We have created an infographic for you to use when thinking about creating your own online campaigns so you know the best possible way to entice new customers to your website. Click the button to download

If you’ve read our articles about SEO and you’re still confused, why don’t you contact us for a FREE CONSULT? We’d be glad to help.

The post SEO Statistics 2017 appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

We’ve compiled a handy glossary of SEO terms for you to download and print out.

If you’ve read our articles about SEO and you’re still confused, why don’t you contact us for a FREE CONSULT? We’d be glad to help.

The post Learn the language of SEO appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

“Digital analytics” sounds quite intimidating, right?! Two words to avoid like the plague. Sorry to say, these are two words you must embrace if you want to ensure you bring the right customers to your door. That been said, let’s break it down and learn what digital analytics is all about.

WHAT IS DIGITAL ANALYTICS?

Digital analytics is the stats you collect online which tell you about your website and how it is faring. It also tells you how your competitors are doing. In other words these stats or data can help you to improve the user experience on your website in order to meet your marketing objectives. More importantly, you get to stay ahead of your competitors. Understanding your data will ultimately demonstrate how your online marketing activities are a great ROI.

DID YOU KNOW?

• There are more than 3 billion internet users in the world
• There are over 900-million websites globally
• In 2016, 56% of all internet traffic were bots, spammers and scrapers, only 44% of the traffic were actual humans
• There are 1.2-trillion Google searches a year which makes up 78% of all search engine usage
• In 2016, more than 1 billion people purchased a product online

And it’s important to note that all of the above stats are growing as each day passes

Here’s the interesting thing though, many businesses that are online still don’t benefit from this. Here is why?

• They don’t have a proper digital analytics strategy
• They don’t know what key performance indicators (KPIs) measure success or failure  
• Most can’t tell you their site speed on different devices, e.g. mobile
• They can’t differentiate between spam traffic and real traffic
• They don’t monitor usability of their sites and which areas to improve
• And the most tragic of all, most don’t have an analytics account

It’s never too late or too early to measure your business’s success or failure online, and start improving your marketing drive.

HERE’S HOW YOU CAN MEASURE YOUR DATA USING ANALYTICS

The great news is most analytics tools are free, like Google analytics, Bing Webmaster, and others.  

We’d like to show you how to understand the quality and quantity of your data by using the Google analytics tool and following these 5 simple guidelines:

1.Draft internal objectives and the steps leading to their success, they could be:

• Increase newsletter subscriptions by 60% in two months
• Sell 16% more tickets online for an event compared to previous month
• Increase online orders for a specific product by 40% over a three-week period
• Increase your shop’s walk-in visitors by 10% in a month
• Get more queries for your services or products leading to more sells

You start with a plan and a goal then open an analytics account

2. Choose the best suited analytics tool for your business, in this case we chose Google analytics. Here’s how to choose the right tool:

• Can it measure your KPIs and steps leading to the acquisition?
• Do you understand the terms used to describe how you analyse?
• Can you configure it to show your specific requests?

If you answered yes to all of the above, you are on the right track

3. Now it’s time to configure the analytics for more accurate reporting. Here’s how:

• Implement the tracking code on your website to start measuring
• Create an additional view/s that excludes internal traffic
• Monitor spam referrals and exclude all known and coming spammers
• Create a view/s for specific pages that are important to your business success – you can have a maximum of 20 views per account, and these could be product pages, services pages, blog/articles pages and much more
• Configure your analytics tool to collect off and on-site campaign traffic stats

All your configurations are guided by KPIs you drafted above

4. Event tracking

In Google analytics this is when you insert an extra code to track things like your downloads, calls, videos views and button clicks on your CTAs (Calls to Action). Event tracking lets you measure the things on your website that don’t appear on your analytics dashboard. Event tracking is used often to track activity on mobile apps.

5. It’s vital to ‘Enable Remarketing’ on your admin because it shows you lost leads which you can pursue and win back.

Now that you have completed these steps you will be able to see what pages of your site have high bounce rates and begin to improve on them.

You will finally have a grasp on:

• which CTA buttons are not being clicked on and change their placement, colour or both;
• what geographical locations are performing well and improve your offerings to make them your brand ambassadors;
• which devices are performing well;
• which marketing channel is bringing the most traffic;
• which queries or keywords bring traffic to your site

Remember, this all starts with a clear goal, quality content and a great website!

