Write My Site will be exhibiting at this year’s Online Marketing Show, which is one of four shows that comprise Marketing Week Live. It takes place on Tuesday 29th and Wednesday 30th June at the Grand Hall, Olympia.

As part of the show, we will be delivering a workshop called ‘Blogging for Business’ at 1.20pm on Tuesday 29th June.

Tickets for Marketing Week Live cost £20 on the door, but you can get free tickets in advance by clicking the banner at the top of this blog post and entering ‘Write My Site’ in the invitation code box.

Hope to see you there! (We’re at Stand A420, near the cafe).

P.s. We’re giving away free chocolate on our stand. Not that we’re trying to tempt you or anything …

When you first sit down to write an article, it can be a daunting task. Here are Write My Site’s top tips for writing an article that grabs attention.

Make a list – Bullet point all the ideas you would ideally like to cover in your article. Do they fit together as a set? Are there any duplications? Which points are essential and which can you remove?

Take some time – Once you’ve sorted your list, take some time out. Focus on something else while the ideas germinate. When you sit down to write the article, you’ll feel calmer and more prepared.

Don’t force it – Write for as long as the words flow. If you hit a wall, don’t fight it.  Change task, maybe go for a walk - you’ll come back refreshed and ready to jump back into the fray.

Don’t censor yourself – On the first pass, don’t edit your own writing. Trust your ideas and abilities and express them in the most comfortable way to you. This will eventually lead to a more natural and personable article.

Proof read carefully – Of course the flip side of this is the need for a number of revisits to edit and correct your article. This gives you the opportunity to refine and crystallise your concepts, while ensuring you put your points across.

Talk to Write My Site if you would like to explore business blogging, article marketing or web content. All work is covered by our Quality Guarantee to ensure you’re 100% satisfied with your content.

It can be argued that of your e-marketing armoury, newsletters have to work hardest. Potential clients will actively seek out your website or your blog, but the newsletter goes to them. It pops up in their personal inbox and has to compete with hundreds of other emails for attention.

So it pays to be attention-grabbing, both visually and in your writing. The easiest way to achieve this is to always put the reader first. Always ask yourself whether the content of your e-newsletter is relevant to your readership. It’s great to announce your firm’s new promotion, but your recipient wants to know that this is a move that will safeguard his investment, or develop the product s/he buys to a higher standard. Targeted email marketing is key.

Although you’re sending the newsletter as a way of marketing your business, don’t be afraid to let your personality come through. Humour can be a great attention-grabber when used appropriately and create a personal tone that speaks individually to customers, rather than leaving them to wade their way through business-speak and jargon. Short anecdotes illustrating your point have a similar effect. These tactics create individuality and tend to stick in the reader’s mind long after your e-newsletter has been buried under the weight of new emails in your customers’ inbox.

Finally, if you are illustrating the newsletter then pick a strong image which clearly sums up the content of the piece. A striking visual will be instantly absorbed by your client, encouraging them to delve deeper into your e-newsletter and read the accompanying text. If you’ve followed the points above, they’ll soon be hooked on your e-newsletter and from there it’s only a short click to your company’s website.

Linkedin is one of the most high profile social media platforms that was specifically designed for business networking. It has over 60 million members across 200 countries, so there’s a very good chance a lot of your business contacts are using it. Here are 5 ways to use Linkedin for business:

1)    Connect with everyone

OK so not everyone you’re ever met, seen or heard of, but certainly everyone you know in a business context. Start with your colleagues, and then expand your list of contacts by inviting your clients and suppliers to connect with you. Are you on any other social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook? It’s likely many of your contacts on those sites will also be on Linkedin so connect with them too. Finally, if you attend industry events, such as conferences or networking receptions, invite everyone you meet there to connect with you on Linkedin, including journalists and bloggers. It won’t be long until you’ve built up a strong network of business contacts. Linkedin provides several tools to help you locate people you know who have profiles on the site – try the ‘People You May Know’ column on the home page, and the email address book search tool.

2)    Create a group

Linkedin has a Groups feature, which – if used correctly – can be a great platform for you to initiate dialogue with your customers. Set up a group that is relevant to your industry (for example, we recently set up a group called Content Marketing for SMEs), invite all of your contacts and encourage them to engage in discussion.

