DIY copywriting, marketing and SEO

Setting up a blog is one thing. Making it work as hard as possible for your business is another. Here’s twenty five ways to attract more people to your blog and keep search engines happy:

1. use key words and phrases within your posts and post titles to make your blog search engine friendly. When search engines ‘know’ what your blog is about they can classify it accurately and make sure it pops up in front of people who search on your key terms. Need advice? WordPress and the other major blog platforms all provide blog SEO tutorials and guides. And Google’s keyword research tool is as good as any
2. take advantage of SEO-related plug-ins that do a lot of the hard work for you. I use an all-in-one SEO pack plug-in for WordPress
3. include images. They make such a difference to the way blog posts look, and people are more likely to read illustrated posts
4. vary the length of your posts to keep human visitors interested. Some short, some medium, some long
5. Tweet your posts on Twitter and promote them on Facebook, LinkedIn etcetera for an integrated approach and extra traffic
6.  make sure your blog post urls are simple and readable, not great long strings of letters, symbols and numbers. You can get information about how to create user friendly URLs via most popular blog platforms, and with some you can get it sorted in one click
7. put your blog on the same url as your business so all that lovely SEO juice benefits your site
8. check Google Analytics regularly to spot trends, peaks or troughs. You might find some subjects attract more interest than others, acting as valuable link bait
9. download a good spam filter so your blog doesn’t fill up with crappy spam comments
10. make sure your blog ‘pings’ out to the world every time you create a new post. Check out your back-end blog CMS to find out how to make it happen
11. include links to useful, entertaining, interesting, relevant and exciting places
12. make your blog look as good as possible, while keeping it simple. Eye candy helps pull in readers!
13. be consistent. If you’re the only contributor, make sure you use the same tone of voice throughout your posts
14. add your blog address to your email communications, as part of your contact details
15. invite comments by actually asking people to interact, posing questions like, “What do you think?”and “What are your experiences?”
16. create blog titles that knock people’s socks off, make them want to read on and give you back-links
17. vary the subject matter to keep things interesting: Q&As, special offers, useful links, surveys, news and views, thought pieces, funny stuff, controversial stuff, product launches…
18. keep it soft sell. There’s nothing more boring than reading a hard sell blog full of excessive trumpet blowing
19. keep your eye on trending topics and react to breaking news as it breaks
20. allow guest blog posts from reliable sources
21. ask for contributions from people in your field you admire and respect
22. write about customers or business partners, encouraging them to link from their site to your blog for extra link oomph
23. blog regularly to keep search engine bots and spiders on their toes and get your blog re-indexed frequently
24. write in plain language and don’t be scared to express your personality. The theory of Likeonomics is huge these days and marketers everywhere are discovering the value of being human in a business context!
25. allow comments, but learn what’s spam and what isn’t. Once you get the hang of it it’s easy to distinguish genuine feedback from comment spam, which can devalue your blog in savvy readers’ eyes. Your blog’s spam filter plug-in will catch some of it, but not necessarily all of it

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jaylopezs for the royalty-free image)

It’s good to know human beings are nowhere near as predictable as marketers like to think we are. 

Despite the vast amount of data sites like Facebook hold about members, the social network’s data-driven adverts are still way off target.

OK, I may be in my forties and engaged to be married. But that doesn’t mean I’m into anti-ageing products. I don’t want a massive great meringue of a wedding dress either. Nor am I interested in celebrities or concerned about my weight: I couldn’t give a stuff how much blubber Cheryl Cole has lost!

These days marketers have access to ‘big data’, which by rights should make targeting offers tightly to people’s needs, preferences and lifestyles much easier. But in real life, it doesn’t. The conclusions they come to are still far too simplistic.

In reality Facebook’s efforts are no better than thirty years ago, when data driven targeting was the direct marketer’s holy grail and we only had postcode, sex and buying history to play with.

If Facebook filled my account with adverts for stuff  I’m really interested in, things like 1950s German art pottery, ’60s and ’70s oil paintings, antique rugs, craft materials, tickets for Radio 4 comedies, garden stuff, wood carving gear and good books, I’d be a happy bunny and would probably click through. That’s what I’d call targeting!

I was chatting with someone about insurance direct marketing the other day, lamenting the fact that most insurance offers are hideous exercises in jargon and corporate speak.   

The person I was talking to wondered whether it was OK to use corporate-style language when marketing business-to-business, as opposed to business-to-consumer. I said no.

How come? Because people are human beings, even when they have their work heads on.

Whether we run multinational companies or spend our days reading ‘OK’ magazine and drowning in daytime telly, we invariably prefer clear, simple marketing communications that get the point across quickly and creatively without making  a meal of it. With no jargon and no convoluted corporate speak.

It doesn’t matter who you’re talking to. Good communication is about clarity, simplicity and brevity… every time.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/barunpatro for the royalty-free, fee-free image)

I’m a stickler for punctuation, simply because without it the written word makes no sense. But I love the way people get creative with language. 

I discovered yesterday that ‘gravy’ apparently means ‘excellent’ these days if you’re under twenty five. Not so long ago ‘wicked’ was a wholly negative word but today even old folk use ‘wicked’ to describe something spectacularly, awesomely good.

And according to the nice young chap in Le Magasin, a posh cafe in Lewes, ‘epic’ is the perfect way to describe their cake selection. Which is, I have to admit, probably the finest in the known universe.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/iprole for the royalty free cake image. Yum! )

Is punctuation dying, dealt a death blow by text messaging and buried in a shallow grave by teens who can’t be bothered to learn the fine art of clear communication?  

If punctuation was the province of a load of fuddy duddies who insisted on following a bunch of boring old rules just for the sake of it, I might say yes. But without punctuation, the world suddenly makes much less sense.

In some cases leaving out punctuation, or getting it wrong, is downright dangerous. Far from being obsolete, it’s vital for clear, effective written communications.

This week’s New Scientist magazine pokes fun at a sign near London Bridge station that says, Narrow lanes do not overtake cyclists. Which is nonsense. But add a colon or hyphen and it’s suddenly a crystal clear instruction with road safety in mind: Narrow lanes –  Do not overtake cyclists. Or Narrow lanes: do not overtake cyclists.

Lynne Truss’s excellent book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is another case in point. There’s a world of difference between the meaning of the phrase “Eats, shoots and leaves” and “Eats shoots and leaves”.

Here’s an example from her book, showing how different ways of punctuating the same statement turn its meaning upside down.

• A woman, without her man, is nothing
• A woman: without her, man is nothing

Punctuation isn’t difficult to learn. It’s mostly common sense and tends to mirror the way we speak. Not using it is just lazy.

If you’re in business and you’re foxed by punctuation, get a freelance copywriter on  the case and make sure your communications make sense. Or buy Lynne Truss’s book and get to grips with punctuating properly.