“All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary – it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.” Somerset Maugham. As a business person with an online presence, you write for the Web.

It doesn’t really matter which type of business you are in. If you have a website and/or a blog (which the majority of business people do nowadays), you either write the content yourself or you have someone else write the content for you. So, how do you get your web writing to stay consistent and compelling over time?

Which style guide should you follow?

The answers that you get to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask. There are several style guidelines to which web writers defer. Among them are the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook and the much newer Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.

It is interesting to understand the differences between the style guides and the motivation behind why Yahoo felt compelled to release a style guide when AP has been considered the “gold standard” for such a long time, including the approach on a large number of commonly used online terms. The bottom line for you as a writer is that if you have integrity about the content that you are offering to others, you still care about editing, attribution and the assurance of reliable and credible sources of information.

Yahoo says that their style guide is different because it offers guidelines exclusively for writing on the web and that it discusses web-related topics, including topics on how to help people optimize web pages. The big question is whether AP and Yahoo can work together successfully to truly help people to write their web content and not confuse anyone.

The Associated Press and Yahoo style guides both offer useful guidance for everyone who consults them. The combination of the two books gives comprehensive advice on traditional writing as well as optimization for the web. People may be inclined to go to the AP Style Guide more often because it offers broader guidelines for the English language, grammar, punctuation and usage. The Yahoo style guide, on the other hand, targets a much narrower audience and focuses on the particular needs of certain writers.

Some people are of the opinion that the Yahoo style guide is not necessary because people have deferred to AP for such a long time. However, it is important to think in a more flexible and open-minded manner with the popularity of social media and peoples’ heavy involvement with online communications.

Which style guide should you consider the “gold standard”?

The AP Style Guide has established standards that, if followed, give the writing a journalistic voice, which also works well for the web. Short, clear and concise writing not only appeals to readers of print media but it also appeals to readers of online content. People don’t have the time or the patience to read long, complicated, involved content no matter how it is delivered.

Of course, there is some overlap between the two style guides. The most sensible approach may be to consult the AP style guide first and if there is some issue or question that has not been answered by AP, you should consult Yahoo. In other words, use AP as your primary source and use Yahoo as your secondary source.

Conclusion

Two reputable style guides have been discussed here. Both guides offer valuable advice, with one offering guidance that is more traditional in nature on the whole and one that is more contemporary. They are both essential to achieving consistency in your online writing and in presenting writing that flows, is well written and that appeals to the readers and makes them want to continue reading whatever you and your business offer them.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Many people have websites (for their businesses as well as for personal use) and many people have blogs. The issue is whether people truly understand the difference between a website and a blog. They certainly are not the same thing.

The following explains the basic differences between a blog and a website:

Blog

• Content is regularly updated.
• Not formal.
• Interactive.
• Informative and educational.
• Interactivity about industry/customer issues.
• Some people have a blog.

Website

• Content is static.
• Formal/professional.
• Interactivity does not exist. There is only one-way communication.
• Transactional.
• Communication about products and/or services.
• Almost everyone has a website. In fact, it is almost a requirement in business today.

A good way to think about a website is in terms of it being a virtual store that sells products and/or services. A website is the perfect forum to self-promote and advertise. Promotion and buying and selling are exactly what people expect when they visit a website. When they are at the point of making a purchase of some kind, they go to a website that will satisfy their needs.

They can either purchase something online directly from your website or they can use your website to find out exactly where your bricks and mortar store is located so that they can come and purchase products and/or services from you in person. Once a customer has bought something from you, there is a very high likelihood that they will not return to your store again.

It is also basically impossible to build relationships with your potential customers and existing customers on your website because the website is static. Once a person has purchased something from you, there is no potential for interactivity so the relationship will never have a chance to develop and grow.

Blog

A blog; however, is constantly supplying potential customers and existing customers with interesting and useful content and the blog enables them to interact with the blogger and the discussions that they have together can be potentially unending. Not only can you and your customers have discussions but they can also ask questions that you can answer.

Also, a blog provides a dimension to the content that you can’t get from your website content. Through your consistent and regular blog content, you will eventually be regarded as a subject matter expert in your niche and people will turn to you for answers. This will promote more and more discussions.

