Entries Tagged 'blogging for business' ↓

Every company wants to sell more.

As a copywriter you would expect me to harp on about how the copy across all your marketing materials is essential if you want to engage and encourage your customers to buy. Of course that’s true, but this post is going to look more at your company as a whole and how its entire marketing ethos should work.

Engaging with your customers is the key to selling to them. To be really successful this engagement needs to happen on all levels within your company and at all stages of customer contact.

Let me explain.

Your company united

Although you probably have a sales department, boosting your company sales shouldn’t be down to them alone.

Everyone within your business, regardless of department or job title, should always be thinking sales. Any conversation could potentially lead to a sale, so its essential all your staff are switched on and ready to act.

Shh…listen

Meetings with customers are often viewed as opportunities to quickly make the customer aware of your products/services and then sign them up.

But meetings are more effective is you listen more than you speak. Listening to what your customer actually wants will lead to better service in their eyes. Show an interest in what they have to say and don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions such as budget while you have their attention. The more information you can extract from them the better.

Education, education, education

If you want people to buy from you, you have to show them how much they need your product/service. The best way to do that is through education. Blogging, how to posts, videos, eBooks, free demos and free trials are all great ways to get your customers reaching for their credit cards.

Use these marketing materials to show them how buying from you will benefit them. Use case studies to show real life examples so they can get a feel for what you can do. Everyone loves a real life story and they are a great way to demonstrate what you do.

Personality

I know some larger companies tend to use a sales script, especially in telesales departments, but these can sometimes come across as contrived and lifeless. Although you probably want your staff to stick to these scripts, encourage them to inject their own personality into their delivery.

It will boost engagement and make your customers feel as though they are dealing with real people who care, rather than someone reading from a piece of paper.

Act now

One of the greatest ways to get someone to buy is to add a sense of urgency to the deal.

Having a time limited special offer for example will encourage your customers make a decision because they won’t want to lose out. Although nothing new, this method has been a winner for many, many years so use it.

Not at gun point

Have you seen those TV documentaries that unearth rogue companies that encourage their sales team to use heavy-handed sales pitches that badger customers in to signing contracts?

Under no circumstances should any of your staff be forcing a sale through. Many people will simply turn their back on you if you try and certainly will never do business with you again.

By relying on education, case studies and helpful, polite staff your company will enjoy great sales figures.

This is a guest post written by Jenn Greenleaf. The views expressed in this post are entirely the author’s own and may not reflect those of Freelance Copywriter’s Blog. If you are interested in submitting a guest post, please get in touch with your ideas

To some, building an audience is second nature. It seems like no matter what these business owners say or do online, they have a genuine following. How does this happen, you wonder? Before getting into that, let’s talk about why they are so

engaged with their audience. The main reason is business. There’s a secret I’m going to let you in on when it comes to building an audience – your business will grow proportionally in size. Here are some tips about how to build an audience.

Keep your blog updated frequently
(source:www.sxc.hu/photo/1165446)

Deliver Content Consistently

Avoid generalizations when writing on your website; instead write as though you were talking to them directly. Develop content that is specific to your niche, especially if you’re selling a specialized product or providing a particular service. Content can be in a variety of forms including blog posts, articles, newsletters, interviews with other experts in the field, product reviews. Visitors to your website want fresh material delivered regularly covering topics relating to their interests.

Offer Freebies

Everyone loves to get something for free, as long as it has perceived value. It’s a perfect way to gain a following for any blog or business. To maximize your benefit, make sure the recipient provides their email address so you can maintain contact. Provide mechanisms for your audience to share these freebies with their own audience on social media. It can be as simple as placing a request to share on the front cover of an e-book or employing a “pay with a tweet” deal, where the person only get the product if they tweet about it. Ebooks are an obvious candidate for free products, but there are many other possibilities including free Kindle books, White Papers, companion guides and webinars. Offer substantial value in the product and avoid using it as an opportunity to sell.

Your audience should never wonder if they are important enough to talk to
(source:www.sxc.hu/photo/948294)

Stay Engaged

Visitors are discouraged when a business owner spends little time posting quality content and rarely engages with readers. The lack of interaction makes the site feel barren and neglected. Provide an immediate and positive response for every blog comment, Facebook post, or tweet. This attention to detail builds respect and garners trust among your audience. As this trust continues to build so does your reputation and ultimately your business, because everyone like to do business with people they can trust.