Do you feel you still need some help after reading this article? Just leave a comment below and we will get back to you in no time or contact us on 010 007 4795    or Email [email protected] for a FREE consultation.

The post Simple guidelines to understanding digital analytics appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

Themed campaigns around special events, if done properly, can work wonders for brand awareness and lead generation. Here are 3 things you must consider to run a #themedcampaign on social media:

1.       Hashtags –  The hashtag is here to stay but now it is being used with more purpose. But what is that purpose, you may ask? The hashtag is used to organise, promote, and draw attention to whatever it is you are campaigning about. It is therefore extremely vital to hashtag correctly. When it comes to special events, you should always hashtag the event itself as well as the date. For example, #FreedomDay #27April. Also, make sure that you are hashtagging the day correctly.

In other words, does the most common hashtag being used for Freedom Day look like this #FreedomDay or this #freedomforall. Maybe both are being used in which case you must decide which works best for your campaign. Do some homework! You can also create some of your own hashtags for the campaign but be sure to use them consistently throughout your marketing otherwise they become irrelevant. For example, if you are a debt counselling firm you could hashtag a service quite cleverly like this: #freefromdebt or #debtfree this #FreedomDay #27April.

2.       Memes – Firstly, what are memes? They are those images, videos and pieces of text which make you think or laugh on social media. They can be shared very easily. And if you get it right they can spread quickly and even go viral. So, you can only imagine how well memes work for #themedcampaigns. Make sure that you have your logo / web address on every meme you create and post so that when people share it your brand keeps popping up. Be smart and subtle and your memes will work wonders for your brand.

3.       Specials – This goes without saying; you should always run with a special of some kind when you do a #themedcampaign. And it should be pretty easy to come up with specials around events such as Easter and Mother’s Day. Be visual when running your specials. Don’t be pushy. Be enticing and make sure that people end up being rewarded with the special only once they have provided you with their details (don’t expect them to do that directly on social media). Create a landing page on your website and steer people there with a hyperlink provided in your social media posts. Be clever in the way you phrase your posts to get people to click on the link.

Of course, you should theme your online marketing around the big events such as Christmas, Easter, Eid, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and the likes but how about celebrating the smaller events, too. This way you’ll stand out from the rest as the business that remembers the quirky celebrations, too. One thing to make sure of though is whether the event is relevant to your brand in some way. So, for example, if you were a psychologist who deals with depression, it may or may not be a good idea to run with National Smile Day. Or, if you were a business dealing in biodegradable goods it would work in your favour to promote a day that celebrates trees, for example. The point is people need to see that your brand is somehow connected to the event you are using to campaign with.

Click the button to download a calendar of offbeat events for your #themedcampaigns in 2017.

Download Here

#themedcampaigns can be extremely successful for promoting your business and generating new leads but the trick is to get it right and to plan properly. We can assist you with integrated and strategic #themedcampaigns. Contact us for a free consultation.

The post Why are themed campaigns so effective for marketing your brand? appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

I mean why can’t you simply promote how good your brand is, why must you give your brand a story?

The article 4 Benefits of Using Storytelling in Marketing published on forbes.com states “92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story”. That’s close to 100% of people out there wanting to spend their money on something.

But if that’s not convincing enough then here are 3 good reasons why brand stories are such a powerful marketing tool:

They establish trust – When a brand story evokes emotion and is believable, people buy into it. Why? Because they can relate. This builds a bond between the story and the reader, which ultimately establishes a feeling of trust. So, brand stories produce trust. But not just any story will do. It needs to be well written, easy to understand and digest, but most of all it needs to be emotive. It must make your reader feel something. This Volkswagen advert brilliantly tells a story about the safety of its cars. Observe how it makes you feel sentimental and evokes happy memories of long road trips with your family. It wins over your trust in no time.

They pull at the heartstrings – While brand stories are very much a part of your marketing campaign, they must never be thought of only in terms of an advert or sales pitch.  Instead, brand stories should be written with the brand’s persona and the consumer’s personality in mind. A clever writer knows how to get this balance right when writing a brand story. Stories with sentiment and personality will have readers wanting more. To simply watch this Discovery video will make you feel all loving and happy. You remember Discovery with a warm heart and you will probably take note of what the company offers next time you’re online.

