WebMastersLoom

Print ads seem to have already used every nooks and turns in the advertising style to make people stop and stare and get the message. Every imaginable subject lines had been used in the banners, catalogs, postcards and even in business cards. One of the more common and overused tactics are misleading and otherwise untrue promises with the intention of leading the readers into something that they will not be too happy about in the end. Out of naivety or ignorance, people are really falling into the “traps” that the advertisers have laid out for them. This is where printing makes works the most.

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In the physical world you can easily sell a product by your interacting behavior and your marketing tactics. But in the e-world where there is no face to face interaction and all marketing is totally a game of your site’s interaction with your visitor which may desperate them to turn into your healthy customers. While designing your site you must know who your target people are and what are their needs and will your website turns to be beneficial for them. A website’s form and content is what will determine if a visitor will stay just a visitor or turn into your next customer. Today we will discuss how to accomplish the later.

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1. Don’t load your web site with a lot of high tech clutter. Your visitors may miss your whole sales message.
2. Don’t use unnecessary words or phrases on your site. You only have so much time to get your visitor’s attention and interest; make ever word count.
3. Don’t make the mistake that everyone will totally understand your web site message. Use descriptive words and examples to get your point across.
4. Don’t write your strongest point or benefit only once. You should repeat it at least 3 times because some people may miss it.
5. Don’t push all your words together on your web site. People like to skim; use plenty of headings and sub headings.
6. Don’t use site content your target audience isn’t interested in. If people are coming to your site to find info about fishing don’t include soccer content.
7. Don’t use 50 different content formats all over your web site. Use the same fonts, text sizes, text colors, etc.
8. Don’t use words your web site visitors might not understand. People are not going to stop and look in a dictionary, they will just go to another site.
9. Don’t let selling words and phrases go unnoticed. Highlight important words and phrases with color, bolding, italics, underlining, etc.
10. Don’t forget to use words that create emotion. All people have emotions, people will have more interest when they are emotionally attached.

As many webmasters and regular web-surfers would know, an online forum community is a great place to meet large groups of people online. Forums provide a means through which visitors to a website can interact with one another and exchange ideas or reviews of products or just talk about anything under the sun. Acute marketers and webmasters will already know that these communities are often excellent places for free advertising.

Word-of-mouth advertising can be used to refer to advertising by which people pass on the marketing message through communication between people. A forum community provides just the setting for word-of-mouth advertising to spread due to its nature of discussion and community structure. Any one member who joins the community is entitled to post his/her thoughts by creating new forum threads or to reply to others or counter someone else’s arguments. Every post that is made is an opportunity to spread some word-of-mouth advertising. This is often done through forum profiles and signatures. A signature is a small description of the member. Most forum communities have no qualms about members posting some self-advertising messages in their signatures, as long as the advert is not too obtrusive. Therefore, forum members can make use of their signatures to post links to their websites or links to products that they are selling. By participating actively in forum communities, one can easily reach a large audience. Because everyone on the forum who participates in the discussion is reading the posts of all members in the discussion as well as signatures, an attractive link will arouse their interests and incite them to click on the link to go to your advertised site. Imagine the impact that this would have in a forum community with thousands of members and your signature appearing in thousands of posts. The boundaries in this form of word-of-mouth advertising is limitless as it largely depends on how much you post and participate in the discussions. The more you participate engagingly, the more times your links appear and the more chances people get to see and interest them to view your site.

Of course, care must be taken to ensure that you are following the proper etiquette as specified by the forum community and that you do not spam the forums. Spamming happens when someone joins in every discussion and posts useless comments that are not constructive. Spammers are often penalized by being banned from the forum for spamming their links in the forum.

If you don’t want people to loose interest in your website quickly then you will have to spend some time focusing on your content. Unless you offer a service(such as web design or webhosting ect…) your audience will demand that there be new content updated every day for them or they will stop returning to your website. The truth is that to offer your visitors an abundance of great material is actually very easy and best yet it is free. Your site will double in value and usability when you start updating your content each day. Trust me when I say “your visitors will thank you for it”.

By searching online you can easily find a wide range of websites that offer free information you can include on your website. The best yet is that the topics range from A-Z, so you never have to worry about not being able to find content for your website. Another great resource that you can find out there are free ecourses as well as free ebooks. The great thing is that you can use these free ecourses/ebooks(make sure to email each site to gain permission just to be safe) as an incentive to visitors to use your website. This will not only increase your websites content base but will give a real value to your website as it will become a known source of useful information.

