Category: Blogs

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Web Writing Is Not Blog Writing

There is a difference between writing for a website and writing for a blog. Here is a short list showing the differences between the two.

Web Writing
1. Written with marketing action and focus on features and benefits.
2. Desired action is to get a client to contact the office for more information or to buy something.
3. Written to expose your products and services in-depth and supply adjunct informative information.
4. Although is user centric the focus is on selling and putting you in the best light.
5. Content typically does not change with any degree of frequency.

Blog Writing
1. Informational in nature and tone and is focused on current news events.
2. Written in a very conversational style and with casual use of slang terminology and euphemisms.
3. Short one topic per page piece. Typically about 250 to 350 words maximum.
4. Does not hard sell your services. May mention your website or service but soft sells.
5. Typically is not all about you, but a newsworthy article or event, but may refer briefly to you or your website.

There is a very big difference in the quality of writer that should be used for blogging and for web content creation. The price is indicative of the quality of writing. It is not uncommon to spend $1 per word to $70 per hour for research and writing for website content.

Blog content on the other hand is more production oriented and is typically not done by a highly skilled and degreed journalist, but rather a good writer who may or may not have the critical marketing and communications background that a professional journalist or professional copywriter may have.

It is very important that if you are looking for web content writing that you not consider blog content or a blog writer an appropriate source for important website content. Rather a content specialist who has website content creation experience is the most appropriate choice. You will pay more, but the quality will be more appropriate for the use.

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What You Can Expect From Social Media

I have had a few clients say “Facebook is not working for me, I am not making any sales from it!”  It is important to understand what Facebook is and what Facebook is not. I do not consider Facebook, at this time, a strong lead generation tool. That being said, I do recommend that every business have a Facebook Business Page and actively work to connect with client’s and prospects.

Facebook is about connections and creating web authority and a reputation. Facebook is a place for prospects and customers to interact, share information and insights, ask questions, and get to know each other on a more personal level. Now, don’t flame me just yet if you disagree, I have personally done business on Facebook, but creating sales is not the real purpose for Facebook. From my point of view there is no better tool for lead generation than Google AdWords and Facebook is not Google AdWords.

“So if Facebook is not a strong lead generating tool then why should I use it?”  You will want to use Facebook as this is where your prospects and customers are hanging out. By exposing people to your products, services, and your business culture, you can move them off Facebook and into your website where your message is more tightly focused and is about lead generation.

Consider Facebook as a snap shot, a gateway, a teaser, an introduction to your business. With the right impression on Facebook you can encourage a migration to your website where your message is more selling focused.

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When Does Blogging Work For You?

This is my candid opinion, blogging works best when WordPress is installed on your website server under your website domain in a folder called blog with a URL that looks like this: http://www.MyDomain.com/blog.

Any other variation does not give you the links or SEO juice that you want and need. So what do I mean by SEO juice.?Well here’s just one example in regard to inbound link generation. We’ve been blogging for a client for about one year three days a week. I was just in on the Google Webmaster control panel and Google is showing that 500 sites are linking in to his blog.

Linking in is one of the really big perks that blogging consistently delivers for a website. Here are some other success stories: for another site there are 1,400 sites linking to the blog, for another 537, and for my own website I have 2,413 sites linking to my blog.

Blogging is just incredibly useful when it comes to getting links back to your website the best part is that if you have good blog content the links all happens on their own without your involvement. But, you only get the benefit of the links by having your blog properly configured as in the first paragraph.

Links are just one of the factors that help with organic search engine placement. Blogging is very effective when it comes to improving organic search placement by increasing the number of website pages, keyword density, and inbound links. If you want to find out more about our blogging services, and we do a really nice job with blogging for clients, check out our blog writing services page for pricing, levels, samples, and in-depth details.

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Yikes, I Can’t See My Blog Posts!

This has just happened to a prospect, and I wanted to share the situation in case you ever come across it. First the prospect is using WordPress for their blog. They had recently moved to a new web host and mentioned to me that when you clicked the blog post title of any posts on their blog their browser returned a blank Internet Explorer page.

I have seen this before where a Word character such as a long dash or an ampersand has not set well with the version of MySQL on the hosting server and then the post needs to be deleted and totally reentered to make the title be clickable, but that was not the case with this client. The title of the posts were simply not clickable.

What ended up happening was that the client had to actually reenter all the blog posts on their blog after they had upgraded to a new version of WordPress. I am not sure if this was due to an issue on the MySQL server, the blog template, or as I suspect the permalink settings that were not updated to match the database when the blog was moved, but it was a very thorny problem.

If you have seen this and have a recommendation for other readers on what you have done to repair this issue on your own blog, just leave a comment below.