protection starts with getting several quotes from highly-rated office insurance companies.

These sites allow users to upload, tag and vote for interesting content.  If you make it to a ‘front page’ position on one of these sites, they could send thousands or even tens, hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website.

What should you publish on these sites?

Choose material which is pitched to appeal to the users.  Once you have registered with the sites, make sure that you understand what works and what doesn’t.  The main objective of the sites is to ensure that their users receive and have access to interesting, up-to-date content.  So, anything you publish there with a view to hitting a traffic spike, or building interest in your product or service, must be suitably tailored.

The way to achieve success is to become part of the community.  The people who use these sites are not ‘casual’ users of the Internet, usually.  They are typically competent, savvy web users who understand the difference between a useful piece of content and a ‘campaign’ designed to promote something.

Popularity and trust are two things which come from being a community member.  When you obtain these things, in your capacity as a marketer for your business, you can find yourself in a win-win situation where you deliver the right materials and information to the right audience. They will find what you publish worthwhile and valuable if you pitch it correctly and that will lead to success in that arena for you.

Be interesting, genuine and not heavy handed

Remember the key elements of marketing.  Put yourself in the shoes of your audience, which wants information, entertainment, real value from its web experience, not to be on the receiving end of self-interested campaigning from a business it doesn’t know or care to know.

People put up barriers when they think they are being played, and quite rightly.  Pulling the wool over the eyes of your potential customers is not where you want to be, either.  Your reputation is important.  Some say it’s all you have.

The title of your content is very important, followed by the content itself and both of these things are underpinned by presentation.  Your presentation has to be excellent:  it must be fantastically written (see copyrighting in this guide) and engaging in a variety of ways.  If you are packaging your self-interest into the bargain, by providing information about your product, that must be secondary to the goal of satisfying the reader.  Or it will not work.  Do not forget this, or you’ll waste time in this space.

The community loves free.  People love free, at one of their most base levels.  You give a lot away, you sell at the “top slice”.  It’s another example of the “freemium” model working.

Take a look around you as you browse the web.  As you walk down the street.  As you watch TV.  As you read a magazine.  Are you “drawn” by free?  Have you ended up somewhere you might otherwise not have been, surfing down the web “rabbit warren”, because of “free”?  Or walked into that random store because of free? Of course you have.

We’re going to do some pieces on the power of free.  Because it is powerful.  And it’s win-win-win.

Using services like Jott to blog opens up new dimensions.  When you call your Jott phone number, the service translates your spoken words into written text.  You can even set your own blog as an “addressee”.  C’mon, you gotta try that.

Who has blogged in the oddest places using the weirdest kit?

But, you know, most people still don’t understand keywords as well as they should, particularly when it comes to creating a new niche site.

Below is a short, but very sweet, video about exactly how you plan and develop a niche market product using Wordtracker.

Disclaimer: Obviously this video was created by Wordtracker and accordingly is about their product, but it really is a gem for people quite new to this area….enjoy….

Let’s take it a little further….

Structure

There are a thousand and one ways to structure your email – some will work, some won’t, like many things in business as in life. But the following works and is heavily adopted by successful ‘list marketers’:

• Greeting with a short introduction on what this issues article will be about.

• A short ad on a product/service that you are recommending.

• The article – this is key and is the content for your Ezine/bulletin.

• Resource box – this can provide associated, contextual information and utilities.

• A list of helpful links.

• Subscriber information.

Building a relationship with your Ezine readers

To follow-on from the piece on business marketing, above, it’s undeniable that having a strong relationship with your readers will take you a long way down the road to achieving your goals.

How do you do this? It’s typically a good idea to ‘get personal’, but not too personal. For example, let’s say you have a list of golfers because you sell golf products. Or a list of bloggers because you’re an expert on blogging. For the golfers, tell them about experiences on the golf course, funny, stupid, or educational – stuff they can relate to as they are golfers and have probably done things very similar. The bloggers will typically want to develop their skills blogging; or to try new things and cover new subjects that interest them.  The blogging community is great at “self-help” – people are keen to share their knowledge and to learn from you, too.

Try to relate to them as best you can. People want to know that there are others out there just like them. When they find out that you are just another person out in the world with the same experiences they are having, it becomes a lot easier for them to trust you.

If you sell products or services, it’s all about getting each subscriber into your life. This should be a huge focus of your list and your marketing efforts across the board.

If you really want to have an incredibly responsive list, then do these three things, in this order:

1) Build a relationship with them.

2) Educate them with quality content.

3) Promote good quality products and/or services that you believe in.

Doing this is a win-win for everybody.

Quality content is king

There isn’t anything good that can come from using bad content.

One of the big reasons to get on the Internet is to research information in some way or another. Who wants to go looking for something and read worthless, unhelpful material?

If you waste a visitors’ time, annoy them, or confuse them with bad content, they are certainly not going to buy from you. You just lost a potential customer. It is pointless. Furthermore, the search engines are not going to like you much either. Especially if your information is the same thing that everybody else is using.