What is really being done in this case is that relationships are being developed and strengthened. Some of the people with whom you interact on your blog will never become your customers. That is perfectly acceptable. They can interact with you as much as they like and do not have to worry about any pressure to buy anything. A very important fact is that the people with whom you interact are getting to know you as a person, which includes your level of integrity, your passion for what you are doing and offering and your knowledge, knowledge that you impart to them.

Blogs have a lot of useful features that are very helpful in promoting interactivity. Blogs enable visitors to subscribe to them so they can receive updates on a very regular basis. They will always be informed when new content is added or there has been some update to the social media profiles of the people with whom they interact.

In order to really be effective, blogs should have new postings at least once or twice a week. Fresh, original content is very important. The content is exactly what attracts and retains people and many of those people will eventually become customers.

The true purpose of a blog is to provide helpful, valuable, informative and interesting content that helps other people and that they find interesting. A blog’s purpose is definitely not to advertise or to do a hard sell on anyone. If you try to use your blog in that way, you will be very disappointed with the results. You will not be able to build relationships with anyone and you most likely won’t sell very much. People don’t buy from people whom they don’t trust. The only way that they will trust you is if they get to know you.

All in one

One approach that has proven very effective is building your website with blog software, such as WordPress. Blog software has the capability of providing you with both static web pages (pages) and blog pages (posts). Since both are necessary for the success of your online exposure, this allows you to design a web presence that contains a traditional website and a blog using one tool. Among the other benefits are:

• One homogenous look and feel.
• Ease of optimization for SEO.
• Sharing of add-on plugins between the pages and posts.
• Ease and speed of designing and developing the web presence.
• Ease of maintenance and updating of content since the entire web infrastructure is based on a content management system (CMS).

Conclusion

Blogs and websites work in very different ways, serve very different purposes and produce different short-term results. However, they are both necessary to increase your online exposure and to strengthen your online business reputation. It is important to have both as part of your online presence. They function well together and undeniably, you will see positive results over the long term if they are a part of your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. You know that the road to the success of your business online is paved with rich and informative content. The more content you generate and syndicate, the better.

Writing does not have to be an arduous or excruciating process for anyone. Writing involves a creative formulation of thoughts and ideas and the ability to put those thoughts and ideas on paper. The more you write the easier and more enjoyable it will become for you. It is critical to devote a certain amount of time to your writing each week, including the first phase, which is the thinking phase in the process. It is important to remember, of course, that your writing needs to satisfy (and please) your readers and the search engines. Remember to write in simple language that is easy for readers to understand.

Inspiration

Inspiration can come to you from many different places and many different people. You can train your mind to always be receptive to ideas around you, which you may be able to use in writing for your business. Possible inspiration is all around you. You just need to recognize it when you see and hear it. Another wonderful source of writing inspiration is people. You can glean ideas from conversations as well as other people’s writing.

Once you have decided upon the topic for your content, your next challenge is writing it in the most perfect way possible. With business writing, you run the risk of the content seeming dry (or even boring). With that in mind, it is very important to make sure that you keep your content as lively and interesting as possible. An excellent way to do that is to have some humor in your writing. Another good way to capture the attention of your readers is to open with a quote, which will lay the conceptual groundwork for the entire article (as was done here).

Passion

As a business person, you have a passion for whichever topics you are writing about. The topics (or concepts) are precisely the reason that you have chosen the business that you have chosen. You have a passion for your brand, products, services, website and business. Because of that passion, you have a guarantee that your writing about your business will be of high quality and exciting.

If you were to publish mediocre writing, you would be putting your business’s reputation and longevity in jeopardy. Your expertise and vast knowledge is critical to the success of your business and your successful writing of content, business articles and press releases for your website is an extremely important component for you and your business. You definitely will not be offering up fluff because you know that your readers will read right through the fluff and what keeps drawing them to your website and your content is your deep understanding and credibility in your area of expertise. Smoke and mirrors will ultimately not help you to help anyone or to sell anything.

Good qualifications

You are extremely well qualified to give advice, tips, tricks and other pearls of wisdom in your industry. With that said, if you are feeling insecure about smoothly converting your knowledge into words that other people will be drawn to, will find helpful and useful, and that will increase your business’s online reputation and exposure, the following tips will help.

• Always write and publish original content: Always providing original content to your readers is what will produce positive results when it comes to increasing your website traffic and ultimately allowing your business to become more successful. The idea of always providing content that is fresh and valuable and that hasn’t been written by anyone else anywhere else is critical to the success of your business. Of course, there will be other people who will write on similar topics; however, they will write differently than you will write. Duplicating other people’s content is never a good idea (not to mention that it is unethical) and you will also not please the search engines if you do that.
   
