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While marketing is a vast, vast field, comprising countless aspects, and while the success of your business will depend upon an effective combination of all of them, it is advertising that remains the key component of a good marketing campaign. Advertisements are what tend to draw most people into viewing your product or service with interest, and sometimes, in fiercely competitive market segments, it can be your ads that differentiate you from the business next door. As far as advertisements are concerned, there are two main aspects that you have to work on:
•    Visual/Aesthetic appeal
•    Actual message conveyed through the words

It is the latter that advertising copywriting is all about. While graphics and visuals are immensely important, it is the actual text of the ad that will inspire a customer to buy from you, and it is only the text that will let people know just how you are different from and better than your competitors.

Here are some key ideas to keep in mind when writing advertising copy or getting it written by a professional.

Tips for Writing Great Advertising Copy:

•    Define exactly what you are offering:
Before writing the ad, it is very important that you know exactly what is on offer, because giving out an ambiguous, or worse, incorrect message in your ad is fatal for your business success. Make sure the customer knows exactly what he will get from you.

•    Adopt a conversational style:
Of course, your exact tone would vary with the product you are selling and the nature of your business, but any advertisement for any product is effective if and only if it speaks directly to the customer. Talking to the reader as though you are writing especially with him in mind is more likely to make him feel as though you are offering exactly what he needs and hence will prompt action from him.

•    Know your target audience:
Define exactly who you want to sell to and design the advertisement specifically with them in mind. General, blandly written advertisements that simply list features of whatever you are offering will be boring and put off potential customers; further, they fail to differentiate you from your competitors and hence will be ineffective.

•    Emphasize the Benefits:
Throughout the advertisement, the emphasis should be on communicating to the customer exactly what advantage your product/service would give them. This would improve the “perceived benefit” of your product in the customer’s mind, and this is what actually prompts action from the customer.

•    Differentiate from your competitors ads:
Study your competitors’ ads carefully, and understand what they offer to customers. Strive to make yours different from them and make your ads appeal to the customers in other ways. Personalize them differently, adopt a radically different tone or writing style, or offer a different perspective.

In regard to actually doing the advertising copywriting yourself, in my personal opinion, it is harder than it sounds. Unless you know what you are doing stick with the professionals. The copy could make or break your business.

What is SEO Copy?
Copy refers to the actual textual content of your website. SEO copy, therefore, refers to the idea of optimizing the textual content of your website to rank well with search engines. Search engines crawl, read and index only the text parts of your site. Therefore, no matter how visually appealing your site and how much audio-visual content it contains, the main thing that’s going to drive traffic to your site is text that is good enough to give you a good search engine ranking.

7-Step Guide to Writing Great SEO Copy:

Step 1 – Find out the keywords most popular among your target audience:
Visit a site such as Wordtracker.com and type in phrases that best describe your products or services. Find out how popular these terms are, and find out what phrases users use most often when searching for what you are offering. These are the phrases you will have to sprinkle all over your content.
Step 2 – Divide your content into pages:
Having separate, short pages for each area of your content will make sure that you can put very relevant content into each of your pages. Thus each page would carry lots of relevant keywords and hence improve your search engine ranking.
Step 3 – Do not allow room for ambiguity:
Use specific terms when describing your business, and use them in prominent places. This improves readability and shows customers what they are looking for in a glance. Putting in vague terms would irritate users and would not bode well with search engines either.
Step  4 – Use your key phrases in links:
Wherever you have a link to external locations or to content in your own site, use a key phrase from among the ones you identified in Step 1.  This really improves your search engine ranking and hence your visibility.
Step 5 – Optimize your headings:
Make sure that like your links, your content headings too contain key phrases and terms, because these help search engines index your content and link your content better with what users are searching for. Plus, headings improve your readability so lots of relevant headings are always a good idea.
Step 6 – Avoid single words:
Do not make the mistake of choosing single words as your keywords; always go for phrases instead. The reason is that when users search for something, they rarely, if ever, use single words for the search. As most searches are done using 2-4 word phrases, this is the length your keywords should be, to ensure that your site appears as a result of a user’s search.
Step 7 – Test your site for SEO content:
Finally, if you think you’ve got your site completely search engine optimized, test it using site diagnostic tools such as spam and black hat SEO detectors, and tools like keyword density checker. Compare results for your site to competitors’ sites to identify problem areas and to ensure that you are both visible in search engines and helpful for your visitors.

