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Why Copywriting is the Litmus Test of Your Online Marketing Readiness

By Cathy Goodwin in Featured

Online marketing requires considerable planning, especially to those promoting a service. Service business owners and independent professionals face multiple challenges of promoting themselves as well as communicating the value of their services.

Therefore service business owners often question whether they are ready to launch a full-scale online marketing effort. Almost always, the question can best be answered by the copywriter – the resource charged with creating and implementing the business’s message strategy.

Copywriting as a Litmus Test

The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines a litmus test as, “a test in which a single factor (as an attitude, event, or fact) is decisive.” They give an example of a political party using gun control as a test for a candidate’s acceptability for office.

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that copywriting is the litmus test of an online service business owner’s marketing readiness. For example:

A few years ago I got a call from someone I’ll call Jeanne. She wanted me to write a sales letter for her new high-end coaching program. She had spent a few thousand dollars with a marketing coach who was helping her schedule the launch, with dates for preview calls, letters and joint venture partners. Now she wanted me to work on the copy for the sales letter.

“Terrific!” I said. “I’ll just need some information.”

Jeanne was scheduling a 6-month program. What topics would be covered each month? She didn’t know and she wasn’t planning to decide right away.

Now I was hearing alarm bells. I asked Jeanne for some testimonials from previous clients. She didn’t have any. She had just left her corporate job. She wanted to begin a high-end program, working with a 12-person group over 6 months.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe your corporate background qualifies you for coaching. Let’s see how we can present your experience.”

Jeanne’s life history was extremely colorful. She had come through some challenges and overcome setbacks. She could have published a memoir. But, she warned me, “You can’t use this in the copy! It’s all private. I just wanted you to have some background.”

In the end, I couldn’t do anything for Jeanne. She just wasn’t ready for copywriting. But the truth is, she wasn’t ready to open the doors for her business. And, like many business owners, she didn’t realize I could have helped her develop a product strategy and brand so she could avoid arriving at a dead end in this way. Sadly, from what I can find online, she’s given up the business and returned to the corporate world.

Copywriting Creates Action

When we start to write copy, that’s where the rubber meets the road. The gaps show up immediately. Even if you’ve worked with half a dozen other consultants, you often won’t know what you need till you start to write. That’s because copywriting requires you to answer questions like

What are you offering?
Who is going to benefit?
Why will they benefit?
Why will they care?
Why are you qualified to deliver those benefits?
How can you make them believe you are qualified?

Once you answer these questions, you know you are ready to share your service with the world. You have a solid offering that prospects can evaluate. Now you can begin creating your actual sales letter – your online advertisement – and get ready to enjoy the rewards.

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Are you getting the best possible results from your online marketing? Copywriter Cathy Goodwin creates compelling website content for business owners who are pressed for time. Discover how you can increase your online marketing revenue and attract more clients without killing your productivity or your bank account. Download your free 5-point checklist to assess your own website: http://www.CopywritingWithCathy.com

6 Essential Social Media Marketing Tips

By Brent McCoy in Featured

When you go about marketing your online business through social media, there are a few basic guidelines you should aim to follow. These can be applied to forming connections in social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as in social bookmarking services like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit – although, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent.

Being a success through social media is all about leveraging connections, and giving in to the fact that no website is an island. If you are completely self-absorbed and only socialize with others for your own benefit, then you will have a hard time building a loyal following. These next few tips will help get you moving in the right direction, so you can grow your network much faster by using social media.

1. Get To Know The Culture: Before you get too trigger-happy and start sending friend requests or following people all over the place, get comfortable with how people interact in your chosen network. Find out what people respond to and get a sense of the language and etiquette people use when communicating with each other. Generally people will sense a spammer from a mile away, and most often it’s because spammers don’t interact in the same way as normal people do (or most times, not at all). If you want to avoid looking like a spammer, then learn to follow this communication etiquette.

2. Don’t Grow Your Network Too Fast: Another thing that could make you look rather bad is attempting to grow your friend or follower count too quickly. Having 10 followers when you follow about 500 will make people think twice about what you’re on the site for, and they probably won’t want to know you. If you grow your friend count at a more natural rate then it’ll look a lot better, and you’ll get many more people interested in connecting with you in the long run. Also, another key to being successful with social media is having a good quality following – not just quantity. Having 50 friends that you’ve taken the time to become closely acquainted with (and turn into loyal followers) is better than a few hundred that only serve to clog up your list.

