Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Engagement Copywriting

Jul 09, 2007 No Comments »

Here, engagement does not mean that thing that happens before the marriage, it means engaging your readers: your customers and clients and getting them involved with your thought process by encouraging them to converse with you. This is a long-term marketing strategy and this can prove beneficial both for conventional websites and blogs. Tom discusses this form of copywriting in a post titled The Rules of Engagement: Copywriting?s New Discipline.

How do you engage your readers? By asking questions of course. Or by asking for participation. For this you have to set up a rapport with your readers, and you can only set up a rapport with them if you constantly provide them quality content, and this is where copywriting of engagement matters. But first you have to realize the real purpose of copywriting. Is it simply selling something? I don’t think so. Although selling is big part of your copywriting (at least from your client’s point of view) the main purpose of your copywriting is to help the reader decide. You highlight the benefits of a product, you tell the reader how the product can improve things and you also tell the reader what it means not to have that product. And you have to do this objectively. Your main concern is your reader. This gets conveyed through your words if your really mean it. This is how you set up a rapport.

Once your readers start interacting with you, you engage them in regular dialogs, and these not necessarily have to be regarding your product or service always. The more you engage them, the more they trust you, and trust gives rise to loyalty and there is nothing better than loyal customers.

More links on engagement copywriting:

• Rules of Engagement: Creating Effective Content
• Writing to Prevent Negative Engagement: The Effect of Protest Sites and Negative Comments

Technorati Tags: copywriting, engagement marketing, engagement copywriting

8 Ways of Creating Compelling Blog Post Titles

Jul 09, 2007 17 Comments »

Why do you need compelling blog post titles? Because the blog post title is the first thing you see when you arrive at a blog post. Your visitors first read your title, and if the title catches their fancy, they go ahead and read the post. It prompts your readers to read further and it prompts people to click your link (provided the anchor text consists of your title) wherever it appears.

Practically every blogger and online copywriter who writes about blogging and copywriting at some or the other time has written about the importance of creating compelling blog post titles: the killer blog post titles. So why am I writing about it again? Well, first of all, I have never (or I’ve forgotten if I have) written on this hot topic, and second, I don’t want to assume that all my visitors have read various posts on the importance of creating compelling blog post titles. So this post is for all those readers who are either not aware of what a great difference carefully crafted blog post titles can make, or who simply want to re-confirm their belief in writing strong, effective titles.

Why do you need compelling blog post titles?

Because the blog post title is the first thing you see when you arrive at a blog post, or even the blog itself. Most often than not a blog post title is the biggest text you see on the screen after maybe the name of the blog. The entire essence of your blog post manifests in your title. Your visitors first read your title, and if the title catches their fancy, they go ahead and read the post. Your title is the voice of your posts that goes far. It rises above the din and becomes a discernible voice. In simple words:

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Read Books To Be a Better Blogger

Jul 08, 2007 2 Comments »

The North x East blog has published a list of 10 books that can help you be a better blogger. You don’t need all the books, but some of them are really good.

Personally, I feel the best book you can ever find is your own experience. Nothing can teach you better than your own experience, and you get experience by doing things that you need to learn. To learn blogging, start blogging. Books save you lots of time because all the “necessary” information you need is compiled in such books in a linear arrangement, properly indexed. Get the books, but don’t wait for them, or don’t think that you don’t blog yet because you don’t have the right books with you, or only those people succeed in blogging who read good books on blogging. Books help you save your time and organize your thoughts. The real learning happens when you do things your own way.

I’m adding this after publishing the blog post, I think there is one book that should be worth reading: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. What you write and how you write can really make or break your blog. The basic idea behind writing a successful blog is, give something valuable to your readers. Give them a reason to come to your blog. Now, if you are Angelina Jolie then surely I’m interested in knowing what you had for breakfast, and even how you chewed every morsel, but if you are a regular blogger then I must have an overwhelming reason to visit your blog again and again.

Technorati Tags: books on blogging, blogging books

All these Social Networking Websites

Jul 07, 2007 3 Comments »

Why are there all of a sudden so many social networking websites popping up like the rain drops in a rainy season. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.

Within a search of two minutes I found the following websites:

• Twitter
• Ryze
• MySpace
• Pownce
• Jaiku
• Orkut
• Facebook

This WikiPedia link has a massive list of social networking websites.

All these websites provide business and social networking and interaction tools. And if you believe the trend, many of these websites are great hits among the young as well as the professionals. Amazingly, some of them are outright silly. Take for instance Twitter. It beats logic why people would even visit the website, leave alone use it for leaving ultra-boring messages. An average MySpace page is so gross to look at.

Some SEO experts are already suggesting you to invest your time on these websites to generate quality traffic to your websites and blogs? But is it really worth it? Depends on what sort of traffic you want and how much spare time you have got. If you are a big company or a rich entrepreneur, sure you can hire someone to interact on these websites on your behalf because extra traffic doesn’t harm (if you can bear the bandwidth cost). But if are a one-man-woman team then every minute you spend promoting your service is precious. Maintaining social networking website can easily turn out to be a time consuming affair.

But Social Networking Websites are not useless

Social networking websites, if used correctly, can definitely help you build brand awareness and create the right buzz for your service or product, especially for services and products that would appeal to the frequenters of these websites. The power of social media websites lies in the massive amount of traffic they generate. Currently numerous films and other entertainment programs are being promoted through various social media websites.

Technorati Tags: social media websites, face book, twitter, ryze, orkut, pownce, jaiku

A quick way of getting traffic to your blog or website

Jul 06, 2007 No Comments »

Maki discusses (incidentally I’m linking to this blog in quick successions, but I like the blog) some ways you can get some quick traffic to your new blog or website. Do the following:

• Provide baits: these baits are the incentives you give to your visitors to visit your blog again and again. The baits could be quality content, useful tips and tricks, some online free tools, interviews with achievers, etc.
• Generate traffic for your baits: you can do this by letting people know about your baits through social networking websites, user forums and by writing to other bloggers.
• Build a community and sustain it: gather a community of dedicated readers who value your content.

Maki rightly stresses that marketing is really important. He (I thought he was a she, but he is in fact a he) says there should be a 30-70 ratio of content writing and marketing which means you should spend 30% of your blogging time generating content and 70% time promoting your blog. I’m trying on a 50-50 target right now because for me generating content is as important as marketing my blog. But marketing cannot, in any way, be underestimated because once you start getting a decent number of visitors to your blog or website, it becomes a great motivation to write content regularly, with greater frequency.

Technorati Tags: blog marketing, blog promotion, internet marketing, promoting your blog