How to Make Money … by Spending Money

It seems like no matter what website you visit, there is an ad there trying to sell you something. Do you ever click on it? You might (maybe accidentally), but most of the time you’ll pass it by. So how do you take your own website and turn it into a money-maker, if most of your visitors skip clicking on the ads? There are a few steps you can take to make more money, but it will require you to invest some of your own money first.

“You have to spend money to make money” is an old saying, but it’s true for many businesses. By investing in high-quality products, whether physical items or software, you can improve your business, draw in customers, and keep your clients more satisfied with your products or services. By spending some money on better equipment and tools, you can often save money by saving yourself valuable time.

Stand Out With Design

So you’ve decided to build your website yourself. Great! This is a fantastic way to save money for your business, as long as you get it done well. You are most likely using WordPress as your design platform. This is highly recommended. WordPress has so many great templates for websites that are free, but tons of other websites have already used these. While it does save money to use the free templates and WordPress on your own, this does not compare to a custom-built website that is designed specifically around your business. This is where hiring someone to custom design your site is worth the extra money if you have it to spend.

If you just do not have the extra money to spend on hiring someone, you can always buy a premium theme on WordPress. This is a great option for a couple of reasons. When you buy a premium theme, it will most likely come with support, whereas most free themes do not. It is also more secure and less likely to have someone hack into it. Considering these things, it would be well worth the $40 it would cost to purchase a premium theme.

Invest in your Website

Okay, it may seem obvious that you need to invest in a good website, since it’s such an important part of a modern business. Seriously though, it is worth your money to hire a company that will build you a great website that is easy to use and has everything you and your clients need. This takes the stress off of you for maintaining the site and lets you run your business from the other side and focus on what you are best at within your business.

Will this cost money up front? Yep. Should you pay a monthly fee to have the company keep it fresh and current? Definitely. If you do this, your website will stay fresh and current, which is very important for modern businesses on the Internet. An updated site will keep your customers coming back as well as draw in new ones. This in turn will bring you more profit and make the money you invested in a great website worth it. By using someone to custom-build your website, it will also help you stand out in the crowd of thousands of websites for similar businesses online.

Make your Website Mobile-Friendly

Making your website mobile-friendly goes along with the previous topic, but is equally important. This is another solid reason to hire a company to build your site custom to you and your business, unless you know what you’re doing in WordPress. Any great website-development company will make your site mobile-friendly. This is critical now that most people browse the Internet and even do their shopping from their smart phone or tablet.

Spend on the Right Technology

Which company you choose to host your website is very important. The hosting provider will play a key role in ensuring site speed and good performance. This is where many businesses make the mistake of settling on the cheapest hosting option. While the cost can be just a small difference, a cheap purchase here can be a costly mistake in the long run. Slower site speeds have proven to cut down on site conversions. Basically, a good web host will be the key difference in a site that takes forever to load or an easily accessible site. You must make sure your site is up and running fast at all times in order for you to retain customers and make more money.

Investing into managed WordPress hosting will help you save time by having someone else do the troubleshooting and making sure you have the latest technologies available no matter how many plugins your site uses or how many changes are made to the site. Also, you wont have to worry about dealing with security breaches to your site, having to back it up, or doing the updates yourself.

It also a good idea to invest in good cloud storage. Free or inexpensive cloud storage is usually that price for a reason. Do not skimp here, and go for a good quality to ensure that your data is safe and secure.

Spend on Marketing

Now that you have invested in a professionally managed and custom built website, you need to draw your customers in. How do you do that when there are thousands of competitors attempting to do the same thing? You have to get out there and battle for every customer. This will include methods like utilizing search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and great content marketing.

Sure you can do your research on using SEO, and you can post your content to social media all day. But these things can end up feeling like an extra full-time job. Many people find that providing content, blogging, keeping current with SEO, and posting daily to social media is impossible to do while still running their business. Another option is investing in pay per click (PPC) ads, but this again will require the time to research and make sure your money invested actually brings you customers and a return on investment.