• Be meticulous about grammar, spelling and punctuation: You have finally reached the point where you are able to put your wonderful ideas on paper so that others may benefit from them. The last thing that you want or need is to have grammatical, spelling and/or punctuation errors in your content. Having mistakes in your content is one of the easiest ways to lose readers. Errors distract the reader from the content and they make a giant statement about your lack of attention to detail. If you are not confident that you will catch those types of errors, it is advisable to ask someone else who you feel is strong in that area to help you.
   
• Choose a writing style that works well: Everyone who writes has a unique “voice.” You need to establish your voice and stick with it consistently. Another thing to consider is that different voices are appropriate for different types of writing. For example, you will write differently for your business if you are selling auto parts than if you are an attorney who specializes in criminal law. The voice should come easily once you have really established your writing style.
   
• Have fun with writing: The more you write on topics about which you feel passionate, the more fun your writing experience will be. Additionally, once you start to see how offering high-quality content is paying off for your business, it will drive you to really want to write more and more.

Conclusion

Writing high-quality content will achieve several results, among them, your writing will compel people to come back to your website repeatedly. Great content is at the heart of the success of your business. The more content you write and publish, and then, subsequently syndicate to social media channels and business directories, the more people will notice what you are doing, be interested in what you have to say and want to build a relationship with you. So, keep writing as often and as much as you can. Content is the yellow brick road to a successful and exciting business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

When you are choosing your online marketing strategy and executing that strategy, you need to make sure to really give it a fair chance at succeeding. The success or your strategy and marketing flow won’t happen overnight.

There are numerous online marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business and to attract people to your website and to what you are offering. You need to remember that the secret to making a success of any strategy that you choose is persistence and consistency. A very positive aspect of online marketing is that your customer base is much larger than it would be with traditional marketing. You must keep in mind that whichever online marketing strategy you choose will take some time until you see results.

Just like all forms of marketing, Internet marketing takes time before you start to see results. There are many elements that go into a successful online marketing strategy (article marketing, social networking, blogging, etc) and they are all very important and essential to the success of your online marketing strategy.

The following steps, which are easy to follow, will help you to increase your marketing flow, assist you in increasing your website traffic and will help to convert your business prospects into customers.

It is recommended that you choose a few Internet marketing techniques that work best for your business and make sure that you use them consistently. You will need to use them on a regular schedule (a specific number of times each week). If you aren’t yet sure if the techniques that you have chosen are the most effective for your business, it is recommended that you try them out for three months and then decide whether you will go with them on a permanent basis.

At the end of the three-month period, you should analyze the results in order to identify which strategies were most effective and successful. If they were successful and effective, you should continue with them and also add others that you think might add to the success of your online marketing strategy.

• Driving traffic to your website: In order to drive traffic to your website, you should be do article marketing, social networking, blogging, podcasting, etc. You will need to get involved in techniques that will result in more traffic being driven to your website. You must ensure that whatever techniques you use are effective in communicating to your readers that you are the one who will be able to solve their problem(s).

  It is recommended that you choose a few Internet marketing techniques that work best for your business and make sure that you use them consistently. You will need to use them on a regular schedule (a specific number of times each week). If you aren’t yet sure if the techniques that you have chosen are the most effective for your business, it is recommended that you try them out for three months and then decide whether you will go with them on a permanent basis.

  At the end of the three-month period, you should analyze the results in order to identify which strategies were most effective and successful. If they were successful and effective, you should continue with them and also add others that you think might add to the success of your online marketing strategy.

• Enticing visitors to continue visiting your website: Once you have gotten visitors interested in your website, you need to keep the relationships going. A good way to entice your visitors is to have a box on every page where they can sign up with you. You can offer them an incentive, such as a free item (product or service) in exchange for their name and Email address. It is vitally important that you automate this process.

• Converting your visitors into customers: After your visitors have agreed to sign up on your website, you need to continue to maintain contact with them. A great way to accomplish this is to send them a newsletter that you publish on a regular basis. A good format to follow for your newsletter is:
  • A personal note from you
  • The promotion of a new event or product
  • A feature article (this is the main section of your newsletter)
  • A section titled “About You”
  • A section where you make recommendations and/or a section titled “Market Place”

The majority of your newsletter content should be valuable content and a small amount should be reserved for promotion of your business’s products and services. It is imperative that you send out your newsletter on a very regular basis. There may be other ways in which you would like to stay in touch with your prospective clients, with the hope of converting them to actual clients at some point in the near future. Whichever methods you choose, the newsletter should also be included.

