Pre-selling assumes that your customers are usually on your website to find answers to their questions or problems, and not to buy. The difference between selling and pre-selling is how you present these answers.

Pre-selling is just the opposite of selling, which is perceived as something that pressurizes you to buy. Pre-selling recommends subtly through one or two links in the informative content, building rapport with the reader and positioning you as the expert. Wouldn’t you be ready to listen if your trusted consultant recommended something to you? And that’s what pre-selling does. Pre-selling works because when people think you’re selling, their defenses go up; but in pre-selling, people are ready to listen.

Just about anyone is capable of doing the hard-sell on a product or service on the Internet. What makes the difference between a consistently successful online business and the ones that are looking for a quick buck boils down to the website’s ‘tone’. Every website speaks to its visitors and when the visitor reads the content, it should create the impression that the website knows what it is talking about.

Depending on how this content is expressed, it can establish you, the website owner as an expert. Rather than publish yards of running text that most visitors on the move are unlikely to read, the content must be presented as informative bite-sized pieces. Obviously no visitor wants to buy without knowing more about the product or service. To reach that fine balance between no information and the overdose, “pre-selling” is the answer.

Around 400-800 words is acceptable for pre-sell content to position you as the expert even as you gently pre-sell your visitors on your product or service. Here are some benefits of pre-selling:

• Ever wondered why NASCAR, Wimbledon, the Olympics, etc. always start on time? It is because they are pre-sold. When you pre-sell, you set a deadline. On that date, you’ll have your product or service out with no excuses
• When you pre-sell, your project is already funded. Which means – you don’t have to get all stressed out. What you need to do now is create compelling content and attractive packaging!
• You get a good look into your customers’ behavior for your product or service. Based on this information, you can tweak and tone before you launch your product/service.

Your next thought is probably about what you can pre-sell – here are some ideas:

• Books – can be pre-sold long before you write them.
• Products – obviously
• Seminars and workshops – you probably know this already. Some marketers pre-sell a series of these ahead.
• Consulting sessions – where your customer pays you before the event
• Membership sites – can be pre-sold even before they exist.

Just imagine how motivated you will feel to deliver when your first customer pays you!

There can be various purposes for publishing content on your website or blog but when you want to generate business from your content, you need to impart the right information as clearly as possible. What’s right information depends on how your customers and clients perceive your content, not you, unless there is a parity.

Whenever you are writing content (or working with a content writing service) for your business you should step into your customers’ shoes. This means not only presenting the greatest benefits of your product or service, but also addressing their concerns before they raise them themselves. This means highlighting even the negative aspects of your product or service. But this doesn’t mean you’re conveying something negative about your business: you are simply informing your visitor so that he or she can make the right decision. Here are a few things you can consider to make your content writing process informative:

• List all the benefits: What do your customers gain when they purchase your product or service? Don’t go on a boasting binge. For instance, if you want to avail my content writing services it doesn’t matter much to you if I’ve done my higher studies in linguistics or if I read abstract literary classics in my spare time. You are interested in knowing whether I can consistently provide you quality content or not, and if yes, what system I have in place to ensure it. Additionally, what benefit you get by working with me and not by working with another content provider?
• Who might benefit the most: Don’t try to sell your product to everybody under the sun (although this seems very desirable). When you are selling, you’re not selling a product or a service, you’re selling a benefit, a usage, a value. So whereas selling combs to bald men may seem quite smart, you are simply cheating people and when they realize it they’re going to have a really bad feeling about your conduct. Help people make a better purchase decision.
• Clearly mention if there are any drawbacks: You may think, what am I talking about? Am I trying to help you increase your sales or lose your prospects. The truth is, if you think there are too many drawbacks then may be you should reconsider your offer, and if you think their are more benefits then drawbacks then your customers are going to thank you for informing them. Don’t let your customers find out what your product doesn’t do — tell them on your own and also tell them when a particular feature will be available in case it is currently missing.

