business website

The last place you want to look for help or advice on writing copy, for websites or anywhere else, is in “writing” books. Writing effective copy never looks like the writing you did in school or for papers or for your business. Powerful web copy looks and reads like speech.

You must view your website like it’s a member of your sales team. You aren’t “writing” to the people who visit your website. You’re communicating with them. Picture them sitting across a table from you and think about what you’d say to them if they came to you with a question because they viewed you as an expert on your subject.

As a copy writer, I often run into businesses that are so afraid to say anything that might be construed as “real” that they fall back on “marketing gibberish” and wind up saying nothing. And that’s exactly the response it creates. Americans are so tired of empty promises and “marketing speak” that advertising of all sorts is falling on deaf ears and blind eyes.

Unless you have a whole lotta money…

And even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best. There’s a lot of bad information and charlatanism on the Internet. Get rich quick schemes abound. And the only people who get rich from those guys are the sham artists pushing the “How To Do It” ebooks, videos and seminars.

Of course, if their methods were really successful, they’d be doing it rather than selling it. They’d be hobnobbing with people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Richard Branson rather than, surprisingly, each other. Ever notice the same names keep showing up on each other’s websites endorsing each other?

I have friends who own an online dining guide. They’re always bragging that they’re the 800 pound gorilla in their city. The numbers speak for themselves. They get 300,000 unique visitors a month. In fact, if you Google a restaurant in our city, their listing in the dining guide will pop before the restaurant’s website. And yet, my friends are only making about 60 grand a year from it.

Now you might say that’s not chump change for an online business. But at least half of that comes from his search engine optimization, web design and hosting business. So that leaves us with about 30 grand for the actual dining guide.

Let me say, first of all, that I don’t do Pay Per Click. I have a PPC expert I refer clients to when they want pay per click as a part of their online marketing strategy. That said, I believe it can be an important part of your online marketing strategy and should be considered.

The basics of an online marketing strategy

A great online marketing strategy begins with a great website. Period. Without a great website, no amount of marketing to get people to your website will pay off if your site is so bad, no one will use it.

There are a lot of ways to promote your website online that don’t involve spending money on banner ads, tiles, or adwords campaigns. And in the long run, the no-cost methods are a lot more effective.

Why?

Because unlike TV or radio or magazines or newspapers or any other media, the search engines are not in the business of producing content for the sole purpose of selling advertising. Nor are they in the business of promoting businesses.