Conclusion

The few recommended steps that have been discussed here will help you to attract visitors to your website, compel those visitors to want to become loyal to you and your business and eventually take the leap from prospect to customer. Networking with other people is a tried and true form of human communication. Social networking offers endless possibilities for relationships and for education.

The more buzz you create surrounding your offerings, the more successful you and your business will become. Another benefit is that once you have turned your prospects into loyal customers, they will tell other people about your products and services and those people will also become loyal customers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

People think that a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant can get you top rankings in the search engines because you pay him or her to do so. There really is no guarantee of that. Blogging, however, can make a difference.

Increase your search engine rankings

A much better, less expensive and more effective thing to do is to blog to increase your SEO rankings. An SEO consultant will basically get you started with getting to know the appropriate technology and/or he or she will help you to identify the most effective keywords that you should be targeting. You can just as easily learn how to do all of that on your own.

When it comes to learning the technology, if you begin using a good-quality blogging and content system and you add a few popular plugins that will enhance the basic system, you will be on your way to creating effective and useful content that you will be able to share with many other people and that will increase your rankings in the search engines.

Give of your time

The most significant investment that you will be making is your time. If you are able to set aside a few hours a week to post some helpful news items or your opinions on timely and relevant subjects in which you are an expert and do it on a consistent basis, you will see positive results before you know it.

It is not necessary to post lengthy blogs, in fact, other people often have no patience or time to read long pieces. The more relevant the material that you post, the greater your chances will be of moving up in the search engine rankings.

Whatever you are selling, people will always appreciate tips and advice that they can relate to and that will help them to solve their problems. A good way to start to reach out to people in an effective manner is to search online for questions to which you know the answers.

Blog commenting

When you search, you should look for mentions of problems on other people’s blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages and message boards. When you post a comment that addresses one of the problems, you should always include a link back to your blog. Make sure that your comments are well thought out and always try to contribute as much value to the conversation as you can (above and beyond merely posting a link).

The more you comment on other people’s blogs and the more you encourage them to comment on your blogs, the more valuable content will be generated and the more traffic will come to your website. This, in turn, will positively contribute to increasing your rankings in the search engines. When you are looking for blogs on which to comment, you should go with blogs with a high volume of traffic with relevant content that will, in turn, give you a large amount of traffic right away or strong PR blog comments that will allow you to leave SEO optimized anchor text. You should use your blog comments to increase website traffic as well as offsite SEO back links.

Helping others

Remember that you should always put the needs of the people with whom you are connecting online above your own needs. Connecting online (through blogging or in other ways) is not about direct self-promotion. It is about finding ways to help other people, building new relationships and maintaining relationships that already exist and interacting with people on a consistent and frequent basis.

Another very positive way in which blogging will help increase your search engine rankings and your website traffic is by providing fresh content on a regular basis. When you do this, you are keeping your readers updated on everything that is going on and you will be creating an interest in them that will hopefully last for a very long time.

Conclusion

If you always show people that you are more interested in helping them than you are in helping yourself, they will want to continue to build a relationship with you and eventually, they will also be interested in buying what you are selling. Your blog articles should always offer useful and meaningful information that tries to satisfy the needs of your readers. As the relationship develops, your readers will trust you (because they have already gotten to know you well) and find you to have impeccable credibility.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Do you have difficulty keeping up a fast pace and high quality when it comes to writing blog articles? Do you feel that you never have enough time to write blog articles of high quality?

People make time in their lives (both professional and personal) for whatever is important to them. If you think of blog writing as something that is important for the success of your business, in other words, an important marketing tool, you will be more inclined to carve out time in your business schedule to make sure that you write frequently and that the blog articles that you write are of high quality.

When it comes to increasing your online visibility, blog articles that are part of your business are a critical tool. Blog articles are the aspect of your website content that are fresh and cutting edge and inspire interesting and valuable discussions from others online. You will be able to use the content that you write on your blog for many purposes. You will get a great deal of mileage from it. It is important to remember that something that is so important for your business needs to be given an adequate amount of time to develop and maintain.

