Ten Tips To Make Your Web Page Text Stand Out

Studies have shown what you already know to be true – reading a web page’s text is very different to reading a printed page. Many people dislike reading web pages so much that they print them out to read in greater detail later, however, most visitors to your web site will simply skim through your content and make very quick judgment as to whether or not it is worth printing and reading later.

If you are one of the many small business owners turned newbie web authors, you need to know a few simple guidelines for publishing reader-friendly, effective web page text that will have your visitors staying around for more.

Make Your Point and Make it Fast!
You have to grab your visitor’s attention immediately so that in those few precious moments that a visitor scans your web page to see if it is relevant to them, they can see that it is. How is this achieved?

Here are my top ten tips to writing effective web copy:

1. Bold/enlarge your subject headings so that they are clear.

2. Use short sentences and very short paragraphs – a few sentences per paragraph tops.

3. Break up long content and link it to bullet points at the top of the page.

4. Give concise information – get to the bare bones fast, don’t waffle!

5. Cross-reference your content with other pages.

6. Keep content relevant to the subject header – extraneous information should go elsewhere.

7. Make use of white space to make your text easy to read.

8. Format your page’s text content width to narrow – don’t make visitors scan long lines of text – they won’t for long.

9. Use your keywords in a manner that won’t bore the reader – don’t needlessly repeat them: Google might like you some, but your readers won’t.

10. Well written, relevant content is important – use a spell checker so typos don’t let you down.

Small business owners often leave their web sites full of old, stale content. If you are a small business owner in this situation, and you want to write standout web content but don’t have time to add new copy, take the above tips and re-work what you already have. You don’t have to spend hours cranking out new web content because often aesthetic enhancements can go a long way to making your web site an easy read.

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Internet Viral Marketing

Despite having a cool looking website with all the flashy bells and whistles, if people don’t know about it – it just doesn’t matter how great it is. Being online might just be a waste of your time, money and resources unless you can market your site effectively – and that’s where Internet Viral Marketing comes in.

While there are a plethora of methods and schemes used by so many websites today, especially e-commerce sites, there are still some tricks that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings and one of the easiest to use is Internet Viral Marketing (IVM).

The word viral brings to mind the ‘virus’, a dreaded word known and experienced by almost all computer owners, those two words are not related at all in this respect. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business.

So What Exactly is Internet Viral Marketing?

Internet Viral Marketing is a marketing technique used to build and gain public awareness of a product or company by using many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product or company. This is achieved by using ‘must see’ elements like games and videos that get a person hooked and is then compelled or amused enough to actually pass it on to others. Although the IVM piece shouldn’t be a blatant advert for it to work there should be product or company advertisement passed along with it.

Internet Viral Marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it is relatively inexpensive to produce. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, this form of viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass it on. If the recipient knows the sender on an email it will get through spam blockers or black listings, thus getting past the Gate Keeper.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates to help spread their IVM. They also use intrigue – which you can read about in our next post where we will discuss methods for using Internet Viral Marketing to your company’s advantage. You do not want to miss it!

Using Viral Marketing to Your Advantage

The greatest advantage of Internet Viral Marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your website and your company. You can generate a flow of traffic that brings in masses of potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your website’s existence as more than just a drop in the Internet ocean.

Most up-and-coming online businesses are catching on to the effectiveness of Internet Viral Marketing and advertising. By ignoring the importance of IVM your website might just languish and be relegated to nothing more than a glorified online brochure of your company, as opposed to an income generating success. Along with other schemes and methods for promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization, Internet Viral Marketing could easily push you ahead in the ratings game.

The beauty of Internet Viral Marketing, and why it is so successful, is that it is subtle in its delivery of who actually created it. It really is simply a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company – you get them to do the work for you while passing your advertisement along.

All it takes is a great idea, an addictive game, ebook, text message, or a funny story – there are many ideas still out there, maybe you have a few yourself already. All you have to do is create a buzz – many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossip to make them more popular.

Many big companies have tried Internet Viral Marketing and had success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it worked wonders for them. But not all Internet Viral Marketing needs to be on a big budget like Microsoft’s.