In creating a website for your business, one of the most important aspects is website copywriting. This is sometimes ignored by site designers, greater focus being on visually and graphically appealing site design, but in fact this is probably the one thing that can make or break your online presence. So what is website copywriting, and how do you ensure that it gives your business maximum benefit? Here are some answers.

What is Website Copywriting?
Basically website copywriting is just the name given to writing text for websites. Hence the writing style and specification varies according to the nature of your website, and according to your target audience. If you want to attract targeted traffic to your site and if you wan to keep site visitors engaged and interested in what you have to offer, you must ensure that your website copy is very well written and customized to fit your target audience’s needs.
Why is Website Copywriting Important?
No matter how visually appealing your site and how rich it is in content, the most important thing at the end of the day remains the actual text in it. Here are the two main reasons why:
♣    Search engines will look only at textual content in your site when they rank it. Hence to ensure that your site gets pulled up among the top few search results, you have to write excellent copy.
♣    It is mostly the textual content of your site that will satisfy the information needs of your customers. Too little textual content can drive visitors away from your site.
Hence website copywriting is important for your site to actually be found by visitors, and then for it to be actually liked by them.
Website Copywriting Tips:

• Optimize the text for search engines. Ensure a keyword-rich content that will enable search engines to classify and index your content and match it to users’ search strings.

• Content should be helpful and provide maximum information to readers. Researchers say that people usually like to gain information about a product or service before coming back to a site to buy it, so the more informative your content, the greater your site’s popularity.

• People read differently on the internet than they read books or newspapers. Put your information in concise, bulleted form and include links to other content. Avoid long paragraphs and lengthy introductions. Get straight to the point and ensure that the writing style is active, inspiring action, and attention grabbing.

• A helpful tip is to include links to HTML files when you want to give users the option to read more on the subject. Embed such links in the text like” read more on car servicing”. This will improve your search engine ranking and also make the content more readable.

Email marketing is one of the most widespread modes of internet marketing. Researchers estimate that in the Australia alone, firms spent about AU$200 million on email marketing in 2006. To give your sales and revenue a boost, this may be just what your business needs.
While email marketing is not as simple as you may think, it can be highly effective once you get the hang of it. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for an email marketing campaign that should help you avoid falling into the common traps.

Email Marketing

• Try to greet the email recipients by their name, and avoid a mere generic greeting. This automatically makes the email feel much less remote and impersonal – the recipient is more likely to look carefully at your offer and perhaps follow it up.
• Make sure that the subject of the email message is catchy enough to make them want to open it up.
• Ensure that the HTML part of your email corresponds correctly with its plain text counterpart – spam filters check this in particular so make sure your email does not end up in spam.
• Use a good email marketing application (such as aweber.com). These applications help you setup your auto-responder emails in a sequence. So all you have to do is select which list you want the emails to go to and schedule their publish dates. The software automatically sends them to the recipients at the scheduled times.
• Make sure that the emails are written in a conversation tone. A friendly and candid language works best for emails.
• Effective email campaigns are designed so that there is a call to action in the end. Whether you want the readers to visit your site, subscribe to your blog, download your product, or participate in a contest; make sure you entice them to do that at the end of the emails.