It really won’t take as much time as you think to successfully work on your blogging business activities. A reasonable amount of time to devote to blogging is 30 minutes a day. If you stop to consider how much return on investment your business will be getting for those 30 minutes a day, it really isn’t very much time at all. Your consistency will start to pay off before you know it. You will get a lot of use out of the content you write once you syndicate it to several social media platforms.

A good way to gather ideas for the monthly featured blog article is to identify several SMEs who have written books on your area of expertise and interview them for your blog. It is very important to communicate to those SMEs what’s in it for them (WIIFM).

Make sure to provide links in your blog articles that will lead your readers back to your interviewee’s book. Everyone wins in that situation. You win because you don’t have to create the content from scratch, which means that you don’t need to spend as much time on creating the blog article. Your guest SME wins because you are promoting his or her book in your blog article and providing your readers with links back to the book.

• Put it on your calendar: The easiest way to accomplish a consistent schedule is to put it on your calendar. You should assign yourself time to write as well as manage your other blogging activities on the calendar when you are most likely to be creative (for many people, it might be in the morning). The search engines love it when you are consistent and frequent with when you post your blog articles. With regard to frequency, you should try to post blog articles at least once or twice a week. You should write and post at the same time each week, if possible.
   
• Write a list of topics before you write any blog articles: It is a very good idea to make a list of blog article topics before you actually write any blog articles. If you have the topic already picked out, you won’t have to spend any time on that aspect of your blog. If you assign each topic to a specific date, you will find the actual writing to be far less arduous than it would be otherwise. Good organization and efficiency are critical when it comes to managing your business schedule and your productivity level will be very high.

  You will be surprised at how many ideas you will get for your blog articles just by speaking with other people. The more blog articles you write, the more ideas you will come up with. The list will help you if you ever find yourself in a position where you are not sure what to write about.

  Research is also very important to the quality of your blog articles. You need to devote some time to reading the blog articles of other people during your work week. A reasonable amount of time is 30 minutes, twice a week. The blog articles of other people will serve to inspire you when you sit down to write your blog articles. In no way should you copy directly what others are writing. However, if you are interested in some of the ideas and topics that you read about, you can put your own spin on those ideas and topics and share your knowledge with others.

• Write informational articles: It is extremely important that your blog articles are informational and educational as opposed to promotional. Of course, your ultimate goals in offering valuable blog articles are branding, promotion of your products and/or services and generation of leads for your business. However, your immediate goal is to inform and educate your readers. If your article is not focused on helping your readers, people will not have any interest in reading it.
   
• Write more than one blog article at a time: This is a very helpful strategy. It will cut down on the stress that you may be experiencing if you are not constantly under the gun with regard to generating blog articles. If you have chosen to post two articles a week and you have populated your blog article repository with several articles, all you will have to do is post what you have in your blog file.
   
• Write blog articles that are easy to read: You need to make sure that your blog articles are broken down to the point where your readers find them quick and easy to read. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you are trying to say. They need the information quickly and simply. If you don’t deliver the content in that manner, you will lose them as readers, and ultimately, as customers.
   
• Write interviews: A wonderful way to easily and quickly create blog articles is to interview other people who are subject matter experts (SMEs) in your niche or industry. It is not recommended that you do this too frequently. Once a month, possibly as a special monthly feature, is a good idea and people will enjoy your interviews and look forward anxiously to the next month’s interview.

  A good way to gather ideas for the monthly featured blog article is to identify several SMEs who have written books on your area of expertise and interview them for your blog. It is very important to communicate to those SMEs what’s in it for them (WIIFM).

  Make sure to provide links in your blog articles that will lead your readers back to your interviewee’s book. Everyone wins in that situation. You win because you don’t have to create the content from scratch, which means that you don’t need to spend as much time on creating the blog article. Your guest SME wins because you are promoting his or her book in your blog article and providing your readers with links back to the book.

Conclusion

It is important to post blog articles with a consistent frequency and high quality. This will ensure that your content is always fresh, relevant and useful. Investing a small amount of time on your blog activities each week will yield tremendous results for you and your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

All of your social media sites work a little differently. You may wonder how often you should update your status on the various social media channels of which you are a part.

