Let’s say you have chosen to create a company blog. In this instance you are building a page for web visitors that will provide them with more knowledge, not just about your products, but value added helpful information that gives them new exciting ideas. This is the key: A blog is not a tool for sales as such. It’s about using your expertise and knowledge to provide useful content that will create back-links. Those that read your articles and find them useful will reference them. You care about back-links because back-links will increase your position on your target SERP’s, better position on SERP’s equals more of the right visitors. There is something about web publishing that is Karmic. Give generously and it will come back to you.

Social Media

Some companies tout that they will get you hundreds of social media back links, but like any automated en masse strategy there is the potential for watered-down results and spammy looking links and linked content. Bottom line, if a company offers to get you hundreds of links from anywhere be suspicious, there is no way its a legitimate way of creating useful back links! Setup your profiles, make a plan and do the work.

Keeping It Real

Use the force! Stay away from the dark side of online networking! Social Media Strategists and Writers are there to support you in your campaign but they shouldn’t be the voice of your company. Use those professionals for strategy, training, set-up, editing and publishing on CMS systems.  Write well-thought-out, useful articles don’t just try to sell. Open your own social network accounts, promote your own articles, but promote others too. You will see that they will begin to promote you.  Is it hard work? Yes, but Google has proven it has the ability to recognize, well built sites with good content and a good online networking strategy.  That’s why they are the number one brand in the world.

Consider it this way, a health practitioner knows their trade. They know where to squeeze and they know where to put needles. When I have an acupuncture treatment, I may think it hurts and my body may resist as I want to move away, however, I refrain from movement and I don’t tell the therapist, ‘I would prefer it if you put the needle over here’. Now I could dictate pressure (for massage),  or indicate a location where I feel pain, but the practitioner knows best how to treat that pain. For instance if it’s your quad that is causing the pain in your lower lumbar (back), it may not seem right to you, but your practitioner may have to work on your quadricep and not on your back if  a tight or injured quad is the culprit.  How do you know they are right? The proof is in the pudding. Your back feels better. Ultimately, it is your body and you can always say, ‘no I am not comfortable with that’ and any health practitioner would respect this request, however the practitioner cannot stand behind their work if they practice according to the advice of their patients.

There are more and more professional writers out there today because plenty of content is a big part of what gets you noticed. Every man and his dog are bloggers so how do you determine good writers if not by subjective evaluation?  It’s easier than it ever was. It’s called Analytics. If your writer gets tons of traffic you might want to extend some trust to see how they come through for you before you ask them to change their tune.

Whenever I see something cheap I say to myself “Self, you get what you pay for”. The only problem is that my other self says “Self, don’t make this client spend money unless they are making it”. I was recently working for a client transitioning from brick and mortar to online sales and the WordPress Getshopped plugin was already installed in the website by the previous (fly-by-night) web developer. I knew I would have my head stuck in that shopping cart a lot so I wanted to make sure it did certain things like up-selling, different tax rates and shipping rates etc. or else I would ask my client to upgrade. Getshopped seemed that it would do everything I needed it do, I was set.

Now I don’t want to slam their product because quite frankly I got what I paid for (a one off payment of $40 is cheap as far as shopping carts go) but a word to the wise. Getshopped is a bug laden piece of technology. Unless your a developer or programmer you will probably pull your hair out. Its situations like these where I wish I had listened to self number one. Fortunately, there are a gazillion shopping carts out there to choose from. Better pull up your socks Getshopped!

“Copy writing is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to promotional situations, regardless of the medium (as advertisements for print, television, radio or other media)”

Interestingly copy writing the verb does not seem to be recognized as a word by spell check so I assume that the official term is “Copywriter” who writes “copy” but quite frankly I don’t care. If you Google copy writing it is widely recognized and Google is my Websters these days.