As you add free content to your website keep in mind who will view it and who will use it. Make sure to cover a broad range of subjects but also direct the content according to what your website is about. Try to make your content as meaningful as you can and you will have visitors coming back each day to view what is new on your website. Best yet they will start to tell their friends and their friends will tell their friends ect…. Before you know it, by adding free content sections to your site you will have more and more people visiting your website. It is simple as that. We have all done it before where we’ve found a useful website and emailed the link to our friend. Why did we email the link you might ask? We’ve emailed the link because we found the content on the website to be useful/worth while. You can have people doing the same with your website.

Just remember to watch the content you put on your site and to make sure it is of use to your visitors. Your content will truly determined if your visitors are being entertained/interested and if they will come back for more.

Forums are an excellent addition to a website to attract visitors to interact with the site and to return to the website freqeuently. While there are many other website additions that can retain visitors and have them coming back for more, forums are perhaps the most engaging for visitors to your website and offer the most benefits to both the website’s owner and the visitor.

Unfortunately, having a forum addition to a website does not guarantee its success and usefulness in gathering the hypothesized attention and attractiveness. A new forum with no content, no members or no active discussion is like an empty hall. Anyone who steps into such an empty room would most definitely get the creeps and run away as fast as they can. Similarly, your forum can quickly lose its purported usefulness if it is empty and bare.

Starting and building an active forum on your website is no mean feat. It requires a lot of time, patience, and hard-work. Why is that so? Well, there are several important factors that scares away visitors and you have to remove these factors in order to convince visitors to stay, read, and then post and join in the discussions. If there are no discussions in the first place, no one would be around to discuss! It is exactly a chicken and egg question that you have to answer. There are several methods to overcome these issues and to get content/discussions started on your forum.

1. Write good content and request feedback

Having good content draws visitors to read and if they have questions or concerns, they can always find a link to discuss it on your forum. Make sure you provide them a link and the outlet to voice out on your forums. The hard part is in writing quality content on your site.

2. Offer free incentives

Some forums offer active members special advertising opportunities such as banners or text links on the website and in the forums. Members are then encouraged to start threads and post and participate in order to obtain free advertising. Other than free advertising, you might want to consider giving away a free copy of your product to the top poster or hold a lucky draw for active posters. Nothing beats promotion than free products and competition. On my webmaster community (www.buildtolearn.com), I provide free cpanel web hosting for members who have accumulated 50 posts. This incentive has been in use for the past 2 years and our community now has close to 10,000 members!

3. Exchange posts with other forums

There are many other new forums started on the net everyday and you could work together with other websites to generate content on your forums. It is a ‘I’ll post in yours and you post in mine’ exchange where both webmasters participate in each others forums in order to get the ball rolling in the forums. This exchange makes it more interesting for both parties.

4. Pay for posts

If you have deep pockets or have a budget from your website, you can always get people to come to your forum and start discussions. Quality checks are in order to ensure that your ‘free-lance posters’ are not simply submitting 3 word posts or copying posts from other forums.

5. Talk to yourself

If all else fails, due to low budget or having nothing else to offer, you can create ‘virtual copies’ of yourself and start discussions with yourself. To new visitors to your forum, they see an active community and discussions, which helps them overcome the inertia. Once you have a handful of active members talking, you can stop talking to yourself and let your community grow itself!

The above are just some tips that I have gathered from participating in forums and from building forum communities on the net for the past 2 years. The tough part in setting up a forum is in the initial stage. Once you have overcome that hurdle, it gets easier for the forum to grow and mature.

If you are anything like me, your website is a reflection of yourself. It contains your thoughts and communications, exposed to the entire world at all times. Look at virtually any non-commercial web site and you will get a glimpse at the person behind the monitor.

I look at web sites all day long, and I am constantly amazed by the things that people reveal about themselves without saying anything. Is the website well organized or just a jumble of images and text thrown up at a moments notice? Is the site alive with color or just dull and lifeless black and white? Is the site exploding at the seams with content or is it just a collection of ads, banners or links?

All of these and many other clues tell me more about the webmaster than any of those 50 question psychological quizzes.

One clue that tells me more than anything else is whether or not the site is kept up-to-date. Sometimes I will see a beautiful web page - a work of art that comes from the heart and soul of a human being. I fall in love with the page and want to learn more, then click on a link and bam, page not found. I shrug, as every webmaster has a bad link now and then. Click on another, and another, and more than half of the links are dead. I sigh, then move on.

Or I’m reading wonderful stories about a person’s life experiences and find, well, these are all years out of date. A little looking around the site and I find that nothing has been updated since 1997. I always feel a little sad when I see this - it’s as if something inside the webmaster died. I wonder, did she grow tired of it all? Get married and lose interest? Perhaps even died? Who knows, there is no clue on the site at all. It’s just … abandoned.