Content management and SEO are things your website and business will need to thrive online, but it comes at the cost of time to you, and I am betting this is time you don’t have. Here again is where it would be smart to hire an online marketing firm that will handle all of this for you. Luckily, Virtual Market Advantage can do this for you, with as much or as little input from you as you like. It may take some money to properly set up your website, but it is sure to being you plenty of money back to more than cover the costs.

All of these online factors will help your business grow and give you peace of mind. Using these digital marketing tools will give you an edge over your competitors. From social media management to email marketing, there are many avenues you can take to stay competitive and grow your online presence. Know how to make money by spending it wisely where it will make the most impact.

Strategies for Generating Leads Through Social Media

If you are looking to expand your business and get some customers and new revenue coming your way, you may want to consider generating leads by using a social media platform. There are several ways to do this, and of course there are multiple social media platforms to choose from. Below, we’ll go over a few lead-generating strategies that will have new customers and income flooding to your business.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms

Once you have decided try generating quality leads through social media, you need to make sure that the platforms you choose are the right ones for your business. There are so many platform available, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and more. Making sure you know which one is the best to target your customer base will increase your odds of getting good quality leads.

A good start for learning which platforms to use comes from taking a look at B2B (direct business to business) marketers. Some surveys have shown that businesses find the most success with leads through LinkedIn and Facebook. If you are unsure about which sites contain your targeted audience, you can look at analytics data for each. This post lays the demographics out pretty clearly for the major sites.

Using Facebook

If you decide to use Facebook as your platform, the first thing you need to do is take your Facebook page seriously. Use it as a sales page, not a personal one. Host the free sample offers and giveaways here, as this is the platform that most people are likely to share your promotions on or compete with their friends in an online contest. Basically any type of contest or giveaway you can think of is a great way to get names and emails from potential leads on Facebook. It’s also super easy for your audience to share the promotion with their friends for even more reach.

You will most likely have to invest in some Facebook ads at some point if you really want to reach your target market on that site. The nice thing about this is that ads bought on Facebook are less than half the price-per-click than if you were to use AdWords (about $0.80 per click compared to $2.50). So if you want to use advertisements to generate leads, then Facebook is a relatively cheap option.

Using Twitter

Not as seasoned a social media platform as Facebook, Twitter is still fairly new to the game. This means that it can and most than likely will go through some major changes as it develops. Even so, Twitter can really help you generate quality leads, as it is one of the most-used social platforms out there.

To accomplish this, you should use Twitter cards. This is a similar system to Facebook ads. Take full advantage of these cards by choosing the best image for whatever you are promoting and be sure to keep the content short and sweet.

Another great option for connecting with your audience on Twitter is by using its Live Events, which is a way to directly communicate live with your audience. Maybe think about hosting a bi-weekly or monthly 'ask me anything' event. If you end your chats with a plug for your lead-generating campaign, it offers you a big value without directly advertising for your company.

Using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the platform that gives you the most direct access to your peers. It is the option that gives you the most leads for B2B, so logically it is one of the first places you should start for generating leads. It was also recently acquired by Microsoft, so this means that even more professionals will be using the platform to network and connect with each other in the future.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn was built for professionals and business owners to connect. This differs from Facebook and Twitter, which were built for and are used mostly by people looking to casually connect with friends and coworkers.

Offer free samples

One great trick for directly connecting with potential leads is to offer them free samples in return for some information. Everyone loves freebies! These types of campaigns are just the thing that people like sharing on their social media pages. Offering a quality sample with a quick form to fill out at the front to capture some good lead data is great. Make sure you have an option at the end of the form where they can then share the free sample offer on their personal page to all their followers.

Aside from the free sample offer, you can also run a giveaway campaign where the person is asked to enter some information in exchange for exclusive content. This can lead to success for both you and those who participated. The participant got educational or entertaining exclusive content, while you got new names and leads.

