Time is normally limited and with the Internet being a fast moving environment requiring fresh content daily, weekly and monthly, you will hardly have the time to create web copy at leisure time. This is perhaps the most important reason for hiring a web content writing company where numerous writers will slave away at professional copy as fast as they can. If however, you decide to do it yourself you will benefit from the web content writing tips below.

Internet and the offline environment differs vastly

Normally when you write a features article, a short story, essay, report or book you will have enough space and time to start with a comprehensive introduction leading gradually to the climax before coming to a conclusion. It is not the case with the Internet. People read Internet pages in another way and will simply not have the time to scan through an exceptionally long introduction. Just as time is not on your side when it comes to web content writing, so the reader doesn’t have time. You will write copy with that in mind. Also keep in mind that the copy for a blog differs from that of the actual information pages that you will create for your website. That copy in return will differ from the articles you will write as part of internet marketing. The copy for the newsletter will once again be unique and will have another structure. Our focus here will be on populating your website with content.

Web content writing for populating the website

When writing articles for the website you will have more freedom of expression and can use paragraphs rather than bullets and short sentences. The reason is that once a person decides to read an article, they are willing to spend time on the activity. When a person visits a website to find information about a product or service however, they will scan the page and not read it. In this case the content should be formatted for scanning and not reading.

Create a structure for scanning

Web content writing should thus be done in a hierarchical manner throughout the website. You need to give the readers clues as to the importance of wording through headings, contrasts, placement of information and colours. This is where superior graphic design will also be a benefit. Use style sheets in navigation to help the user.

Font sizes and colour combinations

Apart from the way you will go about to write the content you will also have to pay close attention to presentation. Use narrower columns rather than wide columns to organize information. Use an easy to read font type such as Arial or Verdana that will display well on all computers.

Web content writing for internet marketing purposes – the actual copy

The page content must be visible within the first paragraph. Many readers will only read the first paragraph to decide whether they want to move on or will want to read the rest of the page. Most important keywords and information should already be in the upper part of the page. You will have long paragraphs at first – not a problem you will summarize each paragraph in a single sentence which will form the beginning of the paragraph.

Headings and bullets for scanning

Have you ever noticed how many people never buy the newspaper and only read the news headlines when they pass the newspaper advert boards? The reason is simply because the majority of persons feel that they can get the information they need from the headlines. Keep that in mind when you populate the pages of your website. Create information packed headlines for the various paragraphs. This will help the reader to get the information wanted without actually having to read through the content. Create bulleted lists to organize benefits.

Armed with the above information on how to do web content writing for internet marketing purposes you are now ready to practice a few times before applying the knowledge to your own website.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

There are many article directories on the internet offering excellent free web content. True some of the free web content is of poor quality, but if you search a bit you will find many articles offering top quality content.

The article directories offer free web content because they make their income from Google Adsense and the article writers get back links to their websites in return for giving the free web content to you.

The latter is also a great way for you to get back links to your site. If you are a good writer you can write a few hundred articles or write two or three and make use of an article spinning service to create hundreds of articles from the three that can be submitted to article directories. You will be able to add a small biography at the bottom of each article with a link back to your site. Besides getting back links from the articles to your site (and normally they have good PageRank), you can also get back links from the websites where the free web content will be displayed.

The one problem you will have to overcome with submission of articles to numerous article directories on the internet is that the search engine spiders can easily identify spam if the same article is submitted to hundreds of article directories. The secret is to create unique articles by writing original articles which can be spinned and then submit by hand to about five to ten article directories.

Regarding free web content you should know that normally a link back to the original website will be required. This means an outgoing link for every article you use. This could damage your website PageRank. If the link is in an email however, it will not hurt your website PageRank as the back links will not be on your website. As such go ahead and make use of the free web content offered at article directories to create interesting e newsletters.

Where to find the best article directories on the internet for free web content and to get back links

The best route is to locate the top article directories for free content and also to get back links simply because you want directories with high PageRank and Traffic Rank. As such always check the URL (web address) of the article directory with a page rank checker (which can be located through a simple search on Google for “ google pagerank checker”. Go for directories with rankings of four and more if you want to submit your articles to be offered as free web content and thus get back links to your website. Some of the best article directories are that of SearchWarp, EzineArticles, Web-Source, and ArticlesBase. You will be able to locate many by simply doing a search for free article directories at Google.