Email Marketing Don’ts:

• Avoid multiple dollar signs and exclamation marks, and also excessive capitalization in your email offers. With the profusion of advertising on the internet, most users are thoroughly tired of exclamatory offers full of $$$ signs and will delete the email as soon as they spot it. Spam filters often automatically trash such emails. Keep the tone calm and polite throughout to avoid irritating the recipient.
• Do not send emails during the holiday season, because people often don’t check their email during holidays. Marketing in the holidays can therefore be ineffective and a waste of resources.
• Try to keep your email marketing opt-in, not opt-out. Opt in basically means that the user has knowingly given you his or her email address. Opt-in emails are an effective mode of email marketing because you automatically filter out uninterested recipients.

Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool, but only if done following the right guidelines. It can give your sales a significant boost. It’s also a great idea to keep in touch with your existing customers and clients by updating them on latest offerings.

Many online marketing experts assert that permission acquisition before sending an email offer is compulsory, and not optional. Most business owners would question the necessity of this tedious process, which also cuts down the number of people who see their promotional offer. However, despite the restricted number of advertisements sent out, this mode of email marketing gives much better response rates and a much higher level of brand affinity from the recipients. Let us look at a few advantages that permission based email marketing has over regular email marketing, and then you can decide for yourself what your business needs more!

Reasons for Sticking with Permission based Email Marketing:
•    When you send unsolicited email, half the addresses could be blocking you, or they simply may not exist anymore, so half your time and money goes right down the drain.
•    Low price mailing lists may seem like a very good option, but in reality they are full of what we can call “spam traps” – features that will show up in a spam filter and may get you blacklisted. For instance, spam reporters sometimes create specific email addresses and add them to mailing lists, just to check who sends an email there. The moment you deliver an email to that address, you will be reported.
•    There is overwhelming evidence that recipients of permission based emails will actually read the emails much more often than unsolicited recipients – in fact, according to IMT Strategies (2001), only 2% of recipients of a solicited email delete it without reading, opposed to 76% of recipients of unsolicited ones!
•    Secondly, according to the same study, only 5% of the receivers of unsolicited email opened it with curiosity and eagerness, opposed to 61% of permission recipients.
•    We often receive promotional newsletters for products that we never signed up for, but most of us also find that highly irritating. As a business owner or manager, you do not want to irritate prospective buyers. A Harris Poll in 2003 found that 79% of US residents found unsolicited email “somewhat annoying” to “very annoying”, and annoying that many people at once is a very risky move!
Finally, survey results aside, it simply does not make sense to promote your business with people who are not interested in it. You only risk irritating potential buyers, ruining your brand image, and eventually bringing down your sales and revenue. Before launching your emails, think twice about whether your business can afford that kind of risk. If not, then the time and money spent compiling a legitimate mailing list will be well spent.

The phrase “traffic management” in context of internet marketing is not at all uncommon. In fact, for beginners in the field who are attempting to popularize their websites, this concept is a highly relevant one. Essentially traffic management can be split into three somewhat overlapping areas:
•    Monitoring and analyzing the traffic on your website,
•    Generating more high quality traffic
•    “Capturing” the traffic to provide you with leads for email marketing
The first step then is to install a traffic monitoring tool on your website that would keep track of the number of visitors viewing your site, as well as finer details such as which pages they view and for how long they stay. Google Analytics is an example of such software. Many of these tools are free, but you may have to pay a company for giving you a meaningful analysis of the results.
Once you manage to track and analyze the traffic, you will identify the problem areas, such as not enough time spent per visitor in viewing your site, or, more commonly, not enough traffic. The key aspect of traffic management, therefore, is traffic generation, or preferably, targeted traffic generation. The difference is simply that targeted traffic comprises people who are actually interested in what you offer, and have found your website because they were looking for something like it. There are several ways of increasing your targeted traffic. For instance, you can get listed with online directories, so that people who are looking for a business like yours can obtain a link to your website. You can use search engine optimization techniques to ensure that your website shows up among the top few results when anyone types a search string related to your website into a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Finally, traffic management does not end with generating and analyzing traffic – a major concern for a website, and particularly in context of internet marketing, is to capture leads. Leads are the people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering and on whom you should focus your marketing efforts. The idea is to legally obtain the email addresses of visitors to your website who want to know more about you. There are several ways of doing this. For instance, you can offer a free subscription to a newsletter, for which the person will submit an email address, or offer a free e-book for download, requiring submission of a valid email address. You can simply place an opt-in form on every page of your site, which would ask visitors to leave their email addresses if they would be interested in promotional offers from you.
Traffic management may appear to be a hassle, but it is a worthy investment if you truly want your website to prove effective for boosting your sales, ROI, and general reputation of your business.