Your information has to be good to make it big online. It has always been this way, and it always will be, so start producing good information now!  Don’t be tempted down another route, whatever the motivations (be them time-saving, or otherwise).

Look at your content from a visitor’s perspective. If you were looking for information on that specific topic, would you be happy with the content that you are presenting?

Get used to stepping inside your visitor’s/customer’s shoes and looking at your business through their eyes.

It is a surefire way to improve your web sites (blogs and others) and business overall.

An Ezine (let’s just call it that, here; there are lots of names!) is a newsletter that is delivered via email that your customers can subscribe or “opt-in” to.

The feedback we’ve had over the years, and experience ourselves, is that Ezine marketing works consistently well. One element of good business is maximizing your return for effort employed. After all, entrepreneurship is essentially about using and deploying resources for return. For the amount of time you put in to run an online list (relatively little), the return is well worth it.

But, remember: online users will unsubscribe from many lists lately because of lack of quality. You need to be creating quality. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and don’t cut corners. Why would you stay subscribed if you just get bombarded with offer after offer and get no benefit?

If you aren’t producing quality content, then subscribers to your list, no matter what topic you are covering, are going to start unsubscribing in droves. It is now more important than ever to start building a real relationship with your subscriber list and nurturing it by offering serious value.

The people who grasp this concept are going to be the ones making a lot of money with email marketing in the future. And they’ll be the ones who enjoy what they do, too. So far, people have gotten away with low or “no” content, but that is changing. Time are changing (at last).

You need to make your Ezine a worthwhile read for people to want to read it. If you do that, success is likely to follow.

Using Ezines

If you have your own product already, then start an Ezine in that market to help promote your product and future products.

If you do not have a market to publish in yet, don’t worry, you don’t need a product to start an Ezine. However, what you do with that Ezine, and what its goals are, must be fully scoped: do you intend to use it to build and drive readership and sell advertising? If so, plan it. See our post on building your website for advice on scoping and mind-mapping.

It’s a question for debate and planning what your scheduling plan looks like, but from experience in this area we’d suggest you send out an Ezine with a 3-5 page article of good information about once or twice per month at the least with once per week being the most. This may or may not compliment a more regular update (perhaps a mailing list run through FeedBurner or a blog update).  Obviously, Twitter’s an amazing tool in this area, too.

That is all you need to send. When heavily involved in building a list and marketing to it, the ‘formula’ can be to send out one week with a 3-5 page article, and the next week was a solo advertisement for something you want to promote. Then, the week after, you may decide to send another 3-5 page article on something your subscribers wanted to know about, developing their interest and adding real value.

You can alternate successfully between content and advertising, should you wish. Like in most businesses, customers will not balk at advertising as long as the associated content is informative. Remember your brand and don’t damage it.

If you’re going to get into this area of marketing, focus on a content driven Ezine that can help build your business and be a reliable source of benefit for you.

Format

There are various different types of formats that you can use when publishing your Ezine. Focusing on three:

• Put the entire Ezine in an email. This can work well, particularly when people nowadays often read email on mobile devices (Blackberry, etc).

You can put the introduction, marketing/advertising content and article content all in one well-crafted email and send it out to your subscribers.

This is probably the ‘easiest’ way to approach this for newcomers.

We’d advise always sending your email as text and not an HTML page as those can still cause problems with some email readers. But you can give subscribers a choice, obviously.

• Another popular option is to put your article in a PDF downloadable file and then send an email to your list telling them where they can download the file.

This has the added benefit of people being able to save it to their computer and view it later (more views means more people will click on the links in your Ezine which means more traffic for you).

This also has an added benefit of a viral effect. You can put at the bottom (or top if you really want to stress it) of your Ezine that they can pass the PDF file to their friends or make it downloadable on their web site or blog.

This can help introduce your Ezine to people who are not yet subscribed to it. And of course, if your content is good and they like your Ezine, they can subscribe.

A PDF file format is certainly a decent option if you like the ideas above, and you can create PDF file for free with something like PrimoPDF.

• You can use an HTML page where you put your Ezine issue on your website as a regular HTML page, then email your subscribers and give them the link to the latest issue.

This has the same benefit as the PDF file where people can refer their friends, or link to it from their own web site or blog which can generate more subscribers for you.

Plus, it has an additional benefit of being able to use HTML in your Ezine if you wanted to do more interactive content like pictures, flash animations or even video.

If you can add these to your free Ezine to explain your articles/ideas, it will enhance the experience for readers and should attract subscribers. People are drawn to entertaining videos (just look at YouTube’s phenomenal success) so adding these to your free Ezine could certainly help its success.

See Part 2, which will follow soon, about structure, building a relationship with your users and quality of content. Bye for now.

Once you’ve decided to start your own online business (pretty much whatever it is, from a blog to an ecommerce site), you’ll first want to get a firm grasp on how your visitors/potential customers use the Internet. In particular, you’ll need to learn what exactly they use the Internet for.