Discount Codes

Discount codes fall under a similar idea as offering a free sample or running a short contest. Try offering a discount code for a product of yours after the viewer fills out a short form. If you place a clear call to action or time limit on this discount code as you promote it, you create a sense of urgency for the person to fill out the form as well as share it with others, so that can choose to get the discount before the time expires. Many consumer companies are using this tactic as well, as it costs less than running the discount ads elsewhere. You can use this technique to easily generate leads that you can use later for email promotions and other outreach projects.

In short, knowing which social media platforms best fit your target market and which strategy to use while promoting is key. It's always a great idea to try different methods and see which ones work best for you and your business. Also note that while generating quality leads is not fool-proof, by following these ideas, you will generate more leads and higher quality leads across all the social media platforms. If you want more information on SEO, social media, blogging, and more, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blog here!

The Ultimate Guide for How to Use Hashtags

Hashtags are found everywhere in social media these days, and have even permeated into our everyday language. The symbol for hashtags was previously only known as the pound sign (#) on telephones. What does using a hashtag mean? Where does that hashtag go once you put it out on the Internet? Do they really serve a purpose? When used well, they are definitely very useful for spreading and finding information online and reaching out to your audience. This blog will go over how to use hashtags for your business while making them fun to use at the same time!

What is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is a word or phrase with no spaces that has a pound sign in front of it. It is essentially a word, phrase, or sentence fragment that has been smashed together. The ‘hashtag’ has become so widely recognized that the Oxford Dictionary added the word to its dictionary in 2010 and Scrabble added it to their dictionary in 2014.

The hashtag was first introduced and most widely used on Twitter, but has since found its way onto Facebook, Instagram, and countless other sites. Now that so many websites use hashtags, the format links them together so that people using the same kinds of hashtags on one site can easily find more information on the other. All this sounds great, but #HowDoIHashtag? Knowing how to use hashtags well is important. The more specific you are with them, the more you reach out to your target audience.

For some formatting basics, you capitalization doesn’t matter too much when using hashtags for reach purposes. Here, we’ll capitalize each word to make them easier to read, which is a good thing to do for longer hashtags or ones that can be read multiple ways without clarification. Many people only capitalize the first letter, no letters, or whatever they feel like capitalizing in the moment. No capitalization is just fine for shorter hashtags. Also, remove any punctuation from the sentence, including commas and apostrophes.

Be Specific

So you think you are ready to use hashtags to start promoting and marketing your business. Great! First off, you need to know your target audience. Imagine that your service is dog grooming. You could use the hashtag #Dog, but that is way too general. By using something more specific like #DogGrooming, you would get a more targeted audience to what you are actually wanting to sell. If you are trying to promote something other than a specific product, such as a photo, make sure the hashtag is specific to that as well.

Relevant Hashtags

When you are using hashtags for your business, try and come up with ones that have yet to be claimed by another business. This is where it can be tricky. You do not want to use your actual business name as the hashtag, but you want something that is relevant to it. However, tons of hashtags have already been claimed by businesses around the world.

As an example of good branded hashtags, many cities use official hashtags for tourists to use when they are posting pictures from a vacation. This is a great way to promote travel to their city using people who have been there and are posting their own pictures. A few examples of this are:

• South Dakota uses #HiFromSD
• Florida uses #LoveFL
• Disney World uses #DisneyWorld

By doing this and asking audiences to use these branded hashtags when posting to social media, everything from baseball teams to travel destinations to small businesses can reach a target market while creating a good research tool for its viewer base. It also gives them follower-generated content to use on their website and social sites. The initial branding may take some time and research, but will be a powerful tool in the long run.

Short and To The Point

It can be fun to get witty and creative with hashtags, but make sure you do not make them too long. For example: #DontMakeAHashtagAnEntireSentenceLong. Even with capitalization, is that pleasant to read? Sure, a longer hashtag may target a very specific audience and provide lots of information, but it will not trend or search well at all. Pretty much no one would think up the same long sentence in a search. Also, no one wants to type in that many characters, and this hashtag would take up most of the character limit on Twitter.