They excite the audience – A well-told story will inspire the reader and inspired readers will in turn share their experience of the story. There is nothing more powerful than that. So, by writing exciting stories about your brand you not only achieve buy-in from your audience but they spread the word to others who read your story and so on. Exciting stories have a greater impact on your target audience. Take a look at this Nike video  which has been made to inspire the brand’s target audience. It’s believable and makes you feel excited about the brand.

When writing about your brand to attract readers your stories should:

• Have personality – Give every story flair and style. Let your writer’s personality shine through.
• Be simple – Use KISS (keep it simple stupid) on your readers because remember you want everyone to understand your message.
• Shape your existence – Your stories should speak of your brand’s successes, failures, people, history, connections, etc. In other words, everything that makes your brand worthy of the stories. Always write these stories from the heart.
• Connect with customers – Always bring emotion into your brand stories. It is the only way you will bond with your readers.
• Be worth sharing – Make the stories exciting and inspirational so that your readers want to share them.
• Be convincing – So much so they get absolute buy in from customers.
• Have a conclusion – Don’t get stuck in one story. Your brand will have many stories to tell. Give all of them a voice.

Can you think of your brand’s many exciting stories? We can help you brainstorm and write great stories that will make your brand memorable. Contact us to discuss your brand’s stories.

The post How to write a great brand story appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

So why should you care about Google’s demands?

First, because Google has cornered 60% of the market for desktop searches and 92% for mobile searches. Google dominates, so it calls the shots about quality.

Second, you should care if you hope to rank well and be easy to find. Sadly it’s very easy to get lost on the Internet – in fact it takes no effort at all. Whereas to be found on page one or two, or even page 10, of any search result takes a huge amount of effort.

This is the power of Google: Let’s say we want to find information about healthy food choices, so we type “healthy eating” into the search bar. My search brought up 63 200 000 results – that’s over 63 million web pages on the topic! How many of those pages would you have the patience to scan before you find what you want – 5, 10, 15 …?

Fortunately you won’t have to look around for too long, because you can be sure that Google has pulled up the very best ones on the topic and displayed them up front in its search results. All the hard work is done by its Panda algorithms which sniff out with ruthless accuracy which pages offer the best quality information.

Google’s criteria for quality are laid out in its 146-page Search Quality Raters Guidelines. But if you don’t want to wade through that that hefty document, you can read on here to get a nutshell overview of how to pass the Panda test.

10 Ways To High-Q Your Website

1.Understand user intent

Do keyword research to find out what your visitors typically search for (i.e. what search terms are ranking) and provide that information to them. Think about the words they would type to find your pages and include those words in your content. Panda matches user intent with the purpose of a page and the type of content and strives to give users exactly what they are looking for.

2. Expertise

Write at an expert level – no novice content. Show that you are an expert in your field with information that is relevant, well researched and clearly explained. Ditch the jargon – write in plain English and avoid complex industry terminology. For example, if you’re a doctor, write about medical conditions in language that your patients will understand.

3. Authority

Demonstrate your credentials. This is where it’s important to have relevant biographies, or to list your qualifications, awards, citations, publications, original research, speaking engagements, client list, past experience, professional memberships, LinkedIn profiles – anything that shows that your knowledge and expertise are genuine.

4. Trustworthiness

Authentic testimonials are critical because visitors want to see evidence of customer satisfaction. Also include as much as you can about the work you have done – case studies, project reviews, photos, portfolios, events you participate in, social responsibility activities, customer stories. Use the content on your site to build your reputation and create trust

5. A satisfying amount of main content

Put meaty content onto each page. Panda homes in on content-rich pages. But aren’t we supposed to avoid giving people too much to read online? Not anymore. The answer is to give them lots to read in bite-sized chunks, with engaging headlines, bullet points, images, clever layout that draws the eye to read more, and more. Panda especially favours home pages that have a lot going on – your homepage needs to be the magazine front page – loads of information to whet the appetite and want to delve deeper into the site.

