Home Based Business

Five Objectives Of Website Copy

 

Let's look at five things you can accomplish with text.

1.       Establish your points of difference.

Why would a customer choose to buy from you rather than from one of the many other businesses just like yours? If you shudder at the idea that any business could be "just like yours", you've found something important to communicate on your site. You’ve discovered a reason to be different.

You don't need to bomb your competition - this isn't necessary, or in most cases, even advisable. Rather, tell visitors about what makes your approach to the business unique. If you specialize in a certain area or approach, tell them how - and why. Establishing your points of difference helps your visitors become more informed buyers of the services or products you offer.

2.       Satisfy their need to know.

Studies have shown that searchers often use the web to do basic research first, only later going back to convert on the site or look up your business. To the extent that you anticipate and answer research questions, you give your visitors exactly what they are looking for and begin to earn their trust and loyalty.

To create this content, ask yourself, "What would I need to know if I were in the market for this product or service"? Then, think of different ways to present the information. To help your visitors see how your service could benefit them, consider adding one or more case studies or testimonials to your site, each of which describes how a customer was able to solve a problem and overcome challenges with the help of your service or product. You might also add a "Frequently Asked Questions" page. Such an FAQ page can be a powerful marketing tool that raises the questions that you think customers ought to ask.

Sometimes, just by raising an issue and providing information, you will be able to establish a point of difference. As visitors research other sites, they may look for more information on issues, benefits, and features that that they learned about on your site. If a competitor's site doesn't adequately address something that they have become interested in, you will have gained a little bit of an edge.

 

3.       Teach.

You may not consider yourself an expert in your field, but you probably know a great deal more than you give yourself credit for. Chances are that visitors will appreciate any advice you care to give. Writing articles related to your business and publishing them on your site can put you in the enviable situation of being perceived as an authority.

Consider asking visitors for their email address in return for access to your articles. You'll build a targeted contact list that allows you to create an ongoing relationship with qualified prospects, send special offers, and continue to provide useful information.

4.       Increase your visibility.

To a search engine, the best sites consist of many HTML files, each one text rich. If one of your articles mentions a topic for which you have more information, embed links to the extra information like this: "Learn about painting with oil-based paint." Then, on the page with the extra information, make sure that you have a <title> tag with the appropriate title, in this case, "Painting with Oil-based Paint". This helps search engines to index your content, which in turn can help give you some visibility.

Even more important, you'll find that other sites like to link to pages with useful information. Having lots of sites pointing to your articles on art techniques will help artists find your online art store and can improve your natural (unpaid) search engine rankings.

5.       Learn what is interesting to your visitors.

One of the great things about adding a lot of text-based information to your site is that you can find out which topics and issues are most interesting to your visitors. In Google Analytics, and Google’s Website Optimizer (both free), the Top Content report (in the Content section) shows you how many visits to your site resulted in pageviews of each page and the average amount of time that visitors spent on the page.

The Content by Title report shows the same information, but aggregated by page title. So, if you have an article with several pages of content, and each page has the same <title> tag, the pie chart view will show the percentage of total visits and total pageviews that relate to the article.

You can also look at the Site Overlay (in the Content section) for any page to see which links visitors click on the most. This gives you an idea of what's most interesting to visitors, given the fixed set of choices on any particular page.

Try to improve your content mix using what you learn from these reports. By keeping an eye on what the (Google) analytics are telling you, you'll learn more about your visitors and be able to provide just the information they are looking for.

Although this is great, usable information, it does you no good unless you use it and constantly stay ahead of the curve in your business.

As a "student" of the business, I've spent a lot of time researching the best ones in it and I've narrowed down the best they have to offer. You can get access to them at: www.OneSoundIdea.com

Thanks for reading and have a great day.