Being too clever in your hashtags may hurt you as well. You want people to naturally search for your hashtag, not have to be super clever to even find it. Being simple and short with the hashtag will get you more searches and more eyes towards your business.

More Content than Hashtags

When you are posting to social media, no matter which platform, make sure you have more content in your post than you do hashtags. A post crammed full of hashtags overwhelms and annoys many readers. Just because Instagram reportedly lets you use up to 30 hashtags in a single post, does not mean you should actually do that! It is hashtag overload, and often leaves you looking desperate. Sure it will gain you more viewers, but with this many hashtags, the visitors you gain will most likely be spammers rather than real people or people who are not in your target audience. If you like to use many different hashtags, make a list and spread out their use in several different posts over time.

If your post just repeats information and does not add to the general conversation of the topic, it is sometimes best to leave hashtags off entirely. When you are just reposting a breaking news story or a DIY idea you found online, there is no need to hashtag, since you are essentially just repeating something that isn’t your own content that was already out there.

Cater to the Social Media Sites You Use

Each social media site has its own preferred way to use hashtags to get the most out of them while using the platform. Do the research for each site to find the best way. Instagram tends to be more focused on the content description, while Twitter is more focused on the topic of the conversation. Take the time on each social media platform to look into what is the most relevant hashtag for your topic and go from there. If you use LinkedIn, keep in mind that that site does not like hashtags, so using them there can actually hurt your posts.

Hashtags on Twitter

For Twitter, the hashtag is used widely to tie everyone together in an ongoing conversation. For example, if you use #2016PresidentialDebate and click on the hashtag in Twitter, it will pull up all posts for that hashtag. This connects people who are not actually friends and allows them to all be a part of the bigger conversation. There is a hashtag stream that Twitter uses that allows you to connect with people in several ways within the same hashtag. It goes something like this:

• Top: This is the stream of tweets that have seen the most engagement, usually those that have the most recent followers.
• Latest: This is the live stream of those tweeting out a hashtag at that very moment.
• People: This is a list of the top Twitter accounts that you can follow relating to the current popular hashtags.
• Photos: This a collage of photos that are included in the tweets that use the trending hashtags.

Knowing this system for Twitter can help you find your best target audience and help you in figuring out the best hashtags to use. You can see what kinds of hashtags become the most popular and formulate your own hashtags in a similar way.

Hashtags on Facebook

Hashtags on Facebook are much like Twitter, where they tie together people who do not know each other. Unlike Twitter, Facebook profiles can be private, so when the hashtag is clicked on, the person’s information and posts may not be visible. Most hashtags used on Facebook are by brands, publishers, and influencers rather than individuals using them to connect to strangers.

Hashtags on Instagram

Hashtags have the same effect on Instagram as they do on Twitter and Facebook, but the search for a hashtag is much easier. Just go to the search bar in Instagram and type in the hashtag you are looking for to find results including that word or phrase.

Hashtags in the Offline World

Can you use hashtags outside of the Internet for your marketing? Sure! They can be great on fliers to help with a promotion or fundraiser drive you might have. They are also great for weddings, since guests don’t all know each other but will all be posting photos. Having a unique hashtag will create an album of sorts for all customers, guests, or clients. The research may take awhile, but your business will reap the benefits of a good hashtag in the long run. #ExploreHashtags

Hopefully this blog helps you develop your strategy for how to use hashtags for your business or event. If you want more information about social media, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs. This one goes over how to use social media to promote your blog posts!

How To Promote Your Blog Post Using Social Media

How To Promote Your Blog Post Using Social Media

You have a great idea, so you sit down and write a piece about it. You put it out there by publishing it to your blog. Is just posting it on your website enough? The short answer is no. By sharing your blog post the correct way through social media, you will get a steady flow of visitors to your site. Here we will go over a few tips and tricks to get the most eyes on your blog using different social media platforms.