Some of the more popular social media sites will be discussed here and if you follow the recommendations, you will start to see some positive results when it comes to your business connections on social media.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a status update function that a large number of people were not sure how to use or what purpose it actually served. Currently, LinkedIn is integrated with Twitter. A large number of LinkedIn members are also on Facebook and those people have a large number of ideas about how they want to update their LinkedIn status. Because of the fact that LinkedIn does not work in the same manner as Twitter as far as timing is concerned or like Facebook’s News Feed, it is not really advantageous to post information on LinkedIn more than once a day. Also, if you really don’t have any significant status change (or an update that ties into your objective) to post on LinkedIn on any given day, don’t worry about it. You should also be mindful of the fact that people are not going to want you to send frequent status updates too much. If you do, they may consider what you are sharing with them as spam. One very important fact to remember is that LinkedIn is a site for professionals and you need to make absolutely certain that what you are posting on LinkedIn is appropriate for everyone.

Facebook

There are numerous people on Facebook who want to take up space on your New Feed and if you don’t post often enough, you won’t get noticed. Posting once a day on Facebook is totally appropriate and the nature of the content that people post is more personal on Facebook than it is on LinkedIn. When it comes to frequency, Facebook is not Twitter, of course. Once a day is fine but every half hour or every hour would definitely be too much. With that said, you may have times when you want to update your status on Facebook more often than once a day, depending on how much you need to communicate and how much is going on in your business. Always be sure that you post content that is relevant to your readers and that they will find interesting and useful. The more useful the information, the more often they will return to your website.

Twitter

It is completely appropriate for you to tweet as many times a day as you wish. However, you need to be selective about what you convey in your tweets. If you are followed on Twitter by some business colleagues, you may not want them to know that you just ate the most delicious candy bar ever or that you just came back from getting a pedicure.

Blogging

You should blog as often as is humanly possible. You should shoot for your minimum blogging frequency of once a week, although more often is better. It is very important to be consistent with your postings when it comes to blogging. The best thing to do is to have the same frequency, same day of the week and same time of the day each week. Remember that you can never blog enough. It would be amazing if you could blog daily, although it might be difficult to find the time to do that. Each time you post a new blog, the search engines will visit your blog. The more content you post, the more the search engines will pay attention to you. Also, if you don’t continue to post fresh content, people will lose interest in your content and stop coming to read what you have on your website.

Conclusion

Fresh content generation and syndication are the keys to using social media to its fullest potential for your business. Content that is static does not have a very positive effect on your readers or on your business. However, content that is updated frequently and always appears fresh and new has a very positive effect on your readers. The more frequently you share valuable content that is interesting and helpful to other people, the more they will want to read what you are saying and the more they will trust you and find you credible.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You need to include a Call to Action on all of your business content. The whole point of the Call to Action is to entice people to take an interest in and visit your website.

What is a Call to Action?

A Call to Action is what you want your readers to do after they have finished reading your content. It can be a link at the bottom of your content upon which you want them to click to lead them back to your website. It can be a link asking them to connect with you on one of your social media channels. It can be a request asking them to subscribe to your newsletter. This is usually accompanied by a free offer, for example, a free Ebook or White Paper, to entice the reader to carry out the call to action.

As it is, some of your business’s website readers will read your content and that will be the end of it. However, others will read on and want to either leave comments or communicate with you privately. Many of your readers will also want to share your content with other people and a Call to Action is very important so that more and more people will want to visit your website, which, in turn, will hopefully generate more business.

It is important for you to make it as easy as possible for your readers to interact with you. If you want your readers to subscribe to your business’s website or newsletter, ask them to do so and show them how. If you are selling a product and/or service, give them a simple way to do that. If you have some content that you want your readers to vote on or rate, request that they do so.

Why is a Call to Action important?

Motivating your readers: Many people are reactive rather than proactive. They will respond to your Call to Action only if you tell them to click on the link or tell them to respond to another one of your requests. Of course, this should have an incentive with it. If you encourage them to leave a comment at the end of your article and express their opinion, they will do it.

Action propagates more action: When your readers see that other people are responding (or taking action) to your content and to the discussions that follow the content, they will be more inclined to respond also. They will see that it is simple and fun to start or jump into an already-existing discussion.

The following are some tips for writing a stronger and more effective call to action.