3)    Join other people’s groups

As well as setting up your own groups, sign up to other groups that are populated by your target customers and join in the conversation.

4)    Answer questions

Search for relevant questions using the Linkedin answers tool and provide free, helpful advice. You’ll be surprised how frequently this can turn into new business for your company.

5)    Set up a company profile

It is now possible to create a separate Linkedin profile for your company in addition to your individual profile. You can brand the page with your logo, write a description of your company’s products and services and link to your company’s website and business blog. Make sure you take full advantage of this feature by including your keywords throughout the profile: this will boost the chances of it being listed in both internal and external search results.

With more than 350 million active users, Facebook is almost certainly populated by a good chunk of your customer base. The social networking giant is free to use, and has recently introduced “fan” pages for businesses.

Setting up a Facebook fan page is easy: simply click on this link and follow the instructions. The real question is why should you set one up? Here are five reasons why setting up a Facebook fan page could be a great move for your organisation:

1)    Free of charge. It costs nothing but a few minutes of your time to create a Facebook fan page and to send the link to all your contacts.

2)    Effective list-builder. Everyone who becomes a fan will have your page listed on their profile. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends*, you can introduce your business to 13,000 people with just 100 fans.

3)    Shout louder. Won an award? Received some favourable press coverage? Announce it on your Facebook page and have the news picked up by your fans in real-time.

4)    Direct customer feedback. E-commerce retailers in particular can benefit from speedy feedback from customers when they post photos and descriptions of new products.

5)    Blog promotion. If you have a business blog, you can post links to each update from your Facebook fan page and benefit from extra traffic to your website.

To see a Facebook fan page in action, have a look at ours (and become a fan if you like what you see!). We use it primarily to raise the profile of our blog, whereas several of our clients use theirs to research new product and service ideas, or to build up their database of contacts.

Talk to Write My Site about managing a Facebook fan page for your business.

*http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Social media success stories wanted!

Not too long ago we wrote an article about guest blogging. We’re now extending a cordial invitation to you, our readers, to be our guests on this blog. If you’d like to contribute an article to the Write My Site blog (with a link back to your website, of course) please drop us a line at info@writemysite.co.uk with the words “Guest Article” as the headline.

We’re looking for contributions from companies who’ve successfully used social media, blogging or article marketing to promote their products and services. If you’ve achieved results using these marketing methods, we’d love to hear from you.

A blog is one of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your web presence and provides a superb platform for your business to engage potential customers, without resorting to the hard sell. A recent study of 1,500 SMEs found that blogging increased website traffic by an average of 55%. Furthermore, the average company that blogs has 97% more inbound links and a massive 434% more indexed pages than the average company which does not blog.

Having a blog on your website brings huge benefits. However, with only 250-ish words to get your point across (the best blog posts are brief), how can you make your blog stand out and best reflect you?

Before starting you should have identified your main target demographic, as this will largely dictate the tone of voice you adopt within your blog articles. Consultancy businesses may wish to take an advice-led approach to display their expertise, for example. Whatever your decision, make sure your chosen voice is an authentic representative of you; there is no point writing in a ‘teenage’ voice if your business is a luxury catering service.

Once you have your style, you want to look at your substance. Blogs should contain certain keywords that will get your site ranked by the search engines, but without becoming a blatant sales platform. They are an amazing way to show off a wider knowledge to your customers, informing, helping and sparking debate. For example, if you sell wedding dresses, you may wish to highlight new catwalk shows, provide handy hints on finding the ideal accessories or ask if white really is the best colour for the big day.

Finally, remember that blogs are interactive, so don’t be afraid to express an opinion and start a debate. However, do try to present a balanced argument; it lends your blog credence and inspires thoughtful and considered responses.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix.

1) Make more money

Let’s start with the main reason why most people use Twitter for business: to identify potential customers and generate sales.

Micro-blogging is all about people. It’s not about getting up on a virtual podium with a megaphone and making noise about your organisation: it’s about building a network of individuals and getting to know them.