3. Show Interest In Others: One way you can grow your network really quickly is to simply show that you’re interested in what others are doing – not by sending out a stock email, but by reading a person’s profile, visiting their website and sending them a personalized message to show that you care about their ambitions. This will get the majority of people you send requests to accepting them, or people you follow to follow you back – hence, avoiding too much of a hit-and-miss approach for growing your network.

4. Respond To Comments: If someone writes on your wall, or mentions you in a tweet, take the time to write back to them. This reassures people that there is an actual person sitting behind your account, and helps grow the trust that followers have in you. Obviously it can become a little difficult to keep up with everyone once your network gets really big, but in the initial stages you should try to do what you can to make each of your followers feel extra special.

5. Share Content From Other People: Re-tweeting or sharing content that other people post can do a lot to increase the trust and interest that your followers have in you. First, it indicates you are on the site to participate as a normal person would, and are not just there to send people to your own web links. Any relevant content you share adds value to those you share it with, and most of the time they will love you for it as much as if you had created the content yourself. Secondly, it hints to your followers that if any of them created a quality piece of content, then there’s a chance that you might take the time to share that as well.

6. Learn From Others: If you are still unsure about what you should be doing to succeed in social media, then one of the best things you can do is take a look at those who are already successful to see how they do it. Visit the people in your niche who have loads of friends or followers and watch how they interact with their network. Get to know the various techniques they use and you’re likely to find a way you can use them to grow your own following as well.

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Article by Brent McCoy. Millionaire Studio is an online entrepreneurship blog that features articles on online business, blogging, marketing and social media: http://millionairestudio.com/

How to Webcast Videos on the Internet

By Shawn Lam in Featured

Webcasting, also known as live video streaming, is one of the fastest growing video production services. Companies are increasingly using webcasting as a means of communicating that is more engaging than a conference call. The reason that webcasting is so much more effective as a communication tool, as compared to a phone call, is that part of all messages is delivered in non-verbal communication that isn’t transmitted using audio alone.

Webcasting also has the benefit of connecting groups that aren’t in the same physical location at the same time to the same presenter and is often used at conferences, both for incoming and outgoing video communications. Live video streaming saves both the time and expense of flying a speaker to several locations and is an effective way for companies to lower their carbon footprint.

Single camera webcasts can be very simple to produce but multi-camera webcasts require professional equipment and a technical director to perform the live switching. For the most basic webcast, a single camera transmits both the audio and video feeds to a computer that is connected to the Internet and the video is uploaded to a streaming server. The video is then embedded on a webpage for viewers to watch.

Adding additional camera angles requires much more planning, communication, and equipment. Each camera operator requires directions and the technical director communicates with them using intercommunication headsets. Tally lights are also helpful for the camera operators to know which camera is live but the technical director can also communicate this verbally.

The technical director operates a video switcher, which allows her to view each of the video inputs, and switch the output video back and forth between the different input signals. The video switcher is then connected to a specialized computer that encodes the video (and audio that is generally mastered on a sound board, independent of the video) and streams it to a streaming server. A streaming server is a server that is fast enough to deliver live video feeds – a standard server that is used for website hosting is not fast enough.

Many video production companies use streaming service providers instead of running their own servers. There are even some companies like Ustream and Livestream that offer free video streaming, but they interrupt the video stream with commercials so paid services are a better fit in the corporate market.

Top 5 tips for Producing Webcast Videos on the Internet

1) Don’t forget about the audio: Proper microphone placement is important and on-camera microphones are only useful for webcam-style presentations.

2) Avoid free streaming services: They interrupt the video stream regularly with commercials so your viewers will miss portions of your webcast.

3) Multiple camera angles are more engaging for your audience: Shot variety is one of the keys to retaining viewers and having multiple cameras means you can anticipate the next shot and not subject your viewer to pans back and forth searching for the next speaker.

4) Webcasting requires fast upload speed: Internet service providers brag about their download speed but don’t often advertise the upload speed, which is often a fraction of the download speed, but a fast upload speed is what is required to stream the video to the streaming server.

5) Plan your pre-roll: You should start your webcast well before the scheduled start time and provide a holding slide with audio so the viewer knows they are getting both an audio and video signal in advance of the start time.

