Content Marketing - Express Writers

50 Shades of Content

January 1, 2021March 10, 2015 by Adam Oakley

As you well know, 50 Shades of Grey was recently released in theaters amid a bunch of excitement and scandal. It made $93 million in just four days, and its sequels have already been approved. Whether you’re a fan of this (I admit, risqué) story or not, you have to admit it does have some amazing content marketing power. Taking some inspiration from the famous book title that has now premiered in worldwide theaters, I’m taking an original, descriptive look at 50 Shades of Content. Do you actually know just how many shades content has? From bold to macabre to natural, there are so many shades out there among the millions of web pages that exist. Use these content shades to help you identify and create awesome blogs, product descriptions, and more. A Descriptive List: 50 Shades of Content Authentic content. When writing content, you always want to make sure it is authentic. This will help make your content powerful, and help engage your reader base. Just write from your heart and what you know, and you will be creating excellent, authentic content. All your content should have a shade of authenticity. Exceptions could be sales targeted/landing pages, where you are trying to sell rather than simply offer authentic advice or wording. Bold content. Bold content is a great way to catch people’s attention. You can be bold by writing opinion pieces on things within your industry or the latest trends. This is a good content type for emails, home pages, and other busy, targeted areas of text. Creative content. When you write your content, you need to make sure you are being creative. A great way to gain creative inspiration is to write on the latest trends. For example, I took the opportunity to use 50 Shades of Grey as inspiration for a post that helps you learn about the different aspects of content. Use whatever you want and you can have some incredible, creative content. Blogs are a great outlet for content creativity. Direct content. If you are telling your readers something important, you always need to make sure you are being as direct as possible. This will help show people that confident, know what you’re talking about, and also help convert them from simple readers to clients. Email content is one of the best “direct” content shade examples. Engaging content. Engaging content is something that everyone needs. It helps to get your readers and clients involved, which really helps your business be successful. All your content should have a shade of engaging. Fun content. You want to provide your readers with something of value, but you don’t always have to be super professional. When you write your content, you should always make sure you include something fun to add more life to your blogs. This could be something trendy, like how many businesses brought up “The Dress” on their social media sites. Social media should always have a shade of fun to avoid being boring. Good content. This is a given when it comes to content – it always needs to be good, or what we refer to as high-quality. Focus on crafting great content pieces all the time. It might seem like it takes too much time to focus on good content, but when you do, you get some great results. Let’s be honest: all your content should be this shade. Horrible content. Now, this is a shade you absolutely want to avoid. Horrible content is a surefire way to make sure your content fails, losing you many clients and revenue. You need to stay away from horrible content at whatever cost. You don’t want to face the terrible consequences of it. Unfortunately, a lot of it exists on the web. NO content of yours should be this shade. Inquiring content. This is great when it comes to creating engaging content, especially for social media. Ask your clients and readers questions, and have them provide their answers. You can give silly polls or ask serious questions that can help you tweak your content to be more powerful for your readers. Emails and blogs are good outlets for this content shade. Joyful content. When you write your content, you should always make sure you have a happy tone to it. It doesn’t always have to be puppy and rainbows, but make things more upbeat for your readers. We get enough negativity with the latest news reports, so give your readers some great, positive content. It can be pretty powerful being one of the bright spots on the Internet. Seasonal blogs and emails are a good way to present this shade. Knowledgeable Content. You can write content on almost anything, especially with the Internet at your fingertips. However, this can sometimes lead to you writing content that isn’t very knowledgeable. When you write your content, make sure it is on a topic you know or one that you have done a lot of research on. Lackluster Content. This is yet another form of content you want to avoid. Lackluster content is boring, and many times, unreadable. Make sure you craft fun, engaging content all the time to get the best results from it. Macabre Content. Now, this could be good or bad, depending on your macabre sense of humor, and your industry. You can write macabre content, just always make sure to stay tasteful, and keep it on the lighter end of macabre humor (Tim Burton is a good example). Natural Content. Natural content is a great way to rank on the SERP and also helps keep people on your site, reading. You can write natural content by not focusing on keywords and writing about something you have a passion for. Original Content. Your content not only needs to be knowledgeable, natural, and good, it also needs to be original. Write your own content, on your own ideas and you will easily have great, original content. Of course, you can always gain inspiration from others, just always make sure … Read more