It would certainly be great for your site if every person who logged on was doing so because they had their credit cards in hand, and were looking to buy precisely the kinds of products and services you offer.  But, of course, we live in the real world. Rather, most people use the Internet to get information. That search for information often takes the form of trying to answer questions that these individuals have been unable to find answers for elsewhere. That quest may or may not lead them to your product or service. So how do people tend to go about finding answers to their questions?  As you might guess, these days most Internet users tend to rely upon search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Whilst very few users won’t have used at least one of these three search engines, there are also hundreds of other search engines available. However, those other search engines generate far less traffic than the big three (Google alone garners well over 60% of the Internet search traffic), so we’ll focus our attention on the big ones. As you probably know, a person uses a search engine like Google by typing a word or phrase into the search box.

This specific word or phrase is the key to your  success, because the word or phrase indicates exactly what that person is looking for. Let’s say, for example, that the individual is interested in losing weight. If they type the phrase ‘weight loss’ into Google, the search results page will provide two things, “paid” and “organic” search results.  Go ahead and Google ‘weight loss.’

Notice the yellow box at the top of the page, and the narrow column that runs down the right side of the page. These are paid search results which companies have paid Google to have their text (and links to their company websites) displayed whenever someone searches on the term ‘weight loss’.  Not surprisingly, you can see that these companies appear to be selling weight loss and diet products and services.

The majority of the page displays the so-called “organic” search results. This means that the Google search engine determined these web pages to be most naturally (or “organically’”) related to the phrase ‘weight loss’. The phrase ‘weight loss’ is what we refer to as a “keyword term”.

You can see the importance of the keyword term by the fact that the phrase ‘weight loss’ is highlighted throughout both the organic search results and the paid search results. In order to maximize your business opportunities, you’ll need to research and identify the terms and phrases that potential customers will use when they look for the kinds of products and services you’re selling.

After identifying those keywords, you could certainly launch a paid advertising campaign, with Google AdWords or one of the other paid ad services. This would be an easy way of driving lots of relevant traffic to your website, right?  Unfortunately, because of the level of competition for the attention of prospective customers, it’s very easy for beginner advertisers (and even some advertisers with more experience) to end up spending a lot of money but have very little to show for it.

New websites may well choose to do paid advertising until they are more firmly established, and instead focus on getting the best organic search results placement for their website.  This can take longer but it’s safer to start with and, ultimately, organic search gives you the bedrock to build upon – most people who really understand the Internet will tell you that building solid, quality content over time is the way to the top of the search engine rankings. You can do this by using keyword research skills and optimizing your website accordingly.

To do this, you really need to “get” the search engines. Remember, we’re talking business, here: you don’t need to be a rocket scientist (mostly), but you do need to understand it and get it right.  Don’t go in blind. In our opinion, the ‘king’ of keyword tools is here.  They have a wide range of tools and a high proportion of professionals in the business of keywords rely on this tool every day.

What’s a targeted visitor?

You begin an online business in order to make money, right?  Well, some reading this may be more interested in a hobby, or another purpose blogging, perhaps.  But if it’s business you’re interested in, it’s probably apparent you’ll have a greater chance of making more money from individuals who are interested in the kinds of products and services you sell. Let’s use the example that you run a website that promotes a product which helps people lose weight.

So, the types of people you want to find and visit your website are those who are interested in becoming thinner.  Conversely, if a visitor to your website isn’t particularly interested in losing weight (but is instead searching the Internet because they’re interested in video games or gardening), then it is unlikely that they’re going to convert into a paying customer.  Or, perhaps, they’re looking for reasons why people lose weight (e.g., illness, etc).

Subtle differences make a big difference. This is the concept of a “targeted visitor”: a person who is already “in” your website’s topic before they find your website and see the products and services you offer. It’s not hard to see why the most successful web business are those who get traffic comprised of individuals who are already interested in the products or services offered by that business.

It’s essential to your success that you build you individual website pages to contain and focus on the individual keywords that relate to your products and services. In addition, it’s likely that your appearances on a given search results page won’t be limited just to pages on your own website.  The search engine is likely to find and list many external resources, too.  These will include marketing-type materials that you may publish through other websites. Go ahead and type a generic search term or phrase into your favorite search engine.  Chances are that near the top of the natural search results there will be links to external aggregations sites like YouTube and EzineArticles.  This is something that you want to emulate as well.

So, in order to make sure you’re driving the greatest number of targeted visitors to your website as possible, you first need to create a site in which each web page is focused on the particular keyword terms and phrases that you’ll identify.  Second, you’ll support this by creating promotional materials (again, using the relevant keyword terms and phrases), and making sure these are properly distributed on the Internet. Finally, once your website is live, make sure to submit your web address directly to the major search engines.  Each search engine has a page that permits you to do this:

• Google’s is here.
• Yahoo’s is here.
• Microsoft’s is here.

The search engines would eventually find your pages, of course, but using these quick submission forms helps the process move forward more quickly.  Next time we’ll be digging into the detail of Keyword Reasearch.