• Use a variety of Calls to Action: Sometimes, it is advisable to use different Calls to Action in different articles, depending on the context of your article and what you decide you want your readers to do in response to your article. As you try different types of Calls to Action, you will figure out quickly which ones work best for you. It is important to continually try to improve what you have. Remember to always have the marketing principle WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) in mind when it comes to satisfying the needs of your readers. Some examples of effective Calls to Action are
  • Please visit our Facebook Fan page to learn about what happens behind the scenes.
  • Join LinkedIn group “X” to be able to interact with other cutting-edge, subject matter experts in your niche.
  • Follow us on Twitter to be the first to take advantage of our new promotions.
• Write an obtainable and easy Call to Action: You can run a contest where you offer great prizes and have a high-quality audience that you have selected carefully. Your contest rules are 1. The contestant should write a blog article that links back to their website. 2. The contestant should generate (or have generated by others) 10 comments on their article. 3. The contestant should get their article retweeted 3 times. This is a good example of a contest where the rules are difficult to follow and it is not fun to play. If you run a contest like that, you probably won’t get a large number of participants. If your contest rules are simple and easy to follow, you will have a much better chance of getting people to join in.
• Write an obvious Call to Action: Explain clearly what you want the reader to do. After sharing valuable content with your readers, your ROI (return on investment), if you will, will be their continued and loyal connection to you and your business. They will know to connect with you from what you say in your Call to Action.
• Don’t offer too many Calls to Action in one article: If you offer too many Calls to Action in the same article, you will confuse your readers. For the best results, you should keep everything simple and to the point.
• KISS: You should use the KISS (keep it short and simple) principle when it comes to writing Calls to Action. Simplicity is the most effective approach. With regard to your goods and/or services, you should show what you are offering, list the price(s), state which problem it will solve for your customers and your customers’ needs and then strongly encourage that they do business with you through a strong Call to Action.
• Urgency: Your Call to Action should communicate a sense of urgency. When your readers read your Call to Action, they should be left with no doubt about what you want them to do right now. For that reason, “Click Here” is not a strong Call to Action because it gives them the option to come back later, if ever. “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” are stronger and will get you more immediate action

Summary

Not only is the presence of Calls to Action critical in your content but the way that you present the Calls to Action and how effective you are at enticing the reader to connect further with you and your business and also of utmost importance and if done correctly, will ultimately lead to greater success for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Are you getting a great deal of traffic to your website? Is your Internet presence strong and are people excited by your offerings? If not, it is time to make some changes.

There are many different ways to increase the traffic to your website. The more traffic you get, the more your business will increase and you will become more and more successful. The methods that you use to increase your traffic will be effective but will require a consistent and dedicated effort on your part as well.

Some small changes that you might want to make that will most likely prove effective are buying an appropriate and easy-to-remember domain name (which you will have for a long time), identifying keywords and key phrases that increase your website traffic and your search engine rankings, and increasing the amount of content that you post and will continue to post on a frequent and regular basis. Another sensible thing to do to increase website traffic is to find a blog to contribute to that is a good match for your content. Remember that when you give feedback on articles in that blog, you should always be sincere and constructive. At the same time, you should include a link back to your website as well as submitting your website link to other directories.

You will also need to use link-building methods as part of the strategy to increase your website traffic. The following are some of the most effective methods for ensuring that you drive more traffic to your website.

• Article marketing: With this method, your online marketing campaign revolves around articles. Article marketing is a very good way to promote your business through your website and your products and/or services and there is little or no cost involved. The results of your article marketing methods can dramatically increase sales and you have the potential to double, or even triple, your income. In your article marketing campaign, the topics of the articles should be in your area of expertise and should touch your target audience in an emotional and personal way. It is very important to submit your content to Web content sites that don’t charge you a fee to do so. Article marketing is one of the simplest ways to promote your business online and to generate a lot of traffic to your site and increase your business’s revenue.
• Video marketing: Video marketing is an extremely effective and attractive method of getting your word out. Once you have made a video (or several videos over time), you should put it on your website, where it can reach a very large number of people. The search engines react very favorably to videos that are part of websites and your search engine rankings will increase if you use this type of marketing. It is also very easy for you to send the video link to all of your current and potential customers. Another excellent venue for leveraging your videos is a blog, forum and other social media channels. It is highly recommended that you put your video on as many websites as possible that allow videos.
• Use Email newsletters to promote your Web presence: Newsletters are an excellent way to share company updates, new products, and provide your customers with valuable information that offers solutions to their problems. You must make sure that your Email newsletters include links back to your website.
• Participate in discussion forums and Q&A sessions: Remember to add your website’s URL to your signature on those discussions. In addition, you should always include links in your blogs that lead your audience back to your website.
• Include your website’s URL on all of your marketing materials: This includes business cards, postcards, posters, flyers, etc.
• Make sure to optimize your website for search engines: You want to do this so that your rankings with the search engines are increased.
• Make sure to change your website content frequently: Adding a blog to your website is an excellent way to ensure that your content is constantly fresh. Make sure to display the links to your most recent articles on your home page.
• Submit your website’s URL to directories and search engines
• Add your website’s URL to all of your social network profiles: Remember that your URL should be in each and every social network profile.