“Call to action” means telling your visitors in plain words what they should do, now that they are on your page, as nicely explained in this blog post at Copyblogger. It can be like, “Contact me now”, or “Go to this page to know more”, or “Subscribe to my newsletter” or even “Buy it now!” and so on. It may seam very simple, but it actually increases your click-through rate.

An average visitor to your blog or website is highly distracted due to hundreds of things competing for his or her attention. So while creating copy we shouldn’t assume that he or she will understand what you want him or her to do on your website. If you want to make a sale, display your “Buy now” link or graphic as soon as possible. If you want someone to subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feeds, tell them to subscribe. People like to be told what to do, and sometimes they just do it when they see a call to action word. This is a tried-and-tested fact. Our mind is trained to follow instructions.

The blog post I just read calls it The Godfather Guide to Direct Marketing: Make Me an Offer I can’t Refuse. Although I’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie (I know, I know) but I can totally relate to the expression and this should be consistently kept in mind while preparing promotional literature. Offer something great and highlight it. It should be bigger than your company name. It should be the first thing your customer or client see as soon as he or she comes to your website or unfolds your brochure.

Not everybody is dying to do business with you or awed at the marvelous things you’ve done with your products or services, but how do you solve my problem? For instance, I’ve been thinking of buying a slightly higher-end digital camera for a couple of months, I don’t want to buy a cheap brand and I don’t at the moment have the needed cash to buy a reputed brand like Canon, Sony, Nikon or Panasonic. This is my problem and I’ll immediately buy the camera if a vendor offers me a good solution. There must be thousands of customers like me and if the vendors are not addressing this problem I think they are losing a big chunk of sales. The answer to my problem would be being able to pay in easy, multiple installments and that would be an irresistible offer for me.

But what if you don’t have an immediate offer?

An offer doesn’t always mean giving something tangible. If it is not a direct consumable then it can be some emotional benefit. The point is, your message should answer the question “What is in it for me?” immediately. We’re all besieged with problems and consciously or unconsciously we’re looking for solutions. I’ll revisit my problem again with a new angle. Diwali, one of the greatest Indian festivals, is approaching fast and such festivals bring lots of moments that you would like to capture with your camera and you won’t miss them for the world. It’s a time when families get together and since we live in different cities and even countries, such gatherings are all the more special. Personally, I’d like to click my daughter enjoying a phooljhadi (a tiny firecracker you can hold in hand). An ability to click such moments can also be an irresistible offer for me. Make it so genuine and enticing that I buy the camera at the cost of another expense.

Of course this means you cannot target every customer or client under the sun with that single offer. There might be many who can spend the money but are not crazy about buying a camera although once they have it they can make good use of it. Then there might be some who despite having the ability, and a flicker of desire to buy the camera, are going to spend the festival alone or are not particularly attached to their families and friends. This is where targeting comes. Narrow down your target and you’ll sell more. Don’t worry about losing sales by not offering everybody something; you’ll compensate that by narrow targeting.

A good thing about online copywriting is that you can always perform split-tests. Prepare different pages for different targets and observe how they perform. With pay-per-click advertising it is even easier to see the results quickly.

There are torrents of ideas when you start a new blog and in fact you’ve got so much to write that you feel like publishing multiple posts in a single day. You have to forcibly stop yourself just to maintain a semblance of regularity. You start dreaming about featuring in the top 100 blogs of your niche and your traffic graph actually throws buckets full of encouraging numbers at you. It’s like a dream run.

And then you begin to wake up.

It’s not a sudden awakening. You toss and turn around, you try to keep the dream going. 5 posts a day get reduced to 2 or 3 and 2 or 3 get reduced to 1 and then, to your horror, you begin missing entire days. After sometime, it doesn’t even remain a horror, you have nothing new to write and you have lost enthusiasm. You wonder how come all those successful bloggers keep coming up with one killer post after another with phenomenal regularity and to add insult to the injury, they not only write great stuff for their own blogs, they also write awesome guest blog posts for other blogs. What are you missing?