6. Great user experience

Make the user experience (UX) easy and interesting for visitors. Start with quick page load speed. Then make sure that contact information is accurate and easy to find. Keep the navigation simple so that users can move from page to page and link to link and then get back to where they started without any confusion. Confused, frustrated visitors leave – Panda will judge you harshly for that.

7. Keep content fresh

Give visitors a reason to pay you repeat visits. Publish blogs, news, new case studies, reviews of industry events – in any industry there is a host of information that you can leverage to ensure that your content stays up to date. Panda expects your content to be current and relevant at all times and can smell stale info mouldering in the back corners of any website from a mile away.

8. Your money or your life (YMYL)

This term comes from Google’s guidelines. It refers to any content that could have a financial impact on users, or affect their health or wellbeing. Google wants websites that deal with YMYL – happiness, health or wealth – to be of the highest quality. It singles out these categories:

Shopping and financial transactions – e.g. anything to do with online payments, banking, ordering products & services, payment information.

• Financial information – e.g. investments, taxes, retirement planning, home purchase, buying insurance, tuition fees
• Medical information – e.g. pharmaceuticals, medical diseases & conditions, nutrition, niche health sites
• Legal pages – all types of legal information
• Other – this is  really broad; it covers anything to do with happiness and wellbeing, from adoption to car safety

9. Pay attention to the detail

Panda will punish you for small errors. Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes, wrong information, duplicate content, broken links (those dreaded 401 pages) or too many ads on your site, or you’ll be graded with a fat red ‘F’.  

10. Mobile friendly

Since 92% of mobile searches are happening on Google, it stands to reason that Panda will reject your site if it’s not mobile friendly. This is a last call to all those dinosaur websites out there – you need to upgrade to a mobile-adaptable format now!  

Still keen to write your own content? Then you should also get up to speed on SEO copywriting. Read our blog here about how to unlock the power of keywords.

The post Website Content – Why is high quality so important? appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

Online Content 101: The only audience you should be writing for on your website, blogs and social media is your customers. Tell your customers what they want to hear. Give them what they want. But first be sure that you understand your target market. Once you have it sussed you can get to writing content which will lure the customers you want to your business’s front door.

So how do you figure out who your target market is (this is target audience analysis in marketing speak)? Here’s a fun and simple way to do it. Create a personality to represent your ideal customer, the type of person you’d like to do business with. For example, say your business is financial management and you want to attract young, successful women who like to spend money:

She is a young woman aged 25. She loves going out with her friends. She is easy going and friendly. She is single and enjoying it but would eventually like to settle down with someone. She loves shopping, especially for stylish outfits, accessories and tech gadgets. Her favourite thing to do is treat herself to spa weekends when she has enough time or money to do so. Her biggest issue in life is making her salary meet her lifestyle. She’s a bit reckless with her money and hates it when this is pointed out to her. She is young and just having fun; but in the back of her mind she knows she should be saving for the future. (Elaborate as much as you like to make her believable).

Now that you have a clear picture, an actual person to visualise, you can start writing your marketing content for her. You can begin to imagine her desires, her needs, her problems. You can write about how you can help her manage her budget more easily, enjoy more peace of mind and still have loads of fun – if only she was using your products and services.

Here are the 3 elements you should take into consideration when writing for your ideal customer:

1. Purpose – You don’t truly know your ideal customer until you have done the research. Find out everything there is to know about this person. What does she like and dislike? Where does she spend her money? What are her interests? What are her challenges in life? How can you address those challenges with your service or product?

Once you have gathered all your information, set out to build a strategic online campaign to attract your ideal customer. It may be that you need to create a landing page highlighting a special product or service that you know this person wants. And then use blogs, emails and social media to gently steer her to the landing page. The point is you need to have a plan for a set of touchpoints in this specific customer’s journey to help lead her to your front door.

Never do this: Impulsively post on your business Facebook page and LinkedIn in the hopes of attracting your customers.

Rather invest in a professional online content marketing service to assist you with a plan and write the copy for you. This way you will see a return on your investment.

2. Tone – Think about how this person speaks. What ‘language’ will she take notice of, listen to, feel comfortable with and respond to most. For example: my young, born-to-shop-and-have-fun, 25-year-old woman would very likely speak in an upbeat and informal manner while using some cool slang for good measure. I would write in exactly that tone of voice. I would speak to her directly.