In the SEO world, traffic means the number of hits your webpage or blog is getting. This goes to show how many people are interested in what you have to offer. From business and marketing point of view, traffic is vital, that’s how marketers determine the success of a website. Simply put the more traffic to your website, the more the chances of success.

Strategies to increase traffic generation to your site

Here are few tips and tricks to help you generate more traffic to your site:
- Build a presence on Search Engines
- Submit your blog or site to search engines and aggregators like Technorati. Include popular keywords in your posts because what Yahoo or Google do is that when a user is looking for a particular phrase or keywords, it shows those sites in the search results that the most optimized for those keywords. – - – - -Increase your search engine ranking by optimizing your website’s presence and often checking your page rank.
- Stay active in the online world

There are a number of ways to influence your presence on online world positively, few are:
•    Leave useful comments
•    Include backlink in your signature
•    Make friends on online forums
•    Always response to comments
•    Engage your audience by being interactive

Coin attention grabbing titles
What you name your post actually matters, that’s the impression in fact. A title that is catchy, snappy, and grabs attention boosts traffic to your website. It also won’t hurt if you include 15 to 20 word summary about your post.
Tag and categorize
What increase search engine optimization significantly is tagging and categorizing your posts. Search engine algorithms look at tags and categories when performing a search. By categorizing and sub categorizing, it will also be easier for people to find what they are looking for.
Add value to your content
Give useful information; write posts that explain how things work or how something can be useful. Useful things usually get linked and hence more traffic. Adding value reaps on long term basis when it comes to generating traffic. Keep adding fresh content as updating your content will definitely boost your traffic generation.
Simplify
By simplifying your website and content, it will not only increase the traffic but also simplify maintaining your site or blog. It will be easier to manage and keep you away from complex issues. Also posts that are ‘hard to grasp’ usually make people lose their interest quickly.

There are few in the world of online marketing today who have not heard of the term “website traffic”. There are many, however, who do not fully understand the concept. Simply put, website traffic is simply a measure of the number of visitors to a website, and the number of pages they click on. Hence, it is easy to see that the ultimate aim of any website owner is to direct high quality traffic towards his website.

How to measure website traffic:

There are various tools (like Google Analytics) used for this, and many are free of cost. There are companies that will monitor your website and calculate the amount of traffic, as well as analyze the results to give you a clear picture of how popular your website is. If you analyze the results without the involvement of a company, the bright side is that you do not spend a dime; the downside is that you have to spend considerable time and need quite some experience for your analysis to be helpful. However, the cause is a worthy one for investment of both your time and money, so both options should be considered.

Why is it important to monitor website traffic?

The major reason is that analysis of traffic on your website enables you to see which areas are most effective and which need improvement. The number of times a specific page or link is clicked on, and the average time spent by surfers on different areas are all highly relevant bits of knowledge if you are looking to increase your website traffic.

Finally, what happens once you have analyzed your website’s traffic and identified problem areas?

Well, firstly you make the necessary improvements, for instance putting more captivating content on a particular page to increase the average time spent there by visitors. Secondly, in case you identify that traffic is lower than you want, take steps to increase it. This is done by ensuring that when someone types a search string into a search engine, your website comes up in the top few among the thousands of results that will be pulled up. Research and understand techniques like search engine optimization, which deal with modifying the contents of your webpage and including keywords to make it more likely to be pulled up in searches. The time and effort involved is considerable, but is worth it when you see the desired result. Increase your website traffic and increase your website profits.

