I think there’s a couple of things worth thinking about when it comes to website copy. I thought I might take a few minutes to chat to you about that so you understand the approach we take in writing for OM4 websites.

Effective online marketing copy is not marketing hype. In general:

• Sentences are shorter
• Paragraphs are shorter
• A site is stronger if it informs rather than sells
• Let pictures and information show who you are
• Go for copy that is understated rather than overstated
• Simple accessible language works better than formal language
• Think useful information rather than advertising copy.

I’ll take the material clients supply and I work hard to simplify it. The reason for this is that many people will initially skim rather than read websites.

Many people think of a website as an online brochure but it isn’t. You only have a few seconds to get the attention of your customer. The easier it is for them to read, the more likely they’ll want to stay.

Online readers aren’t very tolerant of obstacles in any form. They don’t respond well to a sea of copy that looks like hard work.

More than ever – simplicity is the key. Ask a friend to read the material on your website and make a note of any points they felt bored or confused.

Edit out material until each page is easy and interesting to read. Check your analytics to see if there are particular pages are consistently sending customers away. Consider a rewrite or even delete that page.

Websites are not unlike gardens. Five minutes weeding every now and again will boost your results.

A new study in the US suggests that as of August 2009 more small and medium US businesses advertise using online media than traditional media.

Source: eMarketer: Online Ad Penetration Keeps Climbing

“The milestone of digital/online surpassing traditional media among SMBs is an indicator of the broad shift to online platforms.”
Steve Marshall, Director of Research, The Kelsey Group.

What this study doesn’t measure is the number of small and medium businesses using their website to reach new customers through search engines and referrals from other websites. How do they do this? Simply by publishing web pages and blog posts, which other than their time may cost them nothing.

With the number of small business websites booming, it seems small and medium businesses are far more engaged with online media – paid and unpaid – than they ever were with traditional media.

United Airlines created a customer service nightmare for itself when it broke Dave Carroll’s guitar.

This video has been viewed more than 2.2 million times in 4 days – and this is probably just the beginning. Hey, only 100M views to be up there with the greats

The Internet is a 24/7 complaint line – with global reach – for every business.

im only 13, but i think if every one pulls together we could save the plantet! come on, there is no other world in the universe that has the stuff we have. So save the world it is the only place with chocolate!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ellie, 13.

This comment appears as one of the many comments made about Jane Genovese’s Combating Global Warming Mind Map.

Jane (and her mother Sharon) created this mind map about 12 months ago, and the interest in it has been building and building.

If you search Google for images on global warming, you will see it up there on page 1.

And today the Digg community got involved. Jane’s mind map has over 800 Diggs and more than 300 comments – as more stories are hitting the front page, Jane’s map has moved on to page 3, but is still getting a lot of visits.

We’ve had big traffic events on our servers before, and have been staying ahead of these with capacity upgrades. But this morning’s event really hammered us. The server was at full capacity because of all the image serving – the server didn’t crash (we had plenty of memory and cpu), but responses were slow and it timed out on a significant number of pages for a few hours.

James and I implemented something we have been discussing recently, using Amazon S3 to increase the image serving performance. As soon as we got the mind Map onto S3, the problem just went away. It was pretty incredible to see the frequency of visits, even while it was on Page 2 of Digg.

Before we had increased the image serving performance, someone commented on Digg “if you can’t host it don’t post it”. I thought briefly that maybe he forgot what Digg was – Jane didn’t Digg her own mind map, other people did. But they had a point.

One of my objectives in launching OM4 is to make it easy for small businesses to get online and use the new tools of marketing. If you use Content Marketing as a strategy and are as effective as Jane, you will need to be able to cope with events like this – lots of traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg etc. You don’t want to be where James and I were this morning, in reaction mode.

Realistically, being able to deal with the technical issues involved in an event like this is not something a small business can easily do on its own. My objective is to make these kinds of issues as invisible to a business owner as possible. Running a business online has infrastructure requirements that aren’t always obvious at first. Just like an architect has to consider the potential for hurricanes/cyclones if they are building in a high risk area, so do we (the platform provider) have to consider the potential for large, one-off surges in traffic. And be able to deal with them.

Now Jane can get on with saving the world, thereby preserving the only known source of chocolate in the Universe.

Don’t you love it when someone takes a complex topic and makes it simple? And then offers simple steps to help you take action!

I’ve come across a brilliant example of that, and would like to share it with you.

One of the most effective ways of using internet marketing for online businessess is to use content marketing. What problems do your clients have? Create great content to help solve those problems! This helps you get their attention and build trust. And you need both before you can think about selling to them.

Used in this way, content marketing helps you solve your internet marketing problem – how to find customers and convert online.