Another clue to a neglected site - the person created a webring and got several hundred people to join. The ring is obviously a creation of love as it’s not easy to get so many sites to join up. The ring graphics are wonderful, the join page is beautifully written, and I am actually very impressed. I start to surf the ring and quickly find that over half the sites no longer exist. Another dozen have removed the ring code. How sad. It’s one thing to lose interest in a webring … but to just abandon it? I wonder what changed in a person’s life caused this work of love and community to just be discarded so easily.

Or it could be that a person and simply doesn’t update their site very often. There is a wonderful comic book site which is simply beautiful, yet sometimes months go by without a single update! It’s so frustrating as I really am intrigued and want to come back to visit this guy’s private world. I haven’t checked in a long time - why bother, since the site is updated so infrequently?

My feeling is simple. Create the best website that you can with the knowledge that you have. You will never be finished, as there will always be more to say and show. You are a living, breathing human and you are learning more every day. Thus, there should always be something of value that you can add to your web site.Presumably, you’ve created your web site to communicate something to the rest of the world. It could be that you want to write up your life story, explain about the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, or simply compile a list of the best blonde jokes. It’s possible that you even want to make a few dollars now and then by selling a nice product. Why settle for just getting someone to read what you’ve got to say and move on? Why not continually update your message so that your readers come back time after time to find out what new and wonderful things you’ve posted this week.

Think you’ve said everything that can be said about your subject? There are many options to this method of continual updates. You could add a message board to start virtual conversations with your visitors. Or perhaps you could add a weekly column (and associated ezine) to get people to come back. Even if you’ve said everything there is to say, perhaps you can add pictures, sound and videos or change the layout or presentation.

Be sure and let people know what’s new by including a “What’s New” section right on your front page. This serves to your visitors right to the new content immediately. It also lets them know that you are updating the site all of the time, which means they will want to come back again and again just to see what you have written or changed.

A periodic ezine is another way to stay in contact with your readers, letting them know what’s going on at your special website. Another great way to get people to come back is to become active in newsgroups or email discussion lists (such as egroups and topica). By posting useful information at these places you will get people wanting to come to your site to find out what else you’ve got to say.

Which, of course, leads back to the original premise of this article. If you want people to come back to your site, you had better be keeping it up-to-date, accurate and adding new content all of the time. Otherwise, your readers will grow tired and move on to greener pastures.

And that’s the saddest thing of all … an abandoned creation of love and passion.

More and more businesses are recognizing the importance of content management when it comes to their websites. Website content is more important than ever before, and as the Internet matures and changes, it is likely be become even more important. Many smart companies are beginning to make their website content the centerpiece of their Internet presence.

Content management means many things to different people, but it is generally understood to be the concept of separating the design and layout of a website from the actual content contained on that website. This allows a company’s web developer to do his job more efficiently and not get bogged down with endless requests for changes, additions and deletions to the content of the web page. More importantly, it allows employees who are not web developers to update the company’s web page.

When seeing the changes that have occurred to content management over the last couple of years, it is helpful to take a step back. The commercial internet is only about 10 years old. What began as a way for government researchers to communicate their findings with their peers has morphed into the giant commercial enterprise that is today’s Internet. With this explosive growth over the period of just a decade or so, it is no wonder that content management has changed and grown as well.

It may take another 20 years or more until the internet is fully mature, and many more changes are likely to be in store. Seeing those changes coming can put your business on the cutting edge and position you for success.

Putting content ahead of technology is the centerpiece of the content management concept. When designing and updating their websites, smart companies will put the reader first. Try to put yourself in the place of a visitor to your website.

• When a visitor first sees your website, what is their first impression?
• Do they see an easy to use interface?
• Is everything laid out clearly?
• Is it easy to find what you want?

Take an objective look at your company website and answer these questions honestly. If you find your website lacking, you can use content management techniques to make your website more intuitive and user friendly.

More and more companies are hiring professional writers and editors as part of their overall content management strategy. This is a strategy that I believe will pay big dividends as the internet further matures. The internet is already the number one source of information for many people, and as more and more people get comfortable with using the internet, those numbers are likely to grow. The companies that can provide the most useful web content, to the greatest number of people, are the ones that will thrive in the 21st century.

By now most major corporations and many smaller firms already have functioning websites on the Internet. This means that the demand for professionals to design and upload websites is likely to shrink in the future. On the other hand, the need for professionals who can update web content and make it useful to customers is likely to grow. The future of content management has never looked brighter.

I’ve read that a good web site is all about content, content, and oh yes content. Now if you’ve managed to design your site so that you can fill it with great content, what next, how do you know what good content is?