Posting the Blog Link to Facebook

There are a couple of quick steps here you can take that will ensure that you reach more of your followers. First, as you go to post to Facebook, don't just copy and paste the link. Give your readers a tease before they click on the link. You are allowed over 63,000 characters on a Facebook post, but the first 480 characters are what is visible to viewers without clicking to see more. By providing a quote or paragraph from your blog to get the readers interested, you will entice a bigger percentage of viewers to click that link. Another way to get followers interested via Facebook is to include a picture in your post that relates to the content of the blog.

Posting to Twitter

Twitter is a whole different ballgame from Facebook. Twitter takes time and patience to reach a solid audience. It was the first social media platform to use hashtags and @ handles to spread information. While they have stretched out the character limit to 140, it is sill most effective to use the least amount of characters as possible. Using up to 4 hashtags also makes it more searchable for keywords. Also, use @ handles aimed towards specific people or companies to spread a message or give credit where it is due.

The average time a tweet stays relevant is 18 minutes. This is where the time and patience comes in. To keep your blog post relevant, it is best to share your blog post to twitter more than once and on different days of the week and at different times of the day. The best time to share on twitter is between 8-10am, 11am-1pm, and after work at 4pm. Keep in mind that your audience may mostly reside in a different time zone than you when you decide when to post. Posting within these time frames will give your tweet, and hopefully your blog, more eyes. You can post your link weekly and then slow up to monthly depending on what type of promotion you want for the blog.

Posting to LinkedIn

This is a platform that lets you post to a personal profile, to a group, or on a company page. If you're posting to a company page, it works a lot like Facebook, where only the first 150 characters will be seen. So making those characters engaging and enticing to the reader will make people more likely to click on your link. Make sure that you establish a conversation with your readers within your post. An easy way to accomplish this is by asking them questions. When sharing your blog post to LinkedIn (as with Facebook), it's a good idea to attach an image to your link.

The best time frames to post to LinkedIn are between 8-10am and 4-6pm. Make sure you are posting once here for the first promotion of a particular blog. Then post once a week, eventually reducing down to once every 2-3 months. Make sure these reposts are on your profile and not your page.

Pinning On Pinterest

This location of social media promotion is all about image. With thousands of images up to see on Pinterest, you want yours to catch people's attention and hold them long enough to read the description and click on the image. Pinterest gives you up to 500 characters in the description. However, to keep the reader convinced, it is best to keep your pin at 150-300 characters long. Always use a link to your blog in the description here, because clicking on the image takes the reader to your blog location. Share your featured image of the blog post to Pinterest to help the reader connect from Pinterest to the blog, and add a call to action in the description to engage readers to like, repin, buy now, or read more.

To gain a specific audience, you should use the feature of creating boards based on specific topics and pin to those accordingly.

Sharing on Instagram

Instagram is similar to Pinterest in being image-driven. With Instagram, the images are shared in a single stream and lose impact quickly. Most interaction takes place within the first 3 hours of posting. With only the first 155 characters of the maximum 2200 characters allowed in the description of a photo showing, it is key to say what is most important within the first 3 lines. Hashtags are a great way to engage on Instagram, and there are times where the description is all hashtags. This decision is up to you, depending on what you are promoting.

Use your blog's featured image to promote here first. Then post again over the weeks to keep an audience interested. You may want to post other pictures featured in your blog as well. The best time to post on Instagram is in the evening.

Post Based on Social Media Outlet

What all of this should tell you is that you should not go and post the exact same thing to all of these social media platforms. Each platform has a tailored audience and a different method of dispersing information. Look at your audience and your followers, and ask yourself what would make them stop scrolling and look at what you are posting. Tailor your posts to the platform and the readers who are going there. You also may not need to cross post to all of these sites with every post you make, depending on the blog. Each blog is unique, and so is the social media post that will give you the most viewers.

If you want more information about blogging, SEO, social media, website development, and more, check out Virtual Market Advantage's other blogs here. This one goes into the history of Vine, and why it dissolved even though short videos are a huge content powerhouse right now.