If you were to list the key concepts involved in online marketing and e-commerce in order of importance, then the idea of targeted traffic would be very close to the top.

What is targeted traffic?

Very simply, it is the number of visitors to your website who are actually interested in what you have to offer. For instance, if you have a website for your furniture business in California, then visitors who find your site because they typed “furniture sales Irvine” into Google will be your targeted traffic. Targeted traffic analysis is a much more important area than simple website traffic analysis, because even if ten thousand visitors come to your site everyday, the only ones who matter would be those who are interested in what you are offering.
So your primary concern is to increase targeted traffic to your website, and that will automatically boost sales and revenue of whatever product or service you are offering. Here are a few tips to increase targeted traffic to your website:
•    First and foremost, focus on Search Engine Optimization techniques. These are ways to ensure that when a search string is typed into a search engine, your website shows up among the top few results. SEO is an entire field of study in itself and requires detailed study and research for proper understanding. Essentially these are techniques such as including and emphasizing keywords that users usually type into search engines.
•    Second step is to get listed in major directories and in the most popular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo search. This automatically increases chances of your target visitors noticing and coming to your website.
•    Thirdly, increase the number of links to your site, for example by placing text links to your websites in other sites, or by agreeing to include other related websites’ links in your own in return for them including yours.  You can also write articles for other websites, and have them link to your website. This not only increases your chances of being visited, but also improves your search engine rankings.
•    A very powerful tool for increasing your targeted traffic is to have a blog. When you have something relevant to say in your blog, it gives people a reason to come back to your website. Also, the content can make you rank quite high with the search engines, and as your blog develops a following, more people will link to it and to your site.
There are a myriad of different ways to increase your targeted traffic, and all of them require that you put in time and effort. This may be a heavy investment, but is worth it if your website starts getting pulled up in top search engines and starts grabbing the attention of exactly the kind of visitors you want to see.

Market Analysis has two distinct definitions, but as far as a business’s marketing is concerned, the relevant idea is a thorough analysis of your target market, and a plan of the steps to take for optimum sales and profitability.  The underlying purpose of market analysis is either to plan the best way to enter a new market, or, for an existing market, to increase the market share or make it more profitable. Hence market analysis is a highly relevant concept for business owners and managers.

Let us now look at the two major categories of this type of market analysis:
Market analysis for a new product line/business:
In this case, analysis of the target market involves studying the needs of your potential customers, predicting which products are likely to be successful among them, and in how much quantity you should produce the product. Logic analysis, for instance, involves studying the target customers to identify an unsatisfied need, and launching your product accordingly, to fulfill that need. Also, the incomes and lifestyles of the customers are studied, based on which you decide the price, packaging and distribution of your products, or the corresponding aspects of any services you are providing. Finally, the competition is analyzed. For this, you basically look at other firms that are catering to your target market already, and look at their market shares, their brand image, pricing strategy and other things, and this helps you generate your own ideas on how to best enter the market.
Market analysis for an existing business/product line:
Some of these techniques overlap with the market analysis for a new business or product line, but the major difference is that instead of studying targeted customers, you are interested in your existing customers. You study brand loyalty and brand perception of your product among your customers, and also predict their response to any changes you might bring in your product, packaging or pricing strategy. Also, you study the competition, and devise strategies that might give you a competitive edge, increase your profitability, sales or ROI.

Market analysis tools:
There are a myriad market analysis software tools available on the internet, some free, some not. They usually take the form of spreadsheets with several fields that input a wide range of data, and then manipulate it and present a general analysis using graphical representation, or by listing data in a specific order (such as sales by week or time of day) depending on the data that is input. Also, marketing firms usually provide market analysis services along with their other services.