It Starts with Ciaran’s Post on Organic Search Traffic

The Post. Ciaran McKeever has guest-posted an exceptionally useful article called How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog. Please read the post and pay particular attention to points 1 through 5.

What it Triggered. This post not only shares the concept, but also puts Ciaran’s theory into practice. The post title – internet marketing for online businesses – is predicted by Wordtracker to drive 26 searches a day. That is at the low end of Ciaran’s guidelines (he recommends 15 to 200). But I like his strategy of identifying a group of niche searches that collectively amount to a lot. Have you used the free Wordtracker researcher tool? If not, go back to that link and try it for yourself now – it will take less than a minute.

My site is about online marketing. That phrase – online marketing – has a predicted search volume of over 600 searches a day. Not as high as internet marketing (over 1,600), but about the same as web marketing. (Note: I posted last year on why I chose online marketing instead of internet marketing). This is a highly competitive phrase (and getting a lot more so), and good rankings on the core phrase will take time (and effort).

Which is why Ciaran’s strategy is such a good one. I cannot expect to hit page 1 for online marketing quickly. But I can expect this post to rank highly for ‘internet marketing for online businesses’ in a relatively short period of time. Using Wordtracker I can easily identify more keyword phrases that drive >15 predicted searches a day. I can use keyword phrases that related to online marketing, internet marketing or web marketing.

Write for People. A special note – when doing this, make sure you write useful articles for your primary audience – people. Try and identify the problem your prospective client wants to solve. And then help them solve that problem. Trying to write an article mainly for search engines is a mistake.

Four Steps to Content Marketing Success

In the interests of simplicity, here is my sooper-dooper-even-shorter-than-Ciaran’s checklist to use for your content marketing efforts:

1. Research. Each month go to Wordtracker and review one or more of your primary key word families.
2. Plan. Identify useful keyword phrases that have predicted search traffic between 15 and 200. Find a minimum of 4 of these, so you have at least one post per week.
3. Do. Write posts to help solve a problem related to those niche keywords. Use the niche keyword in your article title and link to related posts/pages in your site (and externally, of course). Include a Call to Action in each of your posts.
4. Review. Check your analytics and see whether these posts are driving traffic to your site. in Google Analytics, check Sources of Traffic to see if they keyword phrases deliver traffic, and check Content to see if your articles are being read. Analyse your effectiveness.

Bingo. Thanks Ciaran for crystallising a very important tactic in internet marketing for online businesses! Not only do you take a complex area and make it simple, you help make it easy to put the ideas into action.

And now for some deeper SEO analysis

About those other points (6 through 10). If you just follow Ciaran’s steps 1 through 5, you are onto a winner. But the tweak in me can’t help but add some commentary to Ciaran’s points 6 through 10. Like Ciaran, I think understanding how search engines work is very important. I try to apply the 80/20 principle, and focus on the few things that have the most impact. There are may different perspectives around this area – feel free to chime in if you have different views:

• Point 6 – page titles and permalinks. If you are using WordPress, including the niche keyword in the post title means that by default it will also appear in the article title and URL. Meta keywords don’t matter. Meta descriptions do (they help readers a lot), so use a good SEO plugin that defaults a unique description for you or lets your write a custom one. We use the All In One SEO plugin, and in my experience it is the most useful WordPress plugin available for SEO.
• Point 7 – include internal links. Linking to other relevant posts in your site is very good practice, a lot more so for search engines than I originally understood. Try to link back to an authority page for that keyword as well.
• Point 8 – add no index meta tags. If you are writing a content rich site you don’t need to worrry about this – Matt Cutts has recently said so. That said, we have included elements in our OM4 theme to minimize duplication by default.
• Point 9 – remove unnecessary links – don’t agree with Ciaran’s idea that it could penalize a site, so I wouln’t worry about this at all.
• Point 10 – tag clouds. If a tag cloud helps your readers, great.

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I love the style of content marketing practised over at Commoncraft, the outfit that produced the wonderful RSS video I have posted about previously.

What I hadn’t seen was the follow up post about the viewer stats. What a great example of how content marketing works.

Commoncraft RSS Video Statistics.

Courtesy of Donncha, I came across a great video explaining what a blog is. It is published by CommonCraft (definitely worth checking out, if you haven’t already).

I’ve got a few additional points for you to consider:

• a blog is personal and conversational – very different to a typical brochure website that is faceless and static.
• a blog is a tool that helps you learn what your business is really about (despite what you may think about it when you launch it online).
• because a blog is personal and conversation, it helps build trust.
• in terms of traffic, a blog is to a website what an engine is to a train (thanks Simone for that analogy).

Blogs are the ace-in-the-hole for content marketers, and anyone interested in marketing online.