A Guide To Guest Blogging: A Big Boost For Your Business

December 31, 2020March 5, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic, generate leads, and build brand awareness. From a business perspective, well-chosen guest blogging opportunities can result in a massive amount of positive impact on a site. Guest blogging gets you noticed by the people who need to notice you. As a brand, guest blogging opportunities allow your company to get their name out there, while at the same time allowing the readers to then experience your content production skills firsthand. When you do guest blogging right, you’ll start to realize the massive return this form of organic content can afford. 3 Ways to Determine Your Guest Content Goals Before you embark upon the twists and turns of the guest blogging road, you’re going to need to determine what you want to get out of your guest blogging opportunities. Just like every other structured marketing campaign, you need to have an end-game in mind to properly utilize your guesting posts. Ideally, as a guest blogger, you will be seeking to do one or more of the following: Position yourself as a go-to person in the industry. Guest blogging allows you to share your experience and knowledge, which helps others perceive you as an expert. Gain exposure for your brand, products, or services. This also helps to generate backlinks that help your SEO campaign immensely. Drawing an audience. When done correctly, guest blogging can help you gain new readers that can become sales for your site. For these goals to come to fruition, you need to have a unique mix of skills and execution. Just having an idea isn’t enough to get the most out of your guest posting. You need to become an expert in your field, reading every bit of information you can get your hands on. Once you’ve done that, you need to develop a real and actionable plan for gaining the attention you deserve from your guest blogging efforts. How to Figure Out What’s a Good Guest Blogging Opportunity and What Isn’t Most of the major players in the content creation field are open to the idea of having a guest blogger on their site. The tough part can sometimes be being chosen from the crowd. After all, experienced guest bloggers are more likely to get first preference than inexperienced bloggers. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get your foot in the door, though. After all – everyone starts somewhere! When you’re just starting out, you may have to settle for less prestigious guest blogging opportunities. Although these aren’t as glamorous or far-reaching as the larger blogs, they are no less important in your quest to build a name as a well-known blogger. That said, it’s well worth your time and energy to learn to differentiate good guest blogging opportunities from bad ones. Here’s how: What Good Blogging Opportunities Look Like Good guest blogging opportunities are those that give you a decent amount of coverage for your time investment. Remember, your guest blog should be as well researched (or better!) than your personal or in-house blogging efforts. For professional guest blogging situations you are going to need to pitch your topic to the owner of the blog to see if it meshes with what they’re trying to achieve. Generally, you and the host can sit down and discuss what they expect and what you can deliver. From there, you may be able to develop a working topic and title before you get writing. Keep in mind that some guest blogging options will offer less support than others, and this is largely a function of traffic. The most in-demand guest blogging platforms get thousands of submissions each month, and it’s impossible to keep up with them all manually. That said, these platforms tend to use electronic forms and a team of editors and content managers to get guest blogs up on their sites. This shouldn’t rule a guest blogging platform out for you. Instead, pay attention to things like the professionalism of the staff, the Alexa Rank of the site, and the expedience with which staffers get back to you. What Bad Guest Blogging Opportunities Look Like To put it simply: bad guest blogging opportunities are those that don’t give you a lot of coverage or that abuse your work without giving you enough in return. Beware of sites that make it excessively easy to guest blog for them, since they’re among the worst offenders. While you shouldn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to get your post featured, you should expect there to be a review and quality assurance process. If this doesn’t exist, it’s a likely bet that, not only will your guest post not count for much, but that it will quickly be lost in the sea of low-quality blogs out there. Keep this in mind: If all you have to do is sign up and post then it’s probably not a very high-quality opportunity. Avoiding these sites is important since they don’t help you attain your guest blogging goals. These are usually the sites that take anything you give to them as a blog post without an actual discussion with the owner or content manager. Again: if you don’t have to talk to a real person or team, it’s probably not a good idea to guest post for them. Guest Blogging Doesn’t Mean the End of Direct Content Production Just because you’re getting into guest blogging doesn’t mean that you can stop producing your own original content. If anything, it’s an encouragement to continue with your own direct content. When you finally start to earn customers from a guest blog, you’ll still need to show them that you can back that content up with your own work. That’s why maintaining your own blog and content creation efforts is so important throughout. Setting up an internal content production schedule helps you to balance your private posting with whatever guest opportunities arise. Guest blogging allows you to create relationships with the audience of the host blog and this can translate into growing your own … Read more