The Bottom Line

Whether you use social media, search engine marketing or SEO to attract visitors, be as human as possible. Search engines don’t read your blog, people do. There is a fundamental shift occurring in the online world, away from writing for SEO to creating content for human beings. Building your audience is the best way to build a business and insulate yourself from any changes in the major search engines. Great content inspires people to share and gives your business yet more exposure.

Author: Jenn Greenleaf writes about a number of topics including gardening, parenting, and legal matters. You can find out more on reputation.com

The following guest post was written by Luke Clum. The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

Content marketing is a fertile field for freelance writers these days; in fact, it’s one of the few areas in which opportunities for writers seem to be getting better, not exploding in a newspaper-fueled inferno. But good content writing jobs won’t fall in your lap just because you woke up one day and said, “I’ve got it! I’ll be a writer.” Getting these jobs requires building a portfolio, being highly adaptable, recognizing promising opportunities, and getting your work into the hands of the right people.
In many articles on the subject, you’ll often find the suggestion to join a content mill to build your portfolio, despite the pitiful rate of pay. This actually is a good first step if you’re really starting from scratch (you need to have something professional to show potential clients). But to really stand out from the masses of people calling themselves writers these days, you’ve got to consciously create content that really brands you as an industry and creative leader. Here are our top 4 tips for doing just that.

1. Become an Informational Resource

By now, you’ve probably been told a million times that you should start a blog to show prospective clients. Again, this is true, but keep in mind that since this is often a baseline (i.e. something that’s strange not to have but not particularly distinctive if you do) your blog or website has to stand out in some way. One of the best ways to do this is to pick a niche and brand yourself as an informational resource by producing a few great pieces of content.

As an example, take the cloud accounting service, Xero, which produced this cloud computing guide as a helpful resource for its current and potential customers. The guide not only addresses a very relevant and widespread question (“Just what is the cloud?”), but it also showcases the company as a fun, down to earth, and helpful brand. And, as an added benefit, stand-alone resources like this are far more likely to go viral than a single company website.
Much the same is the case for the insurance company Simply Business, which has branded itself as a business resource centre with things like this guide to social media success. While not all of the company’s potential customers will want to look through these resources, many will, meaning guides like these both widen the company’s audience and instantly establish their credibility.

While you won’t have the same resources as these companies, the point remains the same. Take the time to develop great informational content that can act as a standalone piece. If you have any interests or specialities as it is, create a resource that answers questions you know are common within that niche, or use the Google Keyword Tool to find what potential readers are searching for. With compelling, impressive resources like this, a potential client will learn a lot more about you than if you were to send them yet another top 10 list.

2. Volunteer…Strategically

Another way to find distinctive material for your content portfolio and to get your work out in front of movers and shakers is to volunteer at a place you really “get.” This could be at an organization that’s within the industry you’re looking to enter, or it could be a cause you’re really passionate about. Either way, sticking with your interests will put you in a position where you’ll be more likely to have those creative content ideas, and more convincing in you pitches to your volunteer clients. What’s more, if you’re writing for an organization’s website, you’ll likely gain a lot of exposure for your work while also adding to your portfolio. The better the job you do, the more likely the people you’re volunteering with will be to use you in their own businesses or refer you down the line.

3. Partner Up

Content writers don’t operate in a vacuum. Where once editors used to be a writer’s most crucial contact (and, don’t get me wrong, they’re still pretty high up there), now partnering with someone in a related industry, like graphic design or SEO, can be just as fruitful a venture. Having a freelance partner means doubling your networking ability. It can also make for a much more convincing sales pitch if you can bill yourselves as a one stop shop kind of place. What’s more, if you’re looking to create those specific resources previously mentioned but you don’t yet have a niche, partnering up can be just what you need, as you can then take your partner’s expertise and get it down in written form, establishing an expert’s reputation for you both.

4. Become a Microblogger on Social Media

Social media isn’t just about promoting your content (though that certainly is important). Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all potential sites for microblogging. Through tweets and status updates, you can post helpful tips in your distinctive and creative voice. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you can write blog posts and join industry groups with discussion boards. These are all forms of content creation, and the more regularly and uniquely you embrace them, the more you’ll stand out.

Take-Away

When you’re a freelance content writer, your content is your marketing. Showing clients what you can do with the resources you create and the impact you can make on social media is showing them just what you can do for them, should they take you on board. Make it helpful, full of expertise, fun and interesting to read, and your content writing career will take off in no time.