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Boost Online Sales

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Boost Online Sales

Social media has become a necessity for helping businesses flourish, especially if you rely on online sales. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and many other sites are great platforms from which you can spread information about your business. The unique thing about advertising on social media is that you can easily start a discussion with your customers. You can also get immediate feedback, answer questions, ask your own questions…the possibilities are endless! Another great aspect of social media is the fact that once you create content for one site, you can easily share it to your accounts on the other sites.

Whether you’re just starting out with promoting your business on social media or need a few tips for expanding your reach, here are several ways you can use social media to boost online sales:

Twitter

Using Twitter is incredibly simple. There’s a small limit to the number of characters you can use within your message, forcing you to keep it short and to the point. Because of its popularity and simplicity, Twitter is a great resource to use to start a conversation with your customers and spread news about your business.

Twitter is the site that created the use of hashtags (#) in social media. By putting a hashtag in front of a short key word or phrase, it groups your message in with similar hashtags. This makes it so that you can search for related posts and other people can similarly find your post. Use this tool to see what people are saying about your product and to interact with them. Get people talking about your product, answer questions, and make connections.

Facebook

Although Facebook started as an exclusive site for connecting college students together, it has grown to be one of the biggest and most influential social media sites. As such, it’s important to use Facebook to your advantage for your online business. Make a page for your store that other people can visit and follow. Reach out and share information with status updates. Interact with other groups and pages that have to do with your business.

Pinterest

and

Instagram

Pinterest and Instagram are both amazing resources for online businesses trying to get more traffic. They are lumped together here because they are both used to spread more visual media than many other sites. Engage with your audience by sharing photographs, infographics, and other pictures. Take pictures of your product, show the manufacturing process, tell a story, and develop your brand image. Some businesses will have an easier time coming up with interesting visuals than others, but if you are creative enough, you can gain a loyal and growing following with these sites.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a more business-oriented, professional social media platform. It’s purpose is to connect professionals from all kinds of industries together. It allows you to easily network with people from all around the world. Set up an e-commerce business profile and look around for connections with other companies, suppliers, potential employees, and other websites. Use it to find other businesses that might want to carry your product. This site is less for advertising or sales and more for connecting professionally and improving your reach in other ways.

YouTube

YouTube isn’t just for finding music videos, movie clips, and other entertainment. It can be a powerful tool to use for your business. People love to watch videos, and if you can make interesting content in video form, you can draw in tons of viewers. Create a YouTube channel for your business and post videos related to your product. Try behind the scenes manufacturing videos, tutorials, maintenance and repair tips, interesting ways to use a product, and any other type of video that works well for you.

Tumblr

Tumblr and other blogging sites are a great way to spread information about your product and business. Design your page around your business and provide content that is engaging, informative, funny, or otherwise interesting. Reinforce your brand by talking about it and providing more information. Make sure that you connect these posts to your other social media pages and vice versa. You don’t have to make completely different content for Tumblr and for Facebook!

Reddit

Reddit is a site used mostly for news and entertainment. However, if used properly, it can also be a great resource for your business and draw in dedicated followers. The tricky part is knowing which subreddits (indicated by r/topic) you should post on. r/entrepreneur is a great place to start. Also look for subreddits directly related to your business or product, if it’s popular enough. As with other sites, try to engage with the audience by showing behind-the-scenes processes, reveal struggles you have faced, and other unique information about your business in particular.

Craigslist

and

Etsy

Online marketplaces can be a great place to start selling your products before you set up your own sales website. General sites such as eBay and Craigslist have been around since 1995, and allow you to sell pretty much anything to pretty much anyone in the world. More recently, sites have created more specialized sales environments. For example, Etsy is a marketplace for artistic and handmade creations.

Forums

Before the big social media explosion, forums were the major way people connected online over various topics. Although they have been shoved out of the spotlight, forums are still thriving and are great places to make connections. Find forum websites that specialize in your product or niche and start a conversation. Forums tend to be great resources to use to find answers to questions that people have already asked. You might find some great blog, post, or video ideas deep in the online forums!