The Great Content Roundup: Week 7, Succeeding on Social Media

December 31, 2020March 4, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Thanks for joining me this week, everyone! How’s your social media doing? I know: it’s a loaded question. But it’s one that’s frequently in discussion. Should I keep or kill my Facebook page? (That’s a question I’ve asked myself, given that our Facebook page rarely to never blows up the way our Twitter does.) Should you use acronyms on social media, or not? I’ve listed some of my favorite reads lately on these very topics below. Enjoy, share the love, and feel free to leave your resources and thoughts in the comments! The Great Content Roundup Week 7: Resources For Succeeding on Social Media Neil Patel’s 11 Tactics to Get More Click-Throughs from Social Media is a great read. Use pictures on Twitter and you could see 108% more engagement, like Neil did. Interestingly, he also says that you shouldn’t post too often. For self-promotion, follow an 80/20 rule. 20% of your social content can and should be self-promotional—but only 20%, folks. Search Engine Journal, author Martin Beck, Is a G+ Breakup Coming for Photos & Hangouts? Google + could be slimming down and focusing on Hangouts and a separate way to host photos. Interesting news about this ever-changing network. Buffer’s extensive guide The Definitive List of Social Media Acronyms and Abbreviations, Defined –a must read for any serious social media marketer. There’s even a quiz to test your knowledge. From All Acroynms, 669 Social networking acronyms and abbreviations –incase you didn’t already know what BFN, or F2F, or AFAIK means on social media. BONUS Photo Credit: Comedy Network If your head’s not under a rock, you’ve heard about #TheDress this week. But you might already feel like Grumpy Cat, above. I’ll end this with a post by Danny Sullivan about #TheDress: Best Brand Tweets On The Dress: White & Gold Or Blue & Black?

Is Syndication Scary? 3 Rules to Successful Content Syndication

December 31, 2020March 1, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Crafting original, relevant, engaging content on a regular basis is only half of the job that any small business owner has to complete on time and on a budget. The other half is represented by the implementation of content marketing strategies set in place to make sure that your writing is visible amongst all the other options that search engine result pages (SERPs) normally deliver. Content syndication makes your job a whole lot easier by allowing you to gain visibility on various other platforms without actually being forced to redirect one dime towards the creation of new content pieces. Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? You may ask: what’s the catch? Should you see syndication as a somewhat scary practice that may jeopardize your relationship with Google, potentially exposing you to penalties or should you actually give this tactic a try to keep your business into the spotlight? Let’s look. Can Content Syndication Become the Most Convenient Method to Promote Your Business? In most cases, the scariest things are the ones that you are not familiar with. Simple, but true. Those who already explore the full potential of a correct content syndication strategy have nothing to fear. By mastering the rules of syndication you could profit from the widest range of benefits ensured by this strategy, including an increased exposure for your products, services or brand, more traffic to your main website, a larger segment of potential buyers and ultimately more money in your bank account. According to Search Engine Journal, through content syndication, you are basically allowing multiple online sources to feature your original content. You can offer a link, a headline or the entire article. RSS is perhaps the most popular form of (automated) content syndication; moreover, some of the most reputable sources that you visit regularly, like Business2Community for example, are huge content syndication websites. B2C and many other websites of this kind provide links and proper attribution to the source where the content piece that they feature was initially published. In this particular set of circumstances, how much can you actually depend on content syndication to boost the visibility of your content, increase brand awareness and establish meaningful partnerships that could keep you in the public eye for the longest period of time? As long as you play by the book, syndication represents a valuable tool that you can use to your best advantage to achieve your marketing goals without actually having to invest in new content pieces. 3 Guidelines to Risk-Free Content Syndication Should you turn content syndication into a major focal point in 2015? According to Business2Community, now would be the perfect time to start looking for syndication opportunities enabling you to place your web content on other people’s websites to increase brand exposure, reach a broader audience and make a name for yourself without having to put the extra time, cash and effort in content creation and distribution strategies. On the other hand, you should know that there are several appealing paid and free content syndication options, so you should feel free to choose the one that makes more sense to you from a practical and financial standpoint. No matter which path you choose to follow when it comes to syndicating content, make sure you follow these rules to stay in the safe zone. Apply a Few Preventive Measures. Undoubtedly, content syndication is seen by many novices as a practice that involves a certain degree of risk, because of its unfortunate association with duplicate content issues. This may make you wonder: how can I direct my content syndication efforts in the right direction to avoid penalties from search engines? According to Moz, there are three ways in which you could syndicate your content conveniently and absolutely risk-free. By using a rel=canonical tag. As Google points out, when it comes to handling syndicated content, your goal is to “consolidate page ranking to a preferred URL”. You can achieve this goal by indicating the preferred URL by using the rel=”canonical” tag. By adding the meta no index tag. The meta no index tag implemented by the authority website on their page tells search engines not to index this page, allowing you to prevent a potential problem revolving around duplicate content. By posting a link to the original content piece published on your blog/website. By implementing a clean link from the version of your content that they have rolled out on their website to your website, the content syndicator will let search engines know that you are the actual author of the content that is promoted across multiple platforms. Make Sure There Is a Solid Balance between Syndicated Content and Original Content on Your Website. All the simple measures of precaution listed above allow you to make the most of the benefits ensured by correct syndication while staying in Google’s good graces. On the other side of the coin, if your content marketing strategy is based solely on syndicated content, now would be the best time to rethink your strategy and focus on your own writing. Glenn Gabe from Search Engine Watch makes this recommendation, revealing that a number of companies that suffered tremendous Panda hits losing more than 60% of their overall organic traffic in the blink of an eye had a major syndication problem left unattended. The syndicated content promoted by these websites had an incorrect technical setup; in other words, the websites that got hit by Panda 4.0 did not rely on the three preventive methods listed above, which do a great job at keeping duplicate content penalties at a distance. Is syndicated content a great friend or a foe in disguise? Should you nuke all forms of syndicated content to play it safe? According to Glenn Gabe, instead of putting your syndication efforts on hold for an indefinite amount of time, you should analyze how this strategy is currently being handled, attribution-wise.While building your entire communication with your audience around content “borrowed” from other sources is definitely not … Read more