Establish your brand in its industry by building a fan base or, as it’s called on Twitter, a network of ‘followers’. Start with people you know: your customers, suppliers and business network, then add suitable people to your network by running keyword searches through tools such as Tweetdeck and Tweepsearch. [Tip: every month, run a search through Tweepular.com to identify people who aren’t following you back, then un-follow them. It’s supposed to be a two-way thing.]

Engage with your followers regularly and they’ll start re-tweeting your posts and becoming advocates of your brand. Not all of your followers will necessarily become your customers but they’ll do something just as important, which is to advocate your message to their network. From our own experience at Write My Site, most of the business we’ve generated through Twitter has been the result of other people re-tweeting our posts or sending us public messages which were spotted by their followers.

2) Generate PR coverage

Follow journalists and editors in your industry, send them an introduction and ask them to follow you for industry updates and breaking news. Then, when you’ve got a press release available, put it on your website and send the journalist a message with the link. Interacting with journalists is no different to interacting with the rest of your business network, so take an interest in their updates, re-tweet anything that might do them a favour, and engage in dialogue with them where appropriate. (It’s much cheaper than taking them to lunch at The Ivy.)

3) Find out what your customers think

Invite your customers to follow you on Twitter. Follow them back, and ask for their honest feedback about your products, services and brand. Used properly, Twitter can be a great tool for learning what your customers like and dislike about what you do. Look at negative feedback as a gift: you’ve just been handed free information about what your business needs to improve. Twitter is also a great way to conduct initial customer research about new product and service ideas. Can you distil the idea into 140 characters? (If not, it’s too complex.) When you’ve articulated the concept, put it out there and see what comes back. Use the feedback to refine the concept and develop a highly targeted product or service.

We’re starting to come round to the idea of Twitter. Much as we love our “no fads, no bandwagons” policy here at Write My Site, we’ve got to admit that Twitter has been paying dividends for us recently. After several weeks of posting about chocolate, last night’s TV and anything else that seemed like a suitable distraction from work we finally got our collective act together and started posting links to this copywriting blog, as well as engaging in dialogue with other business users. And guess what? We made some money! And then we made some more money. And now Twitter’s generating a steady stream of revenue for us – not bad for a free service.

But many businesses are quite understandably suspicious of Twitter, and are reluctant to use it as a marketing tool. Not only is the web-based version still pretty embryonic structurally, Twitter etiquette is still in its infancy too. There’s no established code of conduct in terms of the appropriate way(s) to promote your service using the tool and there’s no telling what which Twitter-based campaign will work, and which will go horribly, horribly wrong.

Even Wendy Tan-White, whose web hosting company Moonfruit recently enjoyed a huge publicity coup via the site, admits that she was unsure whether her strategy would work. The company gave away 10 Macbook Pro laptops for the most creative tweets using the hashtag #moonfruit, and the campaign shot to the top of Twitter’s trending lists, with people drawing pictures, making videos, and even singing songs about the brand.

“I really love the medium and it felt like it could work” says Tan-White, “But it could have gone the other way - we could have been vilified for spamming.” This is exactly what happened when UK furniture retailer Habitat hijacked popular hashtag topics to gain attention, and merely succeeded in winding up users, creating a huge backlash when an “overenthusiastic intern” linked the brand to the post-election protests in Iran.

Habitat probably won’t be Tweeting again for a while, but Twitter still holds massive potential for creative and innovative digital marketing campaigns, and I can certainly say that Write My Site can’t wait to see what happens next!

We have today published the results of our blogging survey and we were not surprised to discover that 70% of the small businesses we interviewed struggle to find the time to keep their blogs up-to-date.

We asked 125 small business owners about their blogging habits and found that, while 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month. The remaining 71% have admitted they just weren’t able to find the time to maintain their blogs.

The survey focused almost exclusively on very small businesses, as these organisations tend not to be able to afford the ‘people power’ that larger businesses can leverage. 42% of our interviewees were one-man-bands; and a further 43% worked within organisations with 1-5 employees with the remaining 15% working for larger organisations.

The full release is available in our Press section. Please feel free to reproduce as long as Write My Site receives a credit and a link back to www.writemysite.co.uk.