Advertising

Besides providing content, there are other ways you can use some of these sites: paid advertising. Facebook, Google AdWords, YouTube ads, and banner ads reach all over the Internet. Carefully consider where your money would be best spent when deciding how to use paid advertising on social media sites. Do you have a lot of followers on Facebook? Are people watching your YouTube videos? When you design these ads, spread the word about your other social media pages so people can easily connect.

Try using these sites and others to help spread the word about your business and boost online sales. Compared to other advertising methods, these sites require you to show a bit more of your company’s unique personality. Try to engage with your customers, listen to what they have to say, and adjust your content to fit their needs and wants. Using social media for your business can seem like a daunting task, but once you get used to it, it can be really fun!

If you want more tips for promoting your online business, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs. Here we discuss ways to use content marketing to boost online sales.

What is Good Copywriting?

We’ve all seen spammy, boring advertisements that make us just want to hit “next” and get on with what we're doing. But there are also advertisements out there that will draw you in and make you interested in learning more about the product. What’s the difference? Often, it comes down to the Copy!

What is Copy?

Copywriting is when someone comes up with text content for the purposes of advertisement and marketing. Copy is the content that the copywriter creates. Glance at a billboard next time you go down a highway, or flip through a magazine at your next doctor’s appointment. All of those words were written by a copywriter. Open up any website page and the text you see is also copy.

Good Copywriting

So what distinguishes good copywriting from bad? The majority of advertisements fly past us, day after day, without making us stop to think about them. Good copywriting stops people from passing by, draws them in, and makes them care about the product or service being sold.

As a copywriter, you don’t have to come up with constant brilliant advertising, like the “Budweiser Frogs” or Apple’s “1984.” You just need to learn how to engage with your targeted audience. Here are three major tenets of good copywriting:

1. Get your audience to want to engage with you. Don’t spam your viewers.
2. Offer something valuable to your audience. Don’t just ask for their money.
3. Make your customers want to buy from you because they like your content.

Unfortunately there’s no one single trick to achieving these objectives. Everything depends on your business, your product, your target audience, and the goals you are trying to attain.

Pay close attention to number 2 on the list. It’s easier to draw people in if you have something to offer to them. This doesn’t just mean using coupons, though that’s a place to start. If you want more ideas about how to use pricing strategies to draw in more customers, check out VMA’s blog on the subject here. It goes over more details on ways to draw in new customers and bring back old ones with offers from your company.

Modern Age Copywriting

One result of the Internet is that there are new kinds of copywriting specifically geared towards that medium. What works in a magazine, newspaper, or billboard won’t necessarily work for a website. How you set up the back end of your website is crucial to ensure that your pages are seen in the first place.

SEO Copywriting

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” You use SEO to make it so that when people search for topics related to your business on a search engine such as Google, your pages are included in the top results. There are 3 major parts to setting up SEO copywriting:

1. Finding the right keywords. The ones that other people are using the most to search for your product.
2. Writing articles on subjects that people want to learn more about to draw them in.
3. Use the important keywords and the content you create around them to try to rank in the top results for those keywords.

The simplest way to see what people are searching for when it comes to your product is to see what Google automatically fills in when you perform a search yourself. Although this can give you a basic idea of keyword searches, it’s much better to use another resource. Programs such as Google Analytics allow you to look in-depth at your audience and what they are searching for. This is an incredibly useful tool to have on your belt for keeping track of how your website is performing. It can also help with determining what to do to make it better.

When Internet search engines first began, getting your site to the top of the search was a simpler process. You could get away with spamming the audience and throwing a ton of junk articles on the page. These days, search engines are getting incredibly smart. They do their best to weed out spammy, junk sites for ones that people want to see.

When you write an article now, it’s important to make it as interesting as possible to draw in more people and keep them on your site for longer. How many people can find your site through searches, how many different people click on your site, how long viewers stay on your pages, and many other factors determine how well your website is performing. Again, tools such as Google Analytics can help you keep track of this kind of information. You can then use that to see which articles are working and which are not, to help improve your future copy.