What Sets Express Writers Apart From Other Content Agencies?

January 1, 2021February 27, 2015 by Adam Oakley

When clients are looking to find a perfect copywriting agency, they will always ask what sets our agency, Express Writers, apart from other content agencies. This is a valid question, and I wanted to take a moment to answer it. I will show you just how we can help your business’s online presence, amp up views, and give you the chance to boost your overall revenue. Let’s take a look at just why Express Writers is tops and what sets us apart from other agencies in our field! Why Should You Choose Express Writers? At Express Writers, we like to think of ourselves as the “content company with high standards.” One of our favorite mottos is “quality content, all the time”. We take content seriously. So seriously, in fact, on average we look at 200 writing candidates a month and hire 10-20 every month. Our staff is comprised of the most passionate industry persons on the planet, who will sometimes work more than 60 hours in one week. Our SEO Content Strategists stay up-to-date on SEO trends and can perform thorough content audits and brainstorm for our clientele content. Our social media managers can create and schedule out amazing, engaging social content. Also, we pride ourselves on diversity. Our copywriting team has every skill a writer could possess, with over 60 writers including attorneys-turned-copywriters, a Master in Philosophy, a certified coach in holistic health, and much more. We believe in natural writing for people first, search engines second. And, we look for the highest quality experts to match specific industries like technical, legal, finance, and more. While our team is mostly based in the US, we also believe talent isn’t restricted inside four corners of any section of earth: so, some of our hires include Canadian and European as well as American writers. We’re structured for success: privileged to have highly successful, experienced team members that help organize and manage our content flow. Our team has the ability to handle hundreds of pages in a month’s time, that come to you crafted by your matching writer, edited by our editors, and organized. Our Content Strategists can brainstorm your content for you, and our SM managers can author engaging memes and written posts to boost your social media to the next level. In short, you won’t find a more dedicated, passionate, and fully comprehensive writing solution. We believe in what we do, and it’s what keeps us driven and successful at it. Top 15 Reasons We AREN’T Like Other Agencies Let’s take a look at just what sets Express Writers apart and how we can help your business have the best online presence! We’re Solely Self-Managed. We don’t make you find and hook up a writer yourself: we find the best writer fit in our team and internally manage that. Our team of editors will also put all work through Copyscape to ensure it is 100% original and will edit your content before delivery. And all of that for no additional management fee. This helps us make sure you get the best quality work that you will be proud to share on your website, blog, and social media channels. This is NOT something you get with some of our major competitors including Scripted, Copify, etc. With those major competitors you have to choose your own writer, and that can get pretty complicated if you don’t know their writers. We know ours, and we find your best match. We Have A Custom Content Shop. Our online Content Shop helps you order content, send your product details, and get your content on delivery. It’s a custom developed platform all 100% by us for our clients, and extremely simple, easy and fun to use. All you have to do is sign up for free and take a look at all that we have to offer. Once you’ve created an account, you can request what you need and the project will start. Once you’ve finished and your content has been delivered, you will be able to download the files and look them over, ensuring they are exactly what you need. The Best Writers. We have some of the best writers on the planet. We know this because we go through thousands of applicants to find the top. Our quality goes beyond the average writer sourcing company or content agency. We have a big passion for what we do, and along with experience that’s our key to our success. See more about our incredible, dedicated team and why you want them to your next content project. Content Strategy. We have content strategy services that go beyond just content creation. We know that creating content is vital, but we also know that you will need more than product descriptions or blogs. Within our content strategy services, you can get a content audit to ensure all of your existing content is the best it can be, as well as content curation. Take a look at our content strategy services to see just how we can help improve your site, boosting views and even social shares. We Believe In Growth & Learning. We are continually improving. Internal training goes on behind the scenes to develop our Content Strategists further in their SEO content auditing and curation, our writers in their SEO content creation, and our staff overall. We test our team members on their knowledge of proctored online tests to ensure they have the best training and knowledge. We also update our training manuals and resource materials for our team frequently to keep everyone on top of all the latest research. Content Isn’t Limited to Just Blogs & Product Descriptions. In the marketing world, we here at Express Writers know that you need everything possible to have the biggest impact on your industry. Because of that, we make sure to cover more content fields outside of the standard blogs or landing pages. You can get social media content from our social media management team including written social media … Read more