First of all you have to realize that everybody runs out of topics, eventually, even the greatest of bloggers. So how do they get new topics? Here are a few things you can do to keep the streams of blogging ideas flowing:

Be a part of the community

When you work alone there is a far greater chance of you running out of blogging ideas. Visit other blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what people are talking about. You get lots of new ideas when you interact with people.

Give priority to building a community

It’s hard to run out of steam if you’ve got a vibrant community on your blog. It’s always very encouraging when people give feedback, whether positive or negative.

Encourage your visitors to ask questions

Once you’ve developed a community, encourage your visitors to post questions. If you write about a product or a service believe me, people will have unlimited queries, and every query can be turned into an engaging and useful blog post.

Get active on social media

Lots of interaction and stimulation takes place on websites like Twitter and Facebook. People are constantly posting interesting tidbits that can be easily turned into great blog posts. Even small exchanges can be transformed into full-blown blog posts with some effort.

Get ideas from your existing blog posts

Lots of sub-topics are hiding in your existing blog posts. Go through your old archives and try to revive your old blog posts with new perspective. A lot changes in a few months. You can also re-write your older posts with some new twists.

Add value to blog posts and articles appearing on other websites

Use websites like AllTop.com, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and PopURLs to find new content relevant to your field and see how you can derive new content out of them. Don’t worry about always writing longish blog posts. Even if you have one paragraph to add, link to the original content page and add your bit. This way it won’t seem daunting. Besides, sometimes when you think of publishing just a single paragraph, it’s easier to writing a long blog post.

Learn and share continuously

Learning doesn’t just help you blog non-stop, it also improves you as a professional, but that’s a different point. It’s great fun learning new things about your niche and them sharing them with your readers.

The key to NOT running out of blog post ideas is realizing that everybody does, and you constantly have to keep this in mind and plan accordingly. How do YOU make sure that you don’t run out of topics?

There are basically two reasons why your website or blog needs unique, fresh content: the search engines prefer unique content compared to commonly and easily found content, and people who are active on various social media and networking websites prefer to promote something unique, something highly useful and something that attracts immediate attention.

Search engines looking for unique content

Various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are constantly competing with each other. Just because they get millions of visitors daily don’t assume they have it easy. Even a small fluctuation means millions of ad dollars lost. So they are constantly trying to improve their ranking algorithms and trying to find and index content that is unique.

The uniqueness and the usefulness of the content they find for their users keep those users from switching over to another search engine. Why would the users use a search engine that finds the same stuff that can be found on scores of other websites? Hence, in order to get higher rankings you have to make sure that the content published on your website or blog is unique as well as highly relevant.

Social media users want to promote unique content

Nobody likes to promote content that is being promoted by 500 other users. Social media websites can bring you tons of traffic if you can lure their users to your website by providing highly interesting, topical and relevant content that they cannot find anywhere else. But do they promote your links just for altruistic reasons? Not at all.

Take for instance Twitter and Facebook. Why do people keep posting interesting links on these websites? They want to show that they can locate and share interesting stuff. They want to be useful to their followers and fans. This way, if they are posting 10 useful links from other websites and blogs, they can also post a few from their own website without looking spammy. Besides, on Twitter, interesting tweets get retweeted and this is beneficial both to the owner of the link and the one who tweets it because both gain exposure.

Then there is conventional logic too. When you publish useful content on your website it tells your visitors that you take pains to keep them informed. If you share important information with them you establish yourself as an authority, and in more than 99% cases authority brings respect and trust, and respect and trust leads to loyal customers and clients.

Although SEO spammers have given a bad tinge to the art of using keywords in your web page copy, they are still as relevant as when the humans discovered their importance vis-à-vis search engine optimization. Really, it makes common sense. It’s the keywords and the key phrases that tell both the search engines and the visitors what you’re talking about in your web page copy or blog post. Miss the keywords, and you miss the whole point.