Used responsibly the free web content can help to improve the content value of your e newsletters. Used as an internet marketing tool, the article directories will be excellent for back links and thus improved web page rank.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Always keep in mind that Internet users don’t read the website content from page one through to page 80 as would be the case with a book. Every article should thus be written to be able to stand alone without the reader having knowledge of the other pages. All the content must be related to the main topic of the website as to prevent confusion. Rather create another website for topics unrelated to the main subject if you have a diversified subject field.

All of the above taken into account you will still need to create coherent website content even though each page must be able to stand on its own. The relationship between the various pages must thus be obvious. The Internet makes it possible to jump from one page to another and to other websites. It is thus imperative that the relationship among pages will be noticeable.

You cannot for instance, have a website about flowers and then have an unrelated page about dog training among them unless you can show the relationship between a dog and flowers. To create relationship you will have to show in the article how dog training can help prevent a dog from trashing your garden.

When writing website content you will also have to keep in mind the pages read before the user got to the present page as well as the pages that the user will visit directly after reading the specific page. If you for instance, write about furniture selection for the dining room, the user most probably read the page of furniture selection for the house or furniture selection for the lounge first and may probably read the page about furniture selection for the bedroom or the study next.

Navigation can become tricky on the Internet

With the user being able to click on a link within a web page and then suddenly jump to another page in the website, you will want to create continuity so that the user can still see the relation between the page jumped to and the page jumped from.

Keep in mind that the user will not always get to a page through the same path. The user could have landed at the web page through a link from another website, banner ad, organic search results, affiliate marketing site, a referral from a friend, a direct link placed in an email or from pay per click advertising. The user could have reached the web page from the main page of your website, the sitemap, a link in another page on the site etc.

The solution

The secret is to help the user see immediately where they have landed and what the relationship to the other website content is. The best way to do this is to have each of the pages on your website start the same with a headline and introduction to help them understand what the page is about and how it is related to the rest of the website content. Also guide the users at the end of each page to related pages with links for further reading.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

First Step – Select the right topic that will be of interest to you

It makes no sense in selling a product or service of which you don’t know anything and don’t care to do so either. If the topic interests you and you believe in the product, service or idea, it will sell better. Remember that you will spend an awful amount of time working with various aspects of the topic and there is no way that you will want to write about or work with a topic that bores you. Essential thus for the success of an internet income generating website will be the topic chosen.

Keep in mind that you will have to write many pages on the topic every month. To lessen the overall strain it will take, get in the help of an Internet marketing company such as Intoweb that has a whole team of copywriters and SEO specialists to do the work on your behalf, leaving you more time to enjoy the income generated. To ensure that you have selected a topic worth pursuing ask whether it will be possible to generate hundreds of content pages about the specific topic and whether you will get bored with such a topic within the first week or so.

Second Step – Select a subject that will also interest other people

It is just fine to select a topic that will interest you, but will other people also find it interesting? The idea here is to find a topic that will spark interest and that can be extended to also sell e-books and various products from the same page. It is essential to select a topic that will stay in favour for more than a month and if seasonal then select a sub-topic to be treated for the rest of the year. Think about what people do after work in their spare time? If you want to create a website about money making, then you will have loads of traffic, but you will also compete with thousands of other websites for the same topic. If that is for instance your choice you have to create a niche within the popular topic and find a product that will sell well within that niche.

Step Three – High in demand topic and low supply to guarantee success of internet income generating website

You now already know what your passions are and have an idea of the passions of other people, but now you have to select the topic that will always be high in demand and for which there are not that many websites. To come back to money making – it is a high in demand topic, but the supply is also high. If you select a niche within the high in demand topic it will be easier to find a low supply area. Take for instance a topic such a making money from the Internet. There is a high demand and supply. To get the better of it you will have to select a unique area of making money on the Internet and work with that. Keyword research tools such as Wordtracker can be used to find appropriate keywords to find such a topic on the Internet.

Now work on the topic and get the help of a web design and SEO company to get in the traffic through an effective marketing mix and for help on writing thousands of content pages for your internet income generating website.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Managing bad publicity on the Internet

It does sometimes happen that a disgruntled customer can trash your company or website on the Internet at a site with a high ranking for keywords relevant to