The Great Content Roundup: Week 6, Why Today Is the Best Content Era

December 31, 2020February 24, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Howdy, folks! This week, I wanted to talk about something I’ve seen everywhere online recently, either in tangible topics or in a thought behind the topic. It’s the fact that “NOW is the best time to jump on the bandwagon of content.” And I don’t really like to call it a bandwagon. It’s more like a strong, sure era than just a passing thing. Make that word “era” decade, or century. Literally—content isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. Why Today is The Best Content Era (No Excuses For You To NOT Create!) Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute recently talked on this very topic: This Week in Content Marketing: Why the New Golden Age of Marketing Is Now, read full blog on CMI. Besides the host (Robert Rose) being quite hilarious (including discussing “inner goddess”, the “Christian Grey of marketing” and more), this is an overall great listen. Agency Says Content Is Their Biggest Opportunity: In the CMI blog was also a mention to another great resource, an AdAge post: Emphasis on Content Marketing Revives Agency SEO Efforts and Revenues. The agency showcased, Profero, said that “content is the biggest opportunity for us.” How Agencies Can Survive in a Content-Driven World by Joe Lazauskas on Contently. This is an interview blog with Steve Rubel with a lot of good insights on how content marketing is at the top of the curve today, and how to do content if you’re in a tight niche, where it’s hard to think of unique things. Finance and technology are mentioned as intriguing industries where it’s easy to spark interest. How To Dominate Content Marketing in 2015 by Neil Patel via Forbes: his #1 first tip is guest blogging. And we absolutely agree. Then, it’s all about user centric content, instead of focusing on SEO; and more good tips follow. A must read. And, to make sure your content is the best as you take on this era of content, take a look at this great post: How to Do a Content Audit (& Why It’s Worth It) by Heather Lloyd-Martin. If you’re not sure about a content audit, what it is or how and why to do it, you need to read this post. It’s a great, clearly written piece about the necessity of content auditing.

The Great Content Roundup: Week 5, Topic Making Your Content Viral

December 31, 2020February 17, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Viral content. It turns heads. It stops us in our tracks. We HAVE to look. We have to read (at least a little of it). What makes content viral, and how do you get a piece of the game so you can experience the results of heavily trafficked, popular content? I have some awesome resources for you this week. Let’s take a look! Viral Content: Resources From The Great Content Roundup! 10 Quick Tips for Going Viral from Problogger. Useful piece. “You can’t go viral if you say the same as everything else.” Getting your basics right, being a trend setter and leader, writing list style posts, and using emoticons and being long are all features of viral content, as written here. The Secret to Creating Viral Content (Get Contagious) on Social Triggers. Did you know positive oriented content is more of a candidate to go viral than negative voice content? Or, practical and useful content is almost always a viral candidate winner? This piece gives some very useful tips that will help you cover all your basics when creating content to go viral. Plus, there are 7 emotions listed that can make your content contagious to include in your content creation. (I have this list in my editorial calendar already.) 5 Secrets for Creating Contagious Content for Social Media & Web Content by yours truly. I explore contagious content and how to craft such content. Usefulness is key; emotions will succeed; storytelling and knowledge are keys. Backlinko Blog- A “Viral Content” Case Study – “How To Generate 36,282 Readers — and 1,000 Email Subscribers — From Your Next Blog Post (Case Study)”. Now you might think this is some crazy automated product for sale by the title, if you’re anything like me, but don’t worry—it isn’t. It’s one of the best pieces of content on how to share and create viral content that I’ve read. Basically, this guy says that if you 1) find awesome content that is getting a ton of popularity and 2) make some awesome improvements to that content (write your own and make it better) 3) lastly, promote via email—well, you’ve got a winner. I’d go as far as to call it viral content creation. And he’s got a whole impressive case study showing proof of this suggestion. I can validate this entire strategy because you’re basically creating terrific quality content here by identifying what’s popular in your industry and how you can add your own voice and improve directly upon it. Rock on, Ben! View their other viral case study on a blog generating 17k plus viewers in a day. And, The Viral Content Problem (Many People Don’t Care Whether It’s True) on Gigaom. A most objective, interesting and truthful piece. This really hits the nail on the head about blogger sites like Upworthy, Huffington Post, etc. A woman with three breasts made for a viral but untrue topic – just one of the points made. Fake news got distributed, driving millions to a website. It’s called a fleeting instance of joy in this piece. And there are “viral content warehouses” like Buzz Feed. Like this post? Tell me what you’d like to see in the next Roundup! Email Julia.