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Shawn Lam is an award winning and professionally accredited Vancouver video producer, educator, and product reviewer who specializes in corporate video production, live video switching, and webcasting. He is a contributing editor for EventDV Magazine and served five terms as President of the BC Professional Videographers Association. You can contact his Vancouver Video Production company at
http://www.shawnlam.ca/

Why SEO in All the Right Places Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

By Jill Whalen in Featured

When I teach my SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn’t. I’ve always felt that it was important because they’re often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn’t they, with all the myths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn’t, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is:

Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it’s an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it’s the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of SEO has always been based on that principle, more people are coming around to it in the wake of Google’s Panda Algorithm.

Pre-Panda, many people built thriving businesses using the following basic SEO process:

* Buy a keyword-rich domain name that encompasses the products you want to sell.
* Build a templated website around it.
* Link internally to the product pages with descriptive anchor text.
* Use those same keyword phrases in the Title and H tags.
* Submit the website URL to lots of directories.
* Drop links to the website in other people’s blogs and forums.

Making The Most of Mobile Advertising

By Tamara Jacobs in Featured

Mobile marketing increased by 75% between 2009 and 2010, the highest marketing jump of any platform – social media marketing increased by 32% and internet marketing by 14%.

What does that mean for advertisers? It means that they have to start becoming active and creative with their mobile marketing campaigns and that will involve a strong understanding of how consumers interact with their mobile – when they use them most, how long they spend on them, and what they are using them for.

Research indicates that the average mobile app session is 4.3 times longer than the average website session, this is likely due to the fact that people using mobile apps are doing so while they’re waiting in lines, sitting on the bus, or dottling until it’s time for their next appointment. Moreover, the average number of apps per smartphone device is almost one hundredth of the total number of apps available for IOS and Android devices and less choice means more focus.

How can brands take advantage of consumers in these instances? Some suggestions are:

1. Personalised experiences for shoppers:

By tracking down consumers once they visited a retailer’s site, brands can show them products according to the parts of the site they clicked on. It is of significant importance that all products and offers are relevant to each consumer since mobile shopping sites display little information.

2. Social integration:

This is good for both consumers and retailers. Consumers obviously love spending time on social media sites – 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers in 2010. More specifically, the number of mobile subscribers accessing Facebook increased by 112% between January 2009 and January 2010, and the number of subscribers accessing Twitter rose by 347%. For brands integrating social into their mobile shopping experience is great because it means that consumers can easily share products they like with their friends and family.

3. Mobile advertising:

Store location and hours are key for mobile marketing as are Google maps and advertisers would be silly not to take advantage of them.

More than advertise to them, brands should think of creative ways to interact with their audience via mobile. Knowing that they might be standing around killing time might inspire them to create some sort of game where, if they win, they have access to a discount code they can use towards a purchase. With an idea like this brands are reaching out to their audience, entertaining them, engaging them, and offering them a good reason to come to their store or make an online purchase. If they ask for the users email and phone number to give them the discount code, they can include them on their email list and continue the conversation at a later date.

There are a lot of fun and innovative marketing ideas brands can come up with for mobile, and it’s high time to get going on them.

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Article by Tamara Jacobs. Adaptive Consultancy is a London-based digital agency specialising in website design, eCommerce, and internet marketing, including SEO, PPC and SMO. For more on ecommerce solutions visit http://www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/e-commerce/

What Is More Important – Quantity or Quality in Online Article Submissions?

By Steve Shaw in Featured

You may be wondering if taking the time to write a quality article is really worth the effort, considering that if you spent less time on each article you could produce more of them.

What exactly does article marketing require? Which is more important in an online article submission–quality and quantity?

The answer is “both”, but not in the way you may think.

Your first job is to produce a quality free reprint article. If you don’t, then your article won’t be republished. Republication is the whole goal of article marketing. If you throw together an article and it’s laden with spelling and grammar errors, then it’s not going to be much use to you.

You also have your readers to think about–people will form opinions about you based on your articles. If your articles are well-written, thoughtful, and helpful, then people will come away with a positive impression of you.

If, on the other hand, your articles are confusing and look thrown together, it can appear as if you’re unprofessional. It can be hard to take you seriously.

It is to your benefit to take the time to write a solid article. Here are 5 things to shoot for:

1 – You need to refine, edit, and check your article for grammar and spelling errors. You may need to spread this work over a few days.

2 – Your articles should be organized–the argument or points in your article should flow in a logical manner.

3 – The subject matter of your article is important too–your article needs to answer a question that your readers are wondering or teach them a skill.

4 – Your title should be constructed to catch a reader’s attention. The title should clearly tell what the article is about and be phrased in an interesting way.