Author Bio

Luke Clum is a graphic designer and writer from Seattle. Follow him on Twitter @lukeclum

As an online marketer you understand the need for a constant stream of content.

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C business (i.e. whether you sell to other businesses or direct to consumers), to gain a strong foothold in the search results you must produce lots of high quality content.

The problem is, the time needed to produce that amount of content is rather hard to come by. We are all over worked and finding a few extra hours a week to write can be tough.

Of course, you can lighten the load by encouraging key staff members to produce content for you – many hands and all that – but there are also some other tricks you can use to help generate content and make the most of the stuff that’s already out there.

Recycle your content

We’re not talking about spinning articles for multiple sites, but rather taking a look at the content you have and making the most of it.

If you have a long article, why not break it down into bite-sized chunks – you may get 2 or 3 articles out of one.

Another great tip is to reuse white papers and reports. They will be full of useful information that can easily be broken down into smaller articles and re-written in a more informal style suitable for your blog or website.

Moving away from text, why not re-create the information in a more visual style such as an infographic? That way you can also make use of social sites such as Pinterest. Or you could create videos from the text for your YouTube channel. Everyone likes to take in information differently so by having it in a text, visual and video format there’s something for everyone.

Optimise

This one is more to do with making the most of your content through optimisation.

Everything you produce should be in line with your current SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy utilising one keyword/phrase per article.

It’s also a good idea to make sure that keyword also appears in the URL of your article and in the Alt tags for the images you use.

Standing out

The whole purpose of content marketing is to make it stand out and get it read. If you go for a wishy-washy format that’s pretty boring to look at, no one’s going to take the time to read it.

Make sure you use a strong headline and social sharing icons that indicate how many people have shared your material. Bulleted lists, charts and diagrams all help to add interest and, by keeping your article relatively short, you’ll encourage readers.

Call to action

These are not just for websites and sales materials.

They can be visual cues such as the social share buttons. If you want people to share your stuff or become a fan on Facebook, have markers to show how many people follow you or ‘Like’ you – they won’t want to be left out.

You can use your call to action to get people to sign up to your newsletter, go to a landing page, make a comment, in fact almost anything you can think of.

Get social

If you want people to read your stuff you’ve got to let them know it’s there. Tweet about it, link to it from Facebook, put it on your website and mention it in your newsletters.

Interact with your readers by encouraging comments and responding to them and, as already mentioned, make sure the social share buttons are present to encourage readers to share it with others.

You see, content marketing is not just about generating a constant stream of fresh material; you also need to think about what you already have that can reused in a different format.

By looking at it that way, you should be able to keep up with the demands of your marketing strategy.

Once upon a time, commenting on blogs was a great way to build links and drive traffic. Today, that’s not the case and as a result many who once were prolific commenters have written off the practice.

After all, if they’re not going to get any benefit from doing it, what’s the point?

But is that true?

Is there really no benefit to commenting on blogs? Other than the obvious knowledge gaining you get (of course, I am assuming that you actually read the blog before you comment on it), do you gain anything else?

Well in my humble opinion the answer is yes. The benefits are threefold:

• It can help you build a good relationship with other bloggers
• Well thought out and relevant comments will show others your authority in a subject
• In relation to the point above, that could potentially lead to traffic heading your way

But this will only happen if you write well-constructed comments showing that you have obviously read the original post, understood it and have something valid to say.

What you shouldn’t be doing is:

• Write something trite such as ‘Great post!’ or ‘I agree’ which are absolutely meaningless. Respond to the points raised and make sure your comment adds value
• Be controversial just because you can. I hate it when that happens; if you don’t agree, fine, but back up your opinions with relevant facts. If you just rant for the sake of it, you’ll end up discrediting yourself
• Posting rude or offensive comments is bad (do I really have to point that out?) – as your mother once said, if you have nothing nice to say keep your trap shut (I may have paraphrased that a bit)
• Posting comments that are full of links. It looks spammy and as such will be consigned to the spam bin
• Posting a comment that’s full of typos. Just as with everything else you write, read it through before you hit send

The writing, reading and commenting on blogs is essential if we are to share information and knowledge. It’s still work doing, just make sure you’re adding value with every comment.

Sally Ormond – Professional copywriter and blogger