7 Rules to Creating Great Blog Content For 2015

December 31, 2020February 13, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Eager to jumpstart your content marketing efforts for 2015? The quality of your blog posts and the topics that you choose will be more important than ever for the success of your website. Google started a SEO transformation several years ago and today, the process seems to be complete. Content has gained central position when it comes to optimization and promotion. Do you know, however, what it will take to make your blog successful in 2015? 1. Length and Quality Quality content is focused and lacking fluff. This doesn’t mean, however, that the pieces should be short. SerpIQ statistics show that the top 10 Google search results for particular keywords are usually about 2,000 words long. Longer posts provide more flexibility in terms of keyword placement and they also boost the audience’s engagement. The conclusion is simple to make – write at least 1,500 words per blog post. If you have detailed knowledge of the particular topic, you’ll find the task to be a relatively simple one. Longer posts increase your chances of getting quality backlinks, they are shared more often and they will probably be quoted by others, as well. Make sure that you have a unique approach and look at the topic. The more original and in-depth your blog posts are, the more valuable they’re going to be. 2. Have a Distribution Plan Good content is essential but how about coming up with the right distribution plan? Knowing how and where to share your content will boost visibility and make it much easier for you to establish that loyal audience. Content creation doesn’t end when the posts are written. Focus a bit more on marketing and selecting the right distribution channels. Social media have become the standard in the field and your pages should have been developed by now. Try distributing your content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Scoop.it, among many other possibilities. Testing each of the channels and evaluating the response will help you determine which ones deliver the best results in terms of content promotion. Content distribution doesn’t have to be paid. Syndication and social bookmarking are two quite simple approaches, enabling blog and website owners to reach new, targeted audiences. 3. Content Repurposing That’s right, content can be repurposed. In fact, this approach will deliver great promotional results in 2015. Content repurposing doesn’t focus on the creation of new text. It simply makes the blog posts that you already have written available to a bigger number of people. In addition, you can use the content that you already have to create an informative piece for an entirely different medium. A series of blog posts, for example, can easily turn in a podcast. You can also change the length and the style of blog posts. An interview with an industry expert can easily become an opinion piece later on. You generate original content but you rely on source material that has already been created. Repurposing comes with a number of key advantages. It’s good for your website’s optimization, it enables you to reach audiences that look for information in different ways, it makes content creation easier and it gives you the possibility to capitalize on the most successful content you’ve written in the past. There’s no need to come up with something brand new each time. Some well-established topics and popular blog posts can easily be repurposed to simplify the task of keeping your blog updated. 4. Go Visual Are you still relying excessively on text? A few visuals will make your content much more engaging and interactive. Visuals grab the attention of the website visitor. If people like what they see, they’ll probably go through the text, as well. The human brain processes images faster than text. In fact, it perceives an image in 1/10th of the time needed to understand text. Statistics suggest that content containing visuals generates up to 94 percent more views than texts that are not accompanied by illustrations or photographs. Content that has both photos and videos will get 48 percent more views. Visual content can easily go viral and it will generate more inbound links. You have so much freedom, when it comes to picking visuals. Illustrations, slideshows, cartoons, diagrams and infographics are all audience favorites. Interactive graphics will be taking your visual content to the next level. These graphics can be clicked to reveal more information, which makes them interactive and highly engaging. 5. Do Competition Analysis Frequently The online world is highly competitive. You can set your clock by paying attention to what the competition is doing. If you haven’t been doing competition research until now, you’ve been missing on a huge source of inspiration. The blogs and websites of other entities inside the niche can help you come up with new topics. In addition, you’ll get to assess the audience’s response in order to determine which themes get people interested. Competition research can also help you come up with partnership ideas. Though many (including Matt Cutts) have claimed that guest posting is dead, this technique can still deliver excellent marketing and optimization results. Such partnerships give you access to a brand new audience. They result in more popularity for your website or brand. Optimization isn’t everything when it comes to being successful online. Joint efforts in the field of content creation can deliver excellent PR (as in press release rather than PageRank) results without being expensive. 6. Think about the Needs of the Mobile Crowd So many experts have said that 2015 is going to be the year of mobile. Take this fact in consideration when writing and formatting your copy. The same applies to the design of your website. Make sure that the mobile crowd is finding it easy to access, read and interact with your content. There have been claims about user experience affecting the Google ranking algorithm for some time. The number of individuals accessing web content through mobile devices is growing all the time. You cannot ignore and underestimate the needs … Read more