Conclusion

If you use the marketing methods and tips that have been discussed here to increase the traffic to your website, you will start to see results in a few months, if not sooner. There is little or no cost involved although you will need to devote some time to your online marketing campaign in order for you to see results. If you use all of the marketing methods that were discussed here, you are bound to enjoy increased success in your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

“Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.”–Stanley Schmidt. When you are writing content for your business, you need to make sure that it is strong, compelling, and positive.

Your website and blog visitors will read your content and react to it. They will know very quickly if your content compels them enough to continue reading, click on other links that you have provided, and want to learn more and more about you and your business. When it comes to your online interactions, you need to be extremely cognizant of what you say and how you say it because words online last forever.

Writing content that is interesting, sometimes humorous and thought-provoking is highly recommended. When it comes to the humorous aspect of content writing, however, you should be careful that the humor is clever and obvious. If you express some humor in your content and any of your readers don’t get the humor, they may be insulted. You should avoid that at all costs.

Another very important thing to remember is to focus your content on what you want to communicate. If you constantly digress, you will lose your readers. Once they decide to go away from your website or blog, you will have lost them permanently.

The public nature of your reputation

The first rule of thumb is that whatever content you have as part of your online presence, it is content that you wouldn’t mind the whole world reading. When you interact with others online, you are doing it in a very public manner. Your profile is public and all of your postings are public. Anyone can read all that they want about you online.

Your reputation is of vital importance when it comes to interacting with other people online and marketing online. You must understand that after your reputation has been established, it will be much more far reaching than just the profiles that you have established on the various social media channels.

Everything that you write online, every time you interact with other people, every single message that you send and each and every person with whom you interact online are contributing factors to your online reputation. Your reputation is the material from which other people will draw in order to speak and think about you and your business. Many of those people will be expressing opinions about you and your business to others and will not share those opinions with you.

Avoid negativity

One important thing of which to be cautious is negativity. You are a part of virtual communities online and each and every person in your online communities has the potential to express negative opinions to any other member of your communities. You must always be very careful of the words that you choose to communicate online so that you avoid any potential for negativity in your online relationships.

If you have thoughts that you feel strongly should be shared with other members of your online communities, you should always use an approach that is direct but never negative or offensive. If you are ever in a position of not being sure how your tone will be read by others, it is a good idea to have another person read it before you post it. In life, people are bound to disagree at some point in time. That is what makes discussions so interesting and that is how content is continually being generated. If the point that you feel you need to make is strong and should really be directed to one individual, it might be wiser to address that individual privately.

Feel free to share your knowledge

It is a wonderful thing for you to share your points of view on the social media channels of which you are a member; however, you should always remember to express yourself in a productive and professional way. You always need to be careful of how you say what you want to say because of the public nature of the social media networks.

You should definitely share your knowledge with others and your goal is absolutely to engage your readers and entice them into wanting to continue the discussions that you have initiated. Engaging your readers is a way to increase your online visibility. The more visible you are, the stronger your reputation will become. The more you put your content out there, the more other people will notice and relationships will start to grow between you and others in your online communities.

It is essential to always try to put forth positive, helpful, valuable content. If you have online followers who are posting negative comments, you can remove them from your list of connections. You should be surrounding yourself with people online who are excited by your knowledge and your offerings. The relationships that you form with those people will be mutually beneficial and very productive.

With that said, you should certainly always stand your ground and stick to what you believe in. You should constantly strive to impart knowledge that is productive and aligns with your professional vision. The end result of demonstrating such professional integrity is that your reputation will be solid and credible and will continue to help your business to grow and to succeed.

Conclusion

The success of social media is based on open communication and solid and consistent interactions with others in your online communities. Remember to always treat other people the way that you would want to be treated and your business will continue to flourish.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.