Also keep in mind that search engine optimization is changing all the time. Google and other companies are constantly working to improve their algorithms. Sometimes they make small tweaks and other times they completely overhaul the system. Staying up-to-date is crucial.

In the end, making good copywriting comes down to the same things that almost any skill requires. Practice and a willingness to constantly learn new techniques will get you far. Being able to keep up with the newest trends is what the Internet is all about. If you get out there and engage with your customers, you will quickly learn what they are interested in and what kind of information will appeal to them. Use their questions as article topics, and start a discussion. One of the best (and sometimes worst!) aspects of modern marketing is the ability to get instant feedback and conversations with your viewers.

If you want more information about SEO, marketing, and other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs!

9 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Boost Online Sales

Content marketing has become a very important method for businesses to reach out to their target audiences. It involves providing content online that your customers might find interesting and/or helpful. Valuable content will help you engage potential customers and bring in new business. Here are 10 types of content marketing you can use to boost online sales. Whether your business already has a content marketing plan or you’re just starting out, hopefully you’ll find something useful in this list for your online business.

Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the most potent content marketing tools at your disposal. Blogs allow you to provide as much useful and interesting content as you can and easily spread the information to lots of people. If you’re not sure where to start with your blog, try to provide general information about your product or think of questions that customers have asked in the past and give the answers. You can also look and see what other similar businesses are talking about on their websites for inspiration.

Guest Blog Posts

Once you get comfortable writing your own blogs, you can expand your reach by writing guest blog posts. These are blog posts that you write for other websites that are relevant to your business to try to expand your reach to new people. You need to build a relationship with the owner of the site to get permission. You might offer a trade of guest posts so both of your websites receive more traffic.

Email Lists

Having a list of emails for current and potential clients is an amazing resource for spreading content. Posts to social media sites such as Facebook may only reach a small amount of your followers. Emails are guaranteed to at least go through to everyone on the list (though whether or not they read it is up to them!) Start your email list ASAP by adding an email subscription form to your website. Then you can send content as a regular newsletter containing whatever information you want. If you add incentives, such as a chance to win free products, you’ll get even more people interested.

Videos

Videos are a great way to provide content, and people love watching them. Since they are more visual than regular text, you can express yourself in many ways that don’t work as well in a blog. You can supplement your blog with similar information or provide completely different content. Set up a YouTube channel for your business, create videos, and link them to your website.

Images and Infographics

Images are a powerful tool and can relay a large amount of information to your audience. Use photographs, illustrations, or other types of images to spice up your content. Link them to your website, blogs, and social media posts. Infographics can be even more useful since they can combine the visuals of pictures with informative text. However, when choosing pictures to use for your content marketing, make sure that they are ones you made yourself or that you have permission to use. Otherwise you can get in some legal trouble.

Podcasts

The popularity of podcasts has exploded in recent years. People listen to them in the car, at work, while doing chores, or while hanging out pretty much anywhere thanks to smart phones and laptops. Record interviews, stories, or other information about your business and post them as podcasts for your customers to download.

Ebooks

Anyone can make an ebook to either sell or give away online. You just need to combine enough information about your business into one package for distribution. After you’re done writing and putting together the information, provide a download of it on your website.

Surveys and Interviews

Your content doesn’t always have to come from your own mouth: ask around for information from your audience or other people in your profession or niche. Surveys and interviews are both great ways to get information to your customers in a smooth and easy-to-understand way. Use them to bring more interest to the topics related to your business.

Testimonials

Similar to surveys and interviews, testimonials also allow you to get content about your business from the points of view of other people. Testimonials are endorsements from customers that provide proof of the value of your business. New customers tend to feel more comfortable with a business if they can see that other people have already tried the product and support it. Urge your customers to provide feedback about their experiences and put them on your website or social media.

Content marketing is a great way to boost sales for your online business. Use these methods as a starting point and get the content flowing on your website! You can also check out more ways to spice up your website and boost online sales with VMA's blog here.