Explore How to Imitate These 5 Huge Companies That Nail Retail Copywriting

June 19, 2024February 12, 2015 by Adam Oakley

If you’re a retailer, you depend on good copy to help sell your products and services. With good copywriting, you can garner interest in your brand, cultivate trust, and provide value to your audience. In turn, these aspects make them more likely to pull the trigger. This is when leads convert to sales, and you score. Fantastic retail copywriting, however, is what sets apart the merely successful from the true stars of the market. However, that level of writing is often hard to achieve. In short, you need the pros. This is where a content creation and copywriting service swoops in to help you. At Express Writers, we’re staffed with skilled scribes who know how to write engaging copy. We employ slick sentences, nimble turns-of-phrase, and alluring adjectives to present valuable information to your customers. We write copy that gets you noticed. We do this in a few different ways, including using the same techniques that the big retailers use. Get the gist of what we offer, then find out which major brands we love to emulate. What Express Writers Offers for Retail Copywriting Our Content Shop is a treasure trove if you’re looking for great retail copywriting. Just a few of our offerings include: Web Pages Product Descriptions Sales Pages Landing Pages Ad Copywriting We write your copy so you don’t have to, and we write it professionally. This means you’ll be a step above your competitors with snazzy copy that holds attention. It’s clean writing that alternately entices and engages your readers. Your copy will be unique to your business and what you’re selling. Whether you offer products or services, we’ll make them desirable. We’ll answer the readers’ questions and position you not only as useful, but necessary to your potential customers. Our Track Record We have helped thousands of clients edge out the competition with solid, smart, well-written copy that’s SEO-ready and optimized for discovery. Our successes are proven: our services have given clients boosts like high conversion rates, big increases in revenue, saved time, and high-ranking pages. We have worked with brands big and small and helped speed their way to standing out among their peers. Our services make it possible – we’re ultra-flexible and can give you just what you need. Our Products and Services for Retail Copywriting You’ll find all kinds of options for custom retail copywriting in our Content Shop. Product Descriptions Excellent product descriptions highlight what you’re selling in a way that makes them unique but understandable. Customers will quickly get the gist of key features with well-written descriptions, but, more importantly, they’ll be enticed to click “Add to Cart.” Ad Copywriting You only have one chance to grab attention with your click-through ads. With professional ad copywriting, we write the kind of creative, fun, targeted copy that gets web users to stop scrolling, take a closer look, and click. Web Pages If you want to grab the customers who are looking for businesses like yours, you need SEO-friendly web pages that are easy on the eyes. We write readable, professional, custom copy that is up to Google’s high standards. This means more traffic and conversions for you. At Express Writers, we know quality retail copywriting. As such, we’ve collected some of our favorite examples of awesome brands doing it right. When we work for you, we’ll aim to emulate these successful brands by using their tried-and-true techniques. 5 Examples of Big-Time Brands that Nail Retail Copywriting According to Econsultancy, there is a formula to great retail copywriting. It includes: A unique approach A knowledgeable perspective Seamless keywords A readable format An inviting, friendly tone of voice Not too much technical jargon Some of the best brands out there nail every aspect – and they make it look easy. 1. Apple Time after time, Apple keeps on producing crisp, clean copy that grabs your attention and holds it. In fact, their words are like their products: sleek, crafted, and to-the-point. But what are the nitty-gritty reasons behind why Apple’s retail copywriting works effortlessly? According to Kissmetrics, it’s based on a couple of key techniques: There’s always one big idea. For example, in the above screengrab, the idea is simple: the iPad Pro is just like the older model, but better. With it, you can still carry out all the tasks you used to do – just better. Sentences are short and broken. Most of the ideas Apple puts out there are rather abrupt in their wording. However, they all give you the sense that the company is making a firm, bold statement that they absolutely stand behind. They’re not suggesting, they’re telling. The copy is memorable. The line “Anything you can do, you can do better” is not just catchy. It actually riffs off memorable song lyrics from the Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun. As such, it has a ring to it. It sticks in your head. Of course, that’s totally the point. 2. ModCloth If there was an award for “best use of plays-on-words in product descriptions,” women’s clothing retailer ModCloth would win it. Just listen to the names of some of these clothing pieces: The Flair and Back A-Line Dress Pull Up a Cherry A-Line Dress Flourishing Flirtation Top Patio Chatting Tank Top According to Hubspot, ModCloth accomplishes enticing product names and descriptions because they know their buyer persona inside-out. This includes what will appeal to them. They know that the gals who shop their website are smart and savvy – and they run with it. 3. UncommonGoods UncommonGoods immediately grabs your attention on their homepage with their unique product categories. Instead of settling for your standard “men,” “women,” etc., they instead zero-in on fun categories that directly appeal to special interests. It’s fun and a little silly to name your “bestsellers” category “Selling Like Hotcakes!” – but it totally works. 4. Old Spice Old Spice has set themselves apart from other men’s brands by just plain going for it. Their wacky, hilarious ad copy is everything from … Read more