In August 2008 the fashion designer Adam Lippes used this simple yet highly effective piece of viral marketing incorporating offline and online seduction and intrigue: Clear inflatable beach balls were places in NYC cabs bearing the message “How far would you go for true love?” printed on them. An attached card (for easy portability) read www.iwentthisfar.com with the password ‘fortruelove’. The promotion turned out to be a t-shirt and the chance for a $1,000 prize.

In summary then: Internet Viral Marketing is when companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a fun flash game, funny video, or an amusing or compelling story, which a recipient may pass on to another person. The media contains the company brand, or logo, or the product’s description, or any other content to help promote the company, or its product.

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Traffic Building Resolutions for the New Year and Beyond

With a new year we become all encompassed in new year’s resolutions and finding new ways to do things that maybe didn’t work so well for us before. But let’s use this time to go over some proven traffic building techniques that don’t cost anything, are easy to implement, and will bring more traffic to your website soon. Just make the scheduling of these techniques a resolution and let me know how they worked for you.

Open your lines of communication with the following:

Forums and Social Networking Community Sites.
Take advantage of online forums and online social networks and communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about your field. With that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your field of expertise and knowledge.

Send out Newsletters.
You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who sign up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site, thus increasing your traffic.

Link With Others.
Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don’t have to spend a cent, all you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts of both sites will benefit both sites. Every visitor that goes to your partnered site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write Good Quality Content For Other Websites.
Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people can provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of articles. When people have interest in your articles there is a good chance they’ll visit your website. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write Good Quality Web copy for Your Own Site.
Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your own but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.

Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without paying for it

It’s very gratifying to find people coming to your website without having spent a lot of time to get them there. Of course work takes time, and there is a cost to your time, but if you are on a limited budget then these tips are especially geared toward you because these techniques won’t need you to open your wallet.

All of these methods will drive more traffic to your site for free, so get your planner out and schedule time in your day to putting these tips into action and watch your web stats improve.

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Above the Fold? Re-Thinking Your Web Copy

Sometimes when I have a design job I am told, “We want all our text ‘above the fold.’” When asked why, often the answer is because somebody in the company had mentioned that they heard it was a good idea not to have any web content below the fold.

I can see the logic – text above the fold can be read without having to scroll, which makes it more likely to be read in those precious few moments a visitor’s eyes first meet your site, but where exactly is the fold?

On my desktop computer, with a regular 19 inch monitor, my browser window has several tool bars open and I still have several inches of screen space. Switch over to my laptop, with a 15.4 inch widescreen monitor, and nary a tool bar, and the fold hits almost immediately – there is barely depth enough for a header, a photo and a couple of paragraphs.

I like to keep the good stuff above the fold – but not all of it – because web copy is important and its importance doesn’t drop off because it is below a very hard to define area.

The word count on your web page needs to be high enough to impart information not only to your readers, but also search engine robots so they can ascertain how relevant your content is for their search queries.

You might think it a waste of time to write a lot on a web page because people don’t read the same way on the web as they do with print; but the fact is that with all things being equal, long copy will outperform short copy each and every time.

Now don’t get confused with long copy and boring copy. You don’t want boring copy – you want quality copy.

Very few people will read your entire web page’s content. They either have to be researching something, or they have plenty of time on their hands! Whichever is true, the longer your web page [when trying to get a sale] the much more effective it is than a short one.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are your prospect. What might seem long to you, especially if you wrote it and edited it several times, may not seem that way your readers. You need time to build their trust through examples, testimonials and money back guarantees, for example. You can’t just expect to show up online and seal the deal within a few hundred words.

Now there have been many studies and split tests conducted on long copy versus short copy. The far and away winner is always long copy. But remember that’s targeted relevant long copy.

So, what kind of long copy are we talking about? Well here are some great online examples:

Google Ambush
The Magic of Making Up
Earth For Energy

Research on long copy has shown that readership typically drops off dramatically at around 300 words, which on this post was at the ‘Very few people will read your entire web page’s content’ part in paragraph eight, but interestingly it does not drop off again until around 3,000 words – and I am not going to write that much here, I promise, as I’d need to come up with another 2,500!

So let’s end with a brief word on your target readership, since that’s who you are lasering in on. Know who your true audience is. It is vital. Writing long copy and promoting something to an audience that has little or no interest in it is pointless – it’s a time and money loser for you.

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