5 – Your articles should provide fresh information. Don’t just write what you see other people writing. Instead, put your own spin on things, teach your topic from an angle that hasn’t been covered, and answer questions that you don’t see being answered.

Let your readers guide you–many times a customer or client may ask you a great question. Many times your answers to these frequently asked questions can be used as the basis for articles.

As you get more used to writing, the process gets faster and easier. It may not take you as long to write an article when you become more experienced.

There’s also the issue of quantity–does it matter how many articles you submit?

Yes, it does. You need to submit enough articles on a consistent basis to see results with article marketing. When you’re first starting, it may be something that you work up to.

If you’ve been wondering if you should be focusing on quality or quantity, focus on quality first. Get your writing process down so that you’re creating quality articles, then you can work on writing a sufficient number of article each month.

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Steve Shaw has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites, and he wants to help you do the same – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website … including yours! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report – some people have used the same information to boost their traffic by up to 600%!

Death of Steve Jobs Fails to Break Twitter Record

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

We all heard the sad news yesterday that Steve Jobs, founder and visionary at Apple, had died at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

I heard it from a client who lives one mile from Apple headquarters and was awoken by helicopters over his house at 4.30am. But most people heard about it via social media. Within seconds of an official statement released by Apple, the first tweets started to appear.

“#ThankYouSteve for the magic you brought to people’s lives.”

“iSad. RIP Steve Jobs for leaving your mark on technology.”

“My iPhone made all the difference during earthquakes on 4 Sept, 22 Feb & 13 June – it found my kids & reassured my family #eqnz #ThankYouSteve”

“Life is the only thing Bill Gates has beaten Steve Jobs at. #ThankYouSteve”

“Steve Jobs changed the world. We have lost a true pioneer and American visionary #iSad #ThankYouSteve”

Twitter users started spreading the news of Jobs’s death, adopting #SteveJobs #iSad and #ThankYouSteve hashtags attached to their tweets. For the first few hours, the rate of Twitter activity about Job’s death looked like it was going to break the tweet per second record of 8,868 tweets per second, set after U.S. R&B artist Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at the MTV Video Music Awards in August.

Australian social media monitoring firm SR7 estimated that Twitter activity hit 10,000 tweets per second following the announcement:

“We’re awaiting the official Twitter data to be released, however, from the numbers that we’ve been monitoring through the day since the announcement it’s certainly been trending to break that record,” Peter Fraser, co-founder of SR7, told the news agency Agence-France Presse.

TwitSprout went even futher, claiming tweet activity reached 42,000 per second at one point.

But it was Twitter who finally revealed the truth. In a statement given to Forbes last night, a spokeswoman from Twitter said that their internal data showed a rate of 6,049 tweets per second. That’s faster than tweets following the death of Osama bin Laden (a little over 5,000 TPS), but below the 8,868 tweets per second that followed Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement.

But even though the death of the technology icon failed to break the all-time tweet record, Steve Job’s death *did* break Twitter temporarily. The site fell over for around 2 minutes under the weight of the heavy initial tweet load.

Apart from anything else, it’s an interesting insight into the growth of Twitter. Consider this: following Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 there were just 493 tweets per second being sent, yet this was still enough to crash the service.

As a final tribute to Steve Jobs and the impact he had, Twitter staff put together a fascinating infographic portrait, consisting of a visualization of public #thankyousteve Tweets, sent over about 4.5 hours yesterday.

RIP Steve Jobs.

12 Clever Ways to Boost Your Traffic

By Terri Seymour in Featured

Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it and we have to be consistent and persistent.

Sales conversion rates normally average less than 5%. What this means is that only 5% of the people who visit your site will become a paid customer. So, to grow your sales, you need to boost your traffic and/or your conversion rates. Below are twelve things you can do right now to start increasing your traffic to get those sales.

1. Launch an Article Marketing Campaign – Writing articles is not as hard as you might think and it can do wonders for your traffic! Write about something you know and just pretend you are telling a friend all about it. There is no need to use big, fancy words because people just want basic, straightforward information. Submit your articles to some of the more prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles.