Never do this: Write copy in your industry’s lingo or try to look professional by writing too stiffly.

Unless your ideal customer is someone in your line of business who understands and appreciates industry-speak, always, always write in your customer’s language.

3. Offering – Be sure to offer your ideal customers exactly what they want. For example: as a financial management business wanting to attract young women with great earning potential, I would write a campaign based only on the services that will benefit her. I would create landing pages, blogs, social media posts, email campaigns and newsletters promoting just these services. I will write in her ‘language’ and provide benefits that suit her situation.

Never do this: Write about all your services in your targeted campaign, even the ones that your ideal customer won’t be interested in, just because you think she may become interested.

You will lose her by doing this. Online, most people have an extremely short attention span. Give your target audience exactly what they want and no more. 

Does it excite you to think about attracting the ideal customers to your business? We can help you plan and produce great content for your target market and bring their business to your door.

The post Copywriting for online marketing: Writing for your target audience appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

Like the advent of TV starlets on the small screen, search engine optimisation (SEO) has risen in prominence as the internet advances onto every desktop, tablet and smart phone across the globe. All in the cause of appeasing the search engines, gods of the online world.

Google, the über god, dominates internet search – whatever users want to find, Google will call it up for them. Thus websites have to dance ever faster and perform ever smarter to satisfy Google’s standards. SEO is all about giving Google what it wants. And let’s not forget that other search engines like Yahoo and Bing are also picky casting agents.

Most business owners now know that they need SEO on their websites, but there is still a lot of misunderstanding about what this is. In this series of blog posts we break down the topic of SEO into plain English. We focus on keywords, quality content, links, website traffic and conveying authority in the market.

Here we look at the importance of using keywords on a website.

What is your audience looking for?

Understanding keywords starts with knowing what your audience is looking for. If they are going to be searching for the products, services or information you have on offer, what search terms will they use when they conduct a search online? These search terms are the keywords that you need to use.

For instance, if someone goes online to find a pizza delivery outlet, they might type ‘pizza delivery’ into the search bar. Or they could refine the search to ‘fast pizza delivery Edenvale’ or ‘gluten-free pizzas’. If the pizza restaurant has incorporated these search terms into its website content, Google will be able to find it. In turn, if the keywords are missing from the website, it will go undiscovered.

You probably have a good understanding of what keywords you should use on your website, but some keyword research will help you to identify them more accurately. The more complex the topic, the more intricate the research.

Let’s say you are a surgeon who specialises in a procedure called Nissen Fundoplication (repair of hiatus hernias which can cause severe heartburn). You’d like to appear on page 1 of Google search results but there are 50 other surgeons in the city who do the same thing, and there are only 10 positions available on page 1. So you drill down and find all the variations of search terms relating to the topic and you check out which ones are used the most and which ones give the most precise description of your service.

The research could show that there are 10 primary search terms you should be using. Since Google likes to keep things simple – one primary search term per page – this determines that you should create 10 different pages to accommodate the 10 search terms (which is where the architecture of your website starts to get interesting).

What is Google looking for?

The next step is how to use the keywords.

When the Google crawlers go hunting, they search through the headings and body text on each page. A good SEO writer will know where to place the keywords for maximum effect. The trick is to keep the content natural and ensure a good read. Use the keywords too often and not only will your text sound stilted and boring, but Google will reject your offering because of keyword stuffing.

Google also looks behind the scenes at the text that is loaded at the back end of the website, the part that readers don’t see. Like the tags for images and the page descriptions. Did you know that every page on your website needs a unique URL (e.g. www.drfredsmith/medical-procedures/hiatus-hernia-repair)? If you use duplicate page URLs, you won’t get a call back.

Then there’s the page title – that’s the bit that shows up as a heading on a search engine results page (SERP). It needs a keyword as well if you want it selected for display. The same applies to the meta description (sometimes called the meta tag) which is the snippet of text that appears under the page title.

The page titles and meta descriptions also have character limits (around 70 and 150 characters respectively, including spaces). And they should be catchy and concise – because you want users to pick you and not one of the other sites on the page.

