Work Better, Not Harder

But all of our marketing words are not important in every context. We have to pick and choose. When I first started my business almost 15 years ago, I remember struggling with the distinction between features and benefits, and with talking about my potential clients' pain. Years later my collection of words and phrases has grown to include keywords, calls-to-action and testimonials. This month I've been working with The Phone Lady to develop a plan and process for prospecting... even more words! It can be confusing to know... what are the best words to use when? A website is a great example of seeing our words in action (or inaction as the case may be). It will contain features and benefits, pain points, broad and specific solutions, calls-to-action, keywords and testimonials. But we should never just toss them in somewhere and hope they'll work. Think alphabet soup. We need to use our words appropriately to lead our visitors to take some action. It might be a...

When it comes to writing articles for your blog or newsletter, what's your stumbling block ? Perhaps it's... coming up with ideas adapting your ideas for writing starting to write finishing writing editing and proofing finding or creating graphics keywords and publishing If you can identify where you get hung up, you can find a solution! Click to Tweet this Article

Whether it's an article title, a blog post title, a subject line or a call to action, there is no doubt that crafting a good one takes a little art and a little science. "The job of the headline is to get the first line of your copy read." ~ CopyBlogger For every article, I could write 4 titles: the simple straightforward one that says what it's all about - it's useful and truthful the catchy or clever one - the content adds context to the title once you start reading the teaser that hints at the content, but is meant to garner opens rather than be useful the version for SEO using keywords and phrases that people might search for I tend to start with #1 because it's often the idea that I jotted down to write about. After I finish writing, I might come up with a couple of choices that are more like #2. I tend to avoid #3 except in certain circumstances. Then a friend started talking about #4. I resisted because it kind of felt like selli...

How do you spell it? During a recent workshop with Twirp Communications , I was updating the keywords on my LinkedIn profile . After proudly doing the update quickly, Anita searched on one of my keywords. Immediately she spotted a disconnect. I had spelled 'email', but she had spelled 'e-mail' when she searched. Now I have to admit, I'm prejudiced against hyphens. I don't know why, but I try to avoid them unless they're necessary. We had an 'internal communication' here at Daley Progress (Danielle and I talked) about it just a couple of days before the workshop and we had decided to standardize all our usage to the un-hyphenated versions of 'email' and 'enewsletters'. How foolish of us to think that prospects and colleagues will use the search terms we want them to use! Now we will have to re-visit all of our online content, with a view to making it more 'search friendly' - rather than about what we like. Who knew ...

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. http://socialmention.com/   Click to Tweet this Article

Take a few minutes to refresh your knowledge about the most popular keywords in your industry and area of specialty. You can use this handy Google Insights for Search tool to find out what the world is searching for. Or you can narrow it down to country or province. Here is the link: www.google.com/insights/search/ . Click to Tweet this Article

Some of you may be blogging to drive readers to a target post of the day but for those of you blogging to have your readers browse your blog much like a magazine, you will want to make sure you are making full use of tags or labels. Tag and label tools are used to put your blog posts in category buckets that are easy to search and browse by the reader. You may want to consider adding a search tool on your front page that searches only your blog posts or a menu list already categorized with links to specific posts. The easier you make it for your reader to browse, the higher the possibility they will linger. Click to Tweet this Article