It’s a fine line on a website: writing copy that sells without coming across as too pushy.
You want your customers to buy from you.
Equally, you don’t want them to simply read your web pages and not buy from you.
Zig Ziglar famously said “Timid salesmen have skinny kids.”
So, what can you do to walk this tightrope and still get sales?
Copywriting can be a daunting task. If you’re not careful, it can bring on a severe case of writer’s block and you either procrastinate on it forever or do a rush job and then beat yourself up for that.
Of course, you could hire in a professional copywriter. But the best ones have high fees, maybe usage royalties on top of those fees and, even then, there’s no guarantee of success.
The good news is that you can create copy yourself which, whilst not necessarily world class, is very effective and works for most purposes.
You also need to remember that copywriting isn’t just sales letters – it’s blog posts like this one, emails, Tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn messages, forum posts and anywhere else you appear “in writing”.
Guest blogging is one of the things people are supposed to do. The logic is that by creating guest blog posts for other people, you gain credibility and also traffic to your own site.
There are various different options available: sites like Blogger LinkUp offer a free service – a bit like a dating service although they wouldn’t call it that – to help match up people who’d like to guest post and people who are in need of posts.
It’s probably fair to say that most people involved in internet marketing are self employed. Which is a good place to be – you’re your own boss – but can mean that you don’t have as many reasons to keep on track as you would if you had a “real” job.
Some people make good bosses. Others make lousy ones. And often we find it difficult to manage ourselves – a lot of people go to one extreme or the other. Either beating themselves up if they get even the smallest detail wrong or adopting a laissez faire attitude where it’s OK to always procrastinate and put things off until a permanently future tomorrow.
Link building has been part of the internet since its birth. But is it still important or has it had its day?
As ever, there’s no easy answer to this question.
Links are definitely still important – without them, we wouldn’t find our way around the web and the search engines wouldn’t find new content.
I recently got asked that question and it’s a tough one to answer for a lot of reasons – I’ll do my best to explain what I’d suggest, why the question makes sense but also why it doesn’t make sense.
Which is probably clear as mud at the moment so let’s try to clarify things!
Internet marketing isn’t complicated but it does require time and persistence. And, truth be told, it probably requires more persistence than time.
Studies vary but it’s generally thought that even the most productive people don’t spend more than a handful of hours a day working productively. The rest is taken up with meetings, phone calls, emails, texts and all sorts of other distractions.
So what can you do in internet marketing in an hour a day?
WordPress offer you the option of setting up a website on your own hosting or using their hosting. For a variety of reasons (partly because I’m a bit of a control freak in that respect), I suggest that you use your own domain name on your own hosting. It leaves you a lot less open to the whims of an outside organisation and means that you’re in charge of your own destiny with regard to your website.
Video marketing has to be done properly if you’re to get the maximum effect. YouTube has hours and hours worth of videos uploaded every minute of the day and you need to make sure that your videos stand the maximum chance of standing out from the crowds and getting watched.
You’ve probably read stories about overnight success in internet marketing. But are they just that? Stories? Or is it really possible to make money fast?
As always, the answer isn’t exactly straightforward.
If you can start something that grabs people’s attention then it’s possible to make money faster than you ever dreamed possible – Alex Tew did it in 2005 with the million dollar home page and the “overnight” part of that took a couple of months for it to start making reasonable money.