It takes skill to write great content for a website and also incorporate keywords correctly. Many business owners and web developers still don’t understand that SEO writing is a specialised copywriting technique. Which explains why so many companies still write their own web content, and why their web developers don’t advise them against this. And why their websites don’t rank well on Google.

Not sure of what you are doing? Book a Free consultation with 10 Plus Media

The post What’s the big deal with SEO copywriting? appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

I can write! Anybody can write!! Oh, how I worry when I hear clients proclaiming this. Unless you are a professionally trained writer, no you cannot write. And if you expect to generate leads online using social media and your website, then please hire a pro to do it for you. In the long-run you will be saving yourself a whole heap of issues and money.

7 reasons why you should use a professional writer to write your online marketing content:

1. We’re skilled at what we do

Copywriting is a profession. If you think you can write and you haven’t studied to become a writer, think again. Writing is a form of communication. To communicate the word clearly so your customers understand what you do or what you are trying to sell them, you need to be a skilled writer.

Does this sentence make any sense to you? “We are a company that is good at hand making home products that comes from the earth. We have won awards for many of our designs.” Well, you sort of get that the company sells something that has won awards, but the grammar makes them sound unprofessional and what exactly are they selling?

A skilled writer would give you something like this: “Are you looking for the perfect ceramic gift? We design award-winning, hand-made earthenware – such as vases, crockery and cooking dishes – which will enhance any home interior.”

2. We know how to write to please your customers

So you have this gorgeous looking website, which you paid a fortune for. It’s meant to showcase your brilliance and how your brand stands out in the market. The problem is it has done nothing for business and has a high bounce rate (the percentage of people who come to your site on a specific page and leave on that page without clicking through to other pages).

The issue is you have showcased how good YOU are and how YOUR brand stands out. Customers aren’t interested in your brilliance. They want to know how they can benefit from using your company from the moment they lay eyes on your website. So by all means make your website design gorgeous but make sure customers can navigate it easily and that your copy is written simply and clearly with engaging information for your visitor. A professional writer knows how to write to please the customer.

3. We understand SEO and how best to use keywords

As professional online content writers, it becomes our job to keep abreast with SEO (search engine optimisation) and keyword placement. To say the least, writing for SEO purposes is a tricky job best left to the professionals.

We know when Google changes its SEO rules and where to apply them. We also know how to write great copy to please the Google crawlers while still engaging customers. We know what keywords to place where and how many times without turning your copy into a keyword-overloaded farce. Google despises keyword-heavy copy. Writers know this. We write to get your website placed on Google.

4. We know all the writing rules

When it comes to writing for online, the rules change regularly to accommodate new ways in which we access digital information. As professional writers, it is our job to keep abreast of these changes and apply them to your copy.

For example, the expansion in using mobile devices to access online content has had a strong impact on how we write for websites.  Now it’s important to write short, to-the-point snippets and short paragraphs that work on all platforms. Responsive websites (designed to adapt to various screen sizes and platforms) are becoming the norm – which means we need to know how to make the content for your website work on both large and small screens.

5. We write clearly

Writing conversationally while keeping the content concise and easy to understand is no small feat. It takes practise and skill, which is something that we writers have honed over years of writing for the various platforms and industries.

The fact that we’re flexible allows us to study the trends and adapt our writing skills accordingly. And we are the ultimate grammar Nazis so we don’t make clumsy mistakes which make the copy difficult to read and understand. Remember, the way you communicate your brand online is the way your market perceives you.

6. We write effective calls to action

If you want to see any action from potential customers, you absolutely must use calls to action in your online marketing.

So, what is a call to action? It is the bait that you use to get visitors on your website to do something that brings them closer to doing business with you. The tastier the bait the more impact you’ll have.

A good call to action should focus on what your visitors are looking for or how they will benefit. For example: “For a FREE consultation on how to get more customers, contact us now” with a click through to your website Contacts page. Or “Do you like the idea of being debt free? Find out more about our debt counselling service” with a click through to your service page.

Us writers have many effective calls to action up our sleeve. We know exactly where to position them in your website copy and just how to entice your visitors to take further action, which will ultimately generate more leads for your business.