2. Guest Posting and/or Commenting on Blogs – Do a search to find quality blogs in your niche and ask if they accept guest posts. Write helpful comments on existing posts and leave your link. Get involved and start building your reputation! A good place to find blogs that need guest posts is BloggerLinkUp

Making Sense of Trademarks in AdWords

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

I was talking to a small business owner the other day, who was complaining to me about how difficult it is to run Pay Per Click ad campaigns on Google when you are faced with conflicting information all the time. I asked him to elaborate and he said:

“I talked to my Google AdWords rep recently and he said that using company names in an ad violates Google’s terms. Also, in some of your blog posts, you seem to suggest bidding on common brand names is also a violation. But I was under the assumption that this was common practice. Is it not? I’m sure our competitors are doing that and I’m wondering if I could report that to Google?”

It did seem like a confusing issue, so I decided to research it a little more.

Use of Your Company Name or Trademark in AdWords

Putting your own company name or trademark in your ad is certainly not a violation, it’s encouraged, particularly if yours is a well known brand/name. In the section of AdWords Help called Use of Trademarks in AdWords, there is an authorization form you can submit to be able to use your brand / trademark throughout your account.

Use of Your Company Name or Trademark by Competitors

The use of your trademark by competitors is where things get complicated. It differs between region and differs again between ad text versus keyword bids. Google actually opened up trademark keyword bidding two years ago, however AdWord’s trademark policy is now dependent on the region your trademark is registered in and the region/s your billing account is located in.

This is a crucial change and one that has likely gone unnoticed by many advertisers. So here are the main regional trademark policies:

AdWords Regional Trademark Policies

1. In certain regions, Google allow some ads to show with a trademark in ad text if the ad is from a reseller or from an informational site. There is covered by a separate trademark policy for resellers and informational sites.

2. For regions that are NOT included in Google’s trademark policy for resellers and informational sites, if their investigation finds that the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, Google will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future.

3. In most regions covered by the Trademark policy (250+ countries including UK, USA and Canada), Google will investigate ad text only. They will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint in these regions. Furthermore, their investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google rather than those served on partner sites.

4. In EU and EFTA regions, Google does not prevent the selection of trademarks as keywords. However, in response to a complaint, they will do a limited investigation as to whether a keyword (in combination with particular ad text) is confusing as to the origin of the advertised goods and services.

5. In some limited regions, Google may investigate the use of trademarks in ad text, in keywords, or in both ad text and keywords. These regions include:

• Australia
• Brazil
• China
• Hong Kong
• Macau
• New Zealand
• North Korea
• South Korea
• Taiwan

Because Australia and New Zealand are included in the above list (and these are the countries in which I operate), I have witnessed a few keyword trademark infringements and represented some clients who lodged complaints procedures based on this policy. I have also been following closely a landmark case playing out in Australia about this very issue:

Landmark Test Case

In 2005, Australian telecommunications company Telstra found themselves in legal hot water when an online publication owned by one of their subsidiaries purchased Google AdWords blatantly using the names of competitors in their ads.

As a result, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) launched legal proceedings against the Trading Post Australia and Google Inc. in 2007.

In their Federal Court case hearing earlier this month, the ACCC challenged the use by Trading Post of the keyword phrase “Kloster Ford”, which was the name of a car dealership in Newcastle, as misleading conduct in breach of the then Trade Practices Act. When “Kloster Ford” was searched for using the Google search engine, this advertisement appeared:

Kloster Ford
www.tradingpost.com.au New/Used Fords – Search 90,000 + auto ads online.
Great finds daily!

The ACCC argued that Trading Post’s use of “Kloster Ford” in its sponsored link was misleading and deceptive as it represented that there was an association or affiliation between Trading Post and Kloster Ford and the ad suggested that information regarding Kloster Ford or Kloster Ford car sales could be found on the Trading Post website, when it could not.

The ACCC also alleged that, by publishing the results pages with these AdWords, Google had itself engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct. In response, Google raised a defense that it was engaged in the business of advertising and did not know that AdWords purchased by Trading Post amounted to an infringement of consumer legislation.

On 22 September 2011, the Australian Federal Court held that the Trading Post had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act 1974. However, they dismissed the claim against Google, stating that while Google provided the technical facilities that permitted the relevant advertisement to be seen, it did not follow that they had endorsed the information conveyed. Consumers would understand that the message being conveyed to them was an advertisement from the advertiser, they stated, rather than the publisher. A settlement between ACCC and Trading Post has since followed.

This case is significant for all Australian businesses that place advertisements through Google AdWords and other pay per click models, because it means that use of competitor trademarks, business names, brand names and URLs could potentially breach Australian consumer protection laws.