This may be one of those things that you know it when you see it kind of thing but I think that there are a few basic points to make in regards to having good content on your site. Considering how important content is we should all really focus on adding good content to our sites.

1. Relevant. Your content must be relevant to your site. Why would you have articles or information that has nothing to do with whatever it is that you’re selling. You would think that this would be obvious but I’ve seen web sites that just have gobs of information that really doesn’t match their site.

2. Accurate. The information that you give must be accurate. Part of the reason that you’re adding content to your site is to add to your reputation as a knowledgeable person in your field so if your information isn’t accurate then you don’t look like you know what you’re doing.

3. Free. Now if you make your living by selling information then not all of your content should be free but some of it should. How are people going to know that you know what you’re doing if they can’t read or see any of your work. I sell stock photography and I offer all of my short informational articles for free, not only because I enjoy sharing my knowledge and experience but it allows my customers to see that I know what I’m doing.

One last point but I’m not giving it as much importance as the first three, it would be ideal if all of your content was your own. Now there are exceptions to this, if you can’t write well then there is no point to writing poor articles with good information. The good information will be lost in the lack of writing ability. So it’s okay to use some of the free content, furnished by others, on your site. (Don’t forget to give them credit for their work though.) If you can create your own content I think that it the best case scenario for adding good content to your site.

If you have some specific questions please visit my Photography and Design Forum at: http://kellypaalphotography.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/index.php and post your question there.

A glossy magazine placed an advertisement on its Web site, targeting the publication’s upscale subscribers. The expensive ad emphasized how perfect the tiniest detail would be for guests who stayed at a certain, very fancy hotel.

There was only one small problem in the ad, but it was big enough to undermine the credibility of the hotel’s claim to perfection. The headline blared, When Everything Has to Just Right.

Uh-oh. What happened to the “Be” before the “Just Right”?

You may be losing business or hurting your professional reputation by sending out unedited Web site copy. Text that is riddled with errors will distract present or potential clients. The reader will think, do I really want to buy a product or service from someone whose copy is sloppy?

One way to ensure that your Web site message will be as perfect as possible is to invest in the services of a professional copyeditor/proofreader. In the twinkling of a well-trained eye, a topnotch editor can clean up your Web site copy so it sparkles in the sunlight.

Misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, your’s/yours, two/to, and other hair-raising/hare-raising errors will melt away. Skilled editors say that mistakes “leap off the page” at them. And potential clients will leap off the couch to e-mail or call you because of your magnetic Web site copy.

Horror Stories about Unedited Copy

When Web content is launched into the stratosphere raw and unedited, unfortunate occurrences happen:

• A national eNewsletter goes out with the headline “For Pubic School Educators” (the “l” is often left out of that pesky word Public)

• “And as we stand on the toes of those who have gone before us…” appears in a scholarly piece (should be “stand on the shoulders”)

• A financial consultant offers a complimentary phone call (which would only have favorable news the word here would be complementary)

• $25,000. instead of $250,000. in a document might cause a legal nightmare

• The non-word its’ (an apostrophe never follows its) works its way into an otherwise excellent story

• “We’d like to pedal your ideas” is sent worldwide in a magazine ad, and not just to bicycle owners (peddle is the operative word here)

How Working with an Editor Helps Your Business

Maybe you think that copyediting and proofreading are luxury items in your publications budget. Or that nobody will notice if a few mistakes slip through in your Web site copy. But truthfully, copyediting is a necessity and not a luxury, because people will notice mistakes in your copy.

Here are more ways in which a professional copyeditor can benefit your business, in addition to making suggestions about text additions, deletions, and clarifications:

• An editor writes “zingier” headlines – so potential customers will be drawn into your Web site by the zingine

• An editor breaks up dense paragraphs – so potential customers will actually read your copy because it is easy to read

• An editor introduces correct punctuation and good grammar – so potential customers will be convinced that your product or service is high quality, since the copy that advertises it is high quality

• An editor has ideas about when to italicize or boldface words or phrases – so potential customers will be interested in reading the text

Web site text is different from magazine articles and book chapters. The pages are smaller, the paragraphs are shorter, graphics or photographs often accompany the text. Web site “visitors” are assumed to have a shorter attention span than book or magazine readers.

This means that a reader spends just a few minutes reading the text at your Web site. It makes sense that you will want to present your company or services in as professional a light as possible.

How to Hire a Copyeditor

Copyeditors can be found through professional organizations such as Bay Area Editors’ Forum, Bookbuilders West, consulting and marketing organizations, directories of editorial professionals, ads in newspapers and magazines, and by looking up copyeditors on search engines.

Employing a good copyeditor to shape up your Web site text will ensure that your message is conveyed beautifully – and that’s not just editorial spin!