7. We write to interest and excite

Whether we write insightful blog articles and short useful tips for newsletters or tease your customers into action with exciting emailer campaigns, we are skilled at engaging the reader. We know how to write copy that grabs the reader’s attention and doesn’t let go. And once your online content has achieved this you will pretty much have customers eating out of the palm of your hand.

The easiest way to chase customers off to your competitors is to bore them with copy that is either or all of the following:

• badly written
• doesn’t have a clear message
• too stiff and formal
• speaks above your customers’ heads
• pretentious
• written in industry lingo
• tries too hard
• too long and tedious
• all about you and offers nothing to your customer

When writers write for business their focus is to bring business to your door.Sounds easy, but it isn’t. It takes years of practice and serious writing miles to get it right.

The post 7 Reasons to invest in professional copywriting for your website appeared first on 10 Plus Media.

By Elaine Dodge

Your Website is Your Electronic Business Card

Today, it’s probably more important to have a website than it is to have a business card – although you should have both. A website tells potential clients, whom you’ve never met, much more than a business card can.

The Face of the Company

There are rules about what makes ‘good art’. There are rules about what makes a good website. There are also numerous myths locking companies into having just ‘a pretty face’ on the internet.

These are the 4 most common myths:

• Myth 1: Web design is only required to make a website look good
• Myth 2: My website design must be original
• Myth 3: Good design means not sweating the small stuff
• Myth 4: The important stuff must be above the ‘fold’

Myth Bust #1

Have you ever heard anyone ask a designer for an ugly site?
No. But, a web designer worth the beans does a lot more than just make a site ‘visually striking’. A book can have handmade paper, lush full-colour fold-out illustrations, gilded lettering and a holographic cover, but if the plot is non-existent all of that ‘fluff’ counts for nothing. The visual appeal of a site engages the user’s attention but the user experience is how easily they can navigate the site. This includes inspiring people to act.

Myth Bust #2

Be Original

Originality and its desirability is priceless. It’s also a myth. Ever since our ancestors began painting cave walls, humans have been creative. The likelihood of anything being truly original in 2017 A.D. is, to put it mildly, unlikely. Especially when you consider that every 60 seconds, 571 new websites are uploaded. Web design programmes, like WordPress, have given web designers an easy way to create websites thanks to their vast array of highly successful themes and templates. While this does mean that the layout of a site can be similar to that of other companies, the site can be customised with original pictures and branding. Complete originality on the web requires custom coding, which is great if you can afford it. Users like originality but they also like sites with great usability and excellent content.

Myth Bust #3

The power of sweating the small stuff

How much do you think a major e-commerce site made by changing one button on their website to read, “Continue”? US$300 MILLION more in revenue!! After customers had filled their on-line shopping basket and before they could enter the information to actually pay, they encountered a form where they were required to register with the company. The form was designed to make things easier for everyone, especially for returning customers. Instead, it created confusion, frustration and lost sales. The designers removed the form and replaced it with a ‘Continue’ button, giving the customer the option to create an account or continue straight to purchase. In the first month after the change, the company made US$15 million more, and US$300 million more in the first year.

Every little detail counts. Especially when your clients tell you they’re unhappy with something. A website is there to attract more sales from both existing and new customers and clients. Attention to detail in both the customer experience and the user experience is vital.

Myth Bust #4

The Important information needs to be above the fold

The idea of putting everything ‘above the fold’ began with the invention of newspapers. Newspapers are sold, and carried, folded in half. Journalists and advertisers believed that to truly grab readers’ attention the best place for the article or ad had to be above the fold on the front page. That way, your ad would be seen first and remembered. There was some merit to this. But it wasn’t a hard and fast rule, as they soon discovered. A full page ad in the middle of the paper would be far more memorable. But sometimes old adages are hard to shake.

At the advent of websites, the same logic was applied – the most important place must be the Home page and must be visible without people having to scroll down the page. But this isn’t true. According to studies more polls and more galleries are explored when they occur at the bottom of a page, where people had to scroll to find them. People not scrolling says more about your site than the people viewing it. Websites and scrolling are a part of everyday life, thanks especially to smartphones and tablets. A site that meets both the CX and UX will engage a viewer and they’ll want to explore more and more of your site.

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