Navigate With Care

So the upshot of all this is that unless they have your explicit permission, your competitors generally aren’t allowed to use your brand/name in their own ads, but if you’re located in the US or other areas outside the limited regions mentioned above, they ARE allowed to bid on your brand/name as a keyword.

But it’s not all bad news – it means that you are allowed to bid on their brand/name as well.

However, as with any legal issue, tread carefully when using trademarks in your ads. Accidental or not, a violation of AdWords policy can result in the closure of your account by Google and possibly even land you with a lawsuit.

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Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

That First Impression: Title Considerations

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

While it certainly isn’t as much work as crafting the body of a superior article, selecting a title for a piece is definitely an important element of the entire process of content creation. The title of an article is a multifunction web tool, providing opportunities for engagement with the reader and search engine in equal measure. Putting some thought into the title and how best to leverage its effects will help title choices provide a solid return on investment instead of burdening an otherwise good project needlessly.

Making Wordplay Work

The necessity of a good title is rather self evident if one plays a small game. Borrowed from Christopher Hitchens’ autobiography, Hitch 22, the game basically goes like this: Pick a popular movie title and change it just slightly to get a “title that didn’t quite make it” — Quiet of the Lambs, American Pastry, Mister Zhivago, the American Samurai and such all demonstrate the importance of getting things just right. A small change can eliminate the value of good wordplay or an entertaining twist of phrase in favor of something more bland and pointless.

To that end, try to put some thought into the title. Reference popular works — for example, a comparison piece doesn’t go wrong by referring to “A Tale of Two…” Alternatively, the title could reference a key quotation or phrase within the body of the text itself. Don’t ignore something that seems to work, but double check creative title ideas against someone else’s opinion, just to be sure.

Words are Key

The title is a crucial part of the Search Engine Optimization process. Keyword spiders and algorithms often look at the first words in an article, and the title is no exception. Having the core keyword worked into the title will consistently help return better results within Internet searches.

However, this comes with particular caveats: Some keywords, particularly keyword phrases, are long and clunky and can interfere with the aesthetics of a title. If the keyword phrase in question is “how to brew your own beer,” that’s one thing. A clever preface can be put before it, with how to brew your own beer as a subtitle or addendum to the main line. On the other hand, the keywords might be “Legal Advice Auto Accident,” which is more difficult to work into a clever title. Experiment with a few approaches, and consider putting only a few of the keywords into the title or breaking them up into a fresh sentence.

Another trick concerns where to put the title. In many blog posts the title will have its own section. However, also consider putting the title and its keywords into the body of the paragraph itself. Some search engines ignore separate title fields and focus on the content of the article itself, so this can help keep a writer from robbing themselves of good keyword return.

Brevity, Please

Particularly in the academic world, titles of articles and papers tend to be long and quite dense. “An Analysis of the Savior Archetype in Modern English Literature” certainly tells us what the paper is about, but could also easily be summed up as “The Savior in Modern Literature” and loses nothing of its statement of intent.

Further, keyword optimization becomes less effective the further into a document one gets, and this includes the size of the title. Proper keyword effect selects for shorter, more efficient use of titles, so avoid the temptation to put the whole topic into the title line. Go for simpler, brief word choices that allow expression of the important information without going on and on.

Hyphenated titles are very popular for this reason. A single word can capture the intent of the message, such as “Betrayed,” and then be followed with keywords. To take an example from the news, perhaps the keywords are “WikiLeaks” and “PayPal.” The title could then be “Betrayed — WikiLeaks Banned from PayPal.”

To Joke or Not to Joke

Not every lighthearted article responds well to a joking title. People are oddly finicky and picky about when they’ll accept humor, and the use of puns in a title is a risky gamble. Yet it undoubtedly works — consider the example of the Focker movie trilogy starring Ben Stiller.

Obviously if the article is a serious piece, a pun should be avoided unless it’s executed in the vein of dark humor. Serious work demands a serious title.

However, an important rule of thumb is to be very cautious about industries or groups in jokes. Consider for whom the article is intended. If it is aimed at a wider public audience, such as a newsletter or advertisement intended to bring people into a site for discussion or purchases, then an excellent inside joke would be misplaced. Not everyone understands the jargon, so it should be limited. On the other hand, a specialty letter crafted specifically for professionals of the plumbing craft could easily get away with jokes about piping and other internally-recognized puns. As with any online venture, the goal is clearly to keep the audience first and foremost in mind when selecting a title, rather than simply hoping they’ll “get” it.

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Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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