But aren’t there various ways of saying the same thing and wouldn’t you prefer to let the feral stallions of your imagination run wild on the meadows of writing, you may ask? Sure, but when you’re writing for your client, or when you’re writing for business (maybe yours), the need to generate business takes precedence over your proclivity for articulating psychedelic expressions.

You need to use the language used by prospective customers and clients.

Researching and selecting keywords and phrases

When I start a new optimized content writing project (to be candid, everything I write turns out to be optimized because of the way I write), I begin with a brainstorming on what sort of audience I’m writing for and this pretty much decides what keywords and phrases I’m going to use. This is often difficult and many content writers end up with near-gibberish content, but you can sort this problem out by making a list of benefits of the product or service you intend to promote through your writing. This may seem like a clichéd approach in the beginning but not every product or service is known by its name.

It is natural if people search for a "web designer" or an online "copywriter" because by now they are very known services, but there might be a few people who don’t know what SEO is and they may search for something like "improve my search engine position" or "get me on google first page". So aside from optimizing for a generic term like SEO, you also need to take care of people who conduct searches using direct benefits as search terms. Similarly if you are selling a mobile application that lets you manage your ERP system through a smart phone, there is a possibility that people look for "smart phone erp application" rather than the actual name of the software. Or for that matter people may search for "safest family car" instead of using known brands. If you are ignoring such search terms, you are missing the real traffic, whether you are a big business or a small business.

Organizing keywords

I use the main keyword in the heading and the title of the web page or the blog post. Although I use it just once in the first paragraph, if the context demands a repetition, use it again, but don’t use it more than twice. If you feel like using it more than 2 times, rephrase your sentence.

If your keyword is an expression comprising multiple words (for instance, online content writing services) you don’t have to use the complete expression all the time. Use it once or twice (try using it at least once in the first paragraph) in its entirety and afterwards, just scatter it across your remaining paragraph. You can repeat the complete keyword in the last paragraph too, but don’t force it if it doesn’t seem appropriate.

Aside from the paragraphs you can also use the keywords — partially or fully — in your headings and subheadings, bulleted lists, and even in your anchor text.

Is there some other way you feel the keywords can be researched and organized? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

These days I’m writing for a client who wants to put up lots of educational content on his website and then wants to leave it on his visitors whether they want to buy his product or not. Of course we’ve mentioned on every prominent web page – again, without pushing the visitors to buy – that he intends to sell the product he’s talking about on his website and they can buy it as and when they feel like. He believes that educating his visitors is better form of selling compared to writing traditional sales copy. I agree with him.

But while writing educational content for him I’m taking care that the phrases and the keywords that I’m using get him the right sort of traffic. After all it’s a business website and not a reference website. Along with getting "how to do this" and "how to sort out that" kind of traffic he should also get "I want to buy this" kind of traffic and in fact such traffic holds more value for him. Striking a balance is difficult but that’s how an experienced content writer comes handy.

Benefits of educational content

I had lots of "educational" stuff on my website when I was designing and developing websites; in fact people had started suggesting that I should publish an e-book teaching how to become a web designer and start selling it. The downside of it was, most of my visitors wanted to learn web designing and very few wanted me to work for them. This shouldn’t happen when you are publishing lots of educational content on your website. They should definitely learn and get more informed, but they should also be interested in buying from you. Once you’ve figured out how to achieve that, here are a few benefits of publishing lots of educational content on your website/blog:

