Internet Marketing Blog

As you write content for a landing page, a micro site, a blog, a press release or a sales letter, always keep in mind that your main goal is to appeal to your customers and sell your product or service. To fully maximize selling sales copy, use these tips and techniques to get your customers to take action.

1. Your headline says it all – If your audience is not awestruck by your headline, then most likely they will not read anything else you have to say. Use descriptive words and phrases to make your headline compelling and creative.
2. Speak directly to your audience – Customers like to feel as if your writing is speaking directly to them. Use words like “you” and “your” as often as you can. Try to avoid this kind of wording: “One could assume that if one did the work necessary…” This not only sounds incredibly superior, but it disassociates the customer from your copy.
3. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re talking about - Always make it crystal clear about what you’re selling and all the benefits associated with your product or service. Make all action steps extremely obvious to get your customers to do what you want them to do.
4. Don’t use superfluous, incommodious words - Simply put: try not to use too many difficult words throughout your copy that most people are not familiar with. Again, this creates distance between your customer and your copy. If your customer has to look up every other word while reading your content, then your content does not flow well. Simplify it a little.
5. Write shorter paragraphs - Research has shown that longer paragraphs lose people’s interest. Keep things clear and concise. Short paragraphs, bullet points and lists can easily break up long paragraphs.
6. Create a good conclusion – Remember to effectively sum up your content in a well-written conclusion. Don’t end your content on a whim or it may leave your audience wondering what happened. Reiterate your main points about your product or service and explain to them again why it superior and why they should buy it.

Consumers have mixed results when judging the credibility of a website. What influences their opinions of why they trust one site opposed to another? And why will they buy the same product from one site, but not another one that is very similar? Ongoing consumer studies, such as the Stanford Web Credibility Research http://credibility.stanford.edu are striving to answer such questions. Although consumer opinions on web credibility will always differ, implementing these few simple tips and techniques into your sales copy may influence your reader to take the action you want them to.

These days its very easy for small business organizations to get an internet site up and running.  A business owner can let his son, cousin, brother, co-worker, etc. design a site in Front Page and get it up on the web.

The difficult part comes when their web site has been online for a while and they don’t get any traffic or they get traffic but no sales.

Internet  Marketing is a fine art and there are dozens of things you can do.  I will outline what I feel are 5 of the most important ways to make your website more marketable.

1) Content - It’s great to have a site that looks good with flash, animation, images etc. but good content is the key to getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

2) Clean code - Sites that are coded well are not only faster loading but more easily ready by search engines. Ideally make sure your site is coded using CSS (cascading style sheets) and W3C compliant (World Wide Web Consortium).

Once your site is up and running, here are some tools to run to make sure your code is clean:

Markup Validator Service
http://validator.w3.org/

NetMechanic
http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Dr. Watson
http://watson.addy.com/

3) URL Structure - Search engines can scan through your site urls and find keywords relevant to the search. Therefore if you are selling Nike shoes, it much better to name your page nike-shoes.html rather than something like page21.htm.  This also applies to folder names, so you should use something like shoes/nike-shoes.html rather than /store/page21.htm.

4) Relevant Links - We’ve all seen sites that promote submitting your site to 100,000 search engines. This may have worked back in the 90’s but it can actually cause more harm than good.  What you want to do is submit your site only to directories with related content.  Sites that rank on the first page of search results have links that come from trusted industry sites. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

5) Get Feedback - Marketing research can be a very simple but invaluable thing to have on your web site.  Simply put up a feedback form to collect data from your visitors.  Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site accordingly.  When you receive glowing feedback on a product or service you have delivered, post that to a testimonials page.  This will instill trust in others who are considering buying from you!

In summary, create a site that has clean code, fast loading and provides quality content that your visitors are looking for. Keep in mind the url structure to make the pages easy to find and only submit your site to the most quality directories and search engines.  Quality is more important than quantity here.  Finally get feedback from your visitors and heed that feedback to continually improve on your site.

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS!!

Shaun Roos
B.A. Marketing, Utah State University
Web Development Director
Utah Web Services