Professional Writing Services from MagneticWeb

If you run a business you probably don’t have time to write a daily blog entry. Even if you’re used to online business and have had a web site for years, you still have to manage your business first and foremost, so it makes sense to pay someone else to write it for you – a specialist web writer.

But where do you find these people? You can try searching on Google. A search for “web writers” (without the quotes) brings you 43.4 million results, and selecting from those on the first couple of pages is pot luck if you don’t know them already.

You can try rentacoder.com or elance.com (though you may find their web site navigation difficult to follow). One very good one is odesk.com, where you can specify your requirements and how much you’re prepared to pay, and writers will bid for your order.

Or you can try joining the Warriors at warriorforum.com and viewing the postings from professional writers looking for work. Craigslist.com is another place where you can find the people you want for writing your blog.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a lively, interesting blog, with fresh content added most days.

Philip Gegan

How often should you post to your blog?

To answer this, let’s put the question another way round.

How many posts should you have on your blog? Surely the answer is, “the more the better – as long as they are relevant and useful”. The more content a blog has, the better, provided it gives valuable information to the visitor.

So you should post to your blog at least every couple of days, ideally. The search engines favour blogs that are vibrant and humming with the latest news and comment in its niche. Nobody likes a blog that hasn’t been posted to for weeks or more, that is dormant and stagnating.

To start with you’ll have to do all the posting yourself, or outsource someone else to do it for you. But if your blog is successful, they’ll be plenty of visitors who will leave comments on various posts. That will take the pressure off you, and you won’t have to make so many posts, because the search engines will still be “pinged” with new content through your visitors’ comments.

Just another advantage of blogs over static web sites.

Philip Gegan

Since the advent of blogs as a viable form of online business representation around 2006 onwards we have seen the gradual death of static web pages.

Visitors to your site don’t expect to see the same content every time they arrive on your home page. And now blog themes can be obtained very cheaply that allow for the same quality of graphics, header and other web page ingredients that regular web pages provide.

This development does represent a problem for most online businesses, in that they have to get hold of fresh content on a regular basis. Business owners who have their time cut out just managing their business can’t be expected to write that content themselves, so it has to be out-sourced.

Another business expense? Or maybe another opportunity for business. It’s the businesses who take their online presence seriously enough to out-source their blog content who will have possibly a decisive advantage in the new business environment of 2010 and beyond.

Philip Gegan

What difference does a form make to your home page?

There I go asking questions again, but it’s one that you should consider.

If you don’t have a form of any kind on your site, how do you expect prospective customers to contact you? How can you build a list of prospects, and start converting them into paying customers, if you can’t get them to communicate with you?

I think you see by now that having a form on your web site is an absolute must. Yet there are thousands and thousands of web sites out there that don’t have one. Many of them cost thousands to have set up, with quality graphics and various gizmos, yet they are for all that simply expensive indulgencies.

A form, whether on the web page or as a pop-up form, can succinctly state the benefit of signing up to your list, and invite the visitor to insert his name and email address in order to obtain a benefit.

That can be a free guide of some sort, or something as simple as a discount off the price of their next purchase with you.

Actually the possibilities are endless. Think about it.

Philip Gegan

How powerful is the copy on your web page? How persuasive is it?

What is its purpose? Does it perform that task effectively?

Have you read it lately, and from the viewpoint of a potential customer? Take a fresh look at it right after you’ve read this post.

The job of your home page is to attract prospective customers and make them into actual customers. That means you need one or two keyword phrases in your heading and in the first paragraph of your copy. Your heading should be in the H1 heading format and the phrase in your first paragraph should preferably be in bold.

This is solely to attract the search engines and ensure they give your page as high a rank as possible for your keyword phrase. Only by doing that will your page stand much chance of appearing in the top results for anyone who searches for that phrase.

But that’s only one part of the job. The other part is to persuade a high proportion of your visitors to sign up to whatever you’re offering. This is often a newsletter, but it could be a free (digital) gift or a special offer or discount.

Often the inducement isn’t over the top in the benefits it will bring to the visitor, so your copy has to make up for it in its power of persuasion.

Now look at your home page again. Would it persuade you to sign up to your special offer? (You do have a special offer, don’t you?)  If you don’t, then make it a priority to get one in place.

Can’t think of an offer you can make to your visitors? Don’t worry. There are thousands to choose from, and most of them are freely available, or of very low-cost, on the internet. You just need to know where to find them.

What about the form you’ll need, so your visitors can give you their details and you can send them your newsletter or special offer? Well, I’ll come to that shortly . . .

Philip Gegan

So it’s all about interactivity. And you have that with a blog. For offline businesses it’s becoming an absolute necessity. Times are changing. The web has moved on from what it was when it first burst on the scene in the 1990s.

Then we only had static web pages. The surfer landed on your page, read what you had to say, went “Uh-huh”, and swiftly surfed on to the next site. Unless you were lucky enough to make a sale that time, or, later on, get him to sign up to your newsletter or special offer.

We kept hearing that it was all about building relationships with your prospects, but how could you do that with a static web page and a form? Then Web 2.0, as it’s known, came along. And blogs were in the forefront of it all.

And the magic of them is – they’re so simple to set up and maintain. All you need is regular content that your customers and prospects will find of interest or entertainment value.

Ah, yes. Regular content. That a problem? If it is, then outsource it. Whatever you do, you must have a blog. It’s becoming the first rule of business survival.

Philip Gegan

Blogs have really taken off over the last 4 or 5 years and many online businesses have a blog as their main web site. Others still have their web site, perhaps dating back several years, but with a blog attached to it.

So which is best?

To answer that, you have to consider the main purpose of a blog. What do blogs give the visitor that a traditional web site does not? The answer is interactivity. A blog page will have comments at the bottom of each post, and an invitation at the bottom for the visitor to leave further comments – something a traditional web page cannot offer.

That’s not to say a web page cannot collect information from visitors. You can have a form on your site and as long as you have a sufficiently persuasive reason for signing up to it, such as a customer discount or a free gift of some sort, then you can grow your customer list and follow up with offers by way of an autoresponder.

And if your site is basically a one-page direct sales letter then that’s all you’ll probably want.

But if it’s a little more than that then you’ll probably welcome a little inter-activity with visitors, and a blog is the better choice.

The only trouble with a blog is that you’re generally restricted as to how it looks, with most themes, unless specially customised at some cost, being fairly inflexible.

Philip Gegan