The 10 Worst Content Marketing Mistakes We’ve Ever Seen

August 25, 2022February 10, 2015 by Adam Oakley

We’re human: we all make mistakes. But, the bright side of making mistakes is that we learn how to correct them and in doing so become slightly better at avoiding those mistakes in the future (usually). In content creation, there are a lot of mistakes that inundate the Internet, unfortunately. My mind and soul cringes as I discover them. From the simplistic ones regarding spelling and grammar to the more complicated ones that impact our SEO validity, mistakes are a pain in the side of any content creator. And it’s not just one person. Content creators the world over suffer from the same problems that you do regarding content creation. 10 of the Worst, Eye-Digging, Bad-Bad-Bad Content Mistakes Let’s take a look at ten of the worst content mistakes I’ve ever come across. (Beware: it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard.) 1: Duplicate Content. Ah, this evil beast. From an SEO perspective, this is a capital sin and one that many content creators and blog owners fall victim to all too often. Duplicate content hurts your search ranking and can lead to erroneous search results. Redirection tags and multiple hosted copies of a home page can lead to terrible problems when a search engine is trying to reference your actual home page. It can be something as simple as a double-posted blog entry that could lead to the dreaded duplicate content error in your site. From a marketer’s point of view, you’re probably going to need to have a handful of home pages in order to gauge the effectiveness of any particular one. The problem arises when you forget to state these pages as non-indexed one to the search engine robots. The result is that you can have multiple copies of your home page being referenced and one may be a draft or incomplete one. Leaving the decision to the robots on the search engine means that they could be sending users to your unfinished landing page, leaving them with a horrible impression of your site. In the blogger’s case, multiple posts can easily be detected and removed, but only if you know your post was double-posted. Keeping an eye on your site helps you to avoid these issues. 2: Too Much & Bad Backlinking. Backlinks are very important in determining the usefulness of a site and how well it shows up on search engine rankings. The trustworthiness of a site comes down to how well it backlinks to other sites. Creating backlinks that incorporate spammy sites, link directories or ad-heavy sites drives a site down the search rankings. When you’re creating backlinks, you should really examine where your backlinks are coming from to ensure you don’t get flagged as an untrustworthy site. Creating a backlink history that is on the up-and-up requires some research into where you’re linking to. Always try to keep authority sites at the top of your link data. For content that already exists, you should ensure that the links that exist in these content pieces are viable and do not link to any shady sites. Using utilities such as SEMRush aids in creating a backlink report that can help you to weed out these bad backlinks. It’s a time consuming process, but in order to keep your ranking intact, it’s a necessary one. 3: Over-Optimization of Keywords. This one makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out. Seriously. There’s nothing much worse (except maybe my first two points). Creating a page that has a plethora of good information does require you to use keywords to aid in finding the information when a search engine user requests it. But in the past, throwing together a handful of keywords and using them inside the text of the landing page was usually what you needed in order to place high up on the search rankings. Eventually, the focus moved away from keywords and into a combination of factors. This came about because of the abuse of keyword stuffing in the early days of search engine optimization. Over-optimization of keywords occurs when you have more than one page with the same targeted keyword. The search engine doesn’t know which one of your pages is the main site and so you are left with pot luck as to what the search engine decides is the more relevant site, which may not be the one you want to appear there. Proper SEO practice requires you to use different targeted keywords for different pages in order to ensure a situation like this does not arise. Over-optimizing your site for your keywords can have a massively detrimental impact on your search engine results and your overall SEO strategy. As a technical content error it can be a lot harder to spot, requiring constant vigilance over your SEO results and targeted keyword seeding. 4: Too Many Links Off The Home Page. This might seem counter intuitive after having described how important backlinks are, but having too many links from your home page makes your page hard to navigate. Links serve as incoming traffic points and outgoing traffic locales. The more there are, the more areas that you send traffic out to. However, by limiting your links, you are able to direct a larger amount of traffic to the pertinent sites instead of trying to create a link storm that doesn’t really send significant traffic anywhere. Building links is important, but too many links results in a page that is difficult for your reader to navigate and even harder for a search engine to rank. Link building, therefore, should be done in moderation and the locations to your links chosen carefully to align with your overall SEO strategy. You can easily determine if you’ve over-linked on your homepage by using the Moz Tool Diagnostics Summary. It will also inform you if you have too few links on the page. Maintaining a healthy balance of links on your home page is very important to making your page successful, so doing too much or too little does … Read more