• Educational content gets you more search engine traffic. Search engines are more interested in finding the right information for their users and somehow the guys working at the major search engines think educational content should get priority over commercial content.
• It helps you establish your authority. When people know that you know your stuff, they develop a respect for you, especially when you share your knowledge again and again and they find that knowledge useful. I’m not regretting that I published lots of educational content on my website, it’s just that my targeting was misplaced. Share your knowledge and experience consistently – if I’m consistently sharing my thoughts on copywriting and content writing on my blog or website people will prefer to hire me rather than the person who merely has 12 drab pages from where he or she urges his or her visitors to hire him or her.
• It familiarizes your prospective customers with your product or service. Many people don’t do business with you because they don’t know enough about your product. When they read lots of material on your website or blog they get to know about the benefits of your offer and then they are in a better position to make up their minds. In fact after reading your educational content people who aren’t even thinking of buying your product or using your service may decide to do so.
• It helps you in establishing a social networking and social media presence. Most of the content promoted on Twitter, Facebook and Digg is educational or newsworthy. Sales copy rarely makes it there because why would people promote your links where you simply urge people to hire you or buy from you, what is there in it for them? Educational content on the other hand deserves to be promoted because it helps others and increases the goodwill of people promoting it.
• You open yourself for challenge and hence broaden your growth prospects. When you share your ideas, your knowledge, your wisdom openly and then invite people to share their thoughts, you expose yourself to criticism and counter arguments. This either earns you critics or admirers, and it’s definitely better than having none.

Can you come up with more benefits of publishing educational content on your website? Please do share them in the comments section.

When you use keywords just for the sake of generating traffic, it hardly works, and even if by some fluke it works, it still doesn’t work because that traffic never converts. Sure, using keywords in your content does increase your traffic because this is how you tell the search engines what topic you are talking about, but they should appear naturally, as a part of your overall copy. In fact their occurrence should be so critical that without using them your copy makes no sense.

How does using keywords increase your traffic?

Once you have made a list of your important keywords, you start preparing your content. You use those keywords to convey your message, and if somehow you don’t seem to be able to use them in your copy, then they’re probably not important to you. If your keywords are important to you, then there should be no dearth of material for them.

For instance I provide online copywriting and content writing services. I have more than 60 pages (I know, it isn’t sufficient, and I must have more) discussing various aspects of online copywriting and content writing. I’m constantly writing for my blog on the topics of online copywriting, content writing and SEO, and so I get plenty of reason to use keywords and expressions relevant to my business, and this is gradually increasing my traffic for various combinations.

It’s not always possible to rank well for your keywords due to massive competition; what do you do then? Try for longtail search expressions. Longtail search expressions constitute of longer strings of 5-6 words. It’s often not easy to make a list of longtail search expressions; they gradually begin to surface as you regularly generate interesting and valuable content for your website, using your important keywords.

Effective copywriting and content writing is always preceded by a thorough understanding of your target market – your customers, your readers. Want to be a better copywriter? Think from the perspective of your customers. And in order to be a better online copywriter you also need to understand how the search engines interpret what you have written.

Of course we all have different definitions of being better. By being a better copywriter I mean you can improve your conversion rate and by being a better online copywriter along with improving the conversion rate you also improve your search engine rankings. In the end what matters is what the results are and how consistently your copy can perform.

When you understand the needs and desires of your target readers you can provide them exactly what they are looking for. An average surfer on the Internet is looking for solutions. Even when people are looking for brands they are actually looking for solutions. For instance if I am looking for an iPhone, although I am looking for a particular brand I am actually looking for two things: my desire to own a trendy gadget and the things that I can do with all the functions the phone carries. You have to cater to both the aspects if you want people to buy iPhones from your online store.

So when you are working on a copy understand what your customer is looking for and highlight that thing. If you are promoting yourself as an online copywriter, along with highlighting the sort of service you are providing, also highlight the greatest benefit your clients are looking for in case they want to hire you.

• Do they want a more professional voice on their website or blog?
• Are they looking for a particular style of writing?
• Are they looking for a particular expertise (technical writer, medical writer, film critic, instructional writer, blogger, SEO writer, etc.)?
• Do they want to improve their conversion rate?

These kinds of things immediately convey to your prospective customer or client you have what they are looking for. If you simply go on and on about what a great writer you are and how many clients you have worked for it is not going to make much impact.

This goes for any kind of product or service. Whenever you are starting to write think about what your customer or client would like to read. If it helps make a list of all the things your customer can gain if he or she purchases your product. Feel enthusiastic about all the benefits your product can offer. Why must your customer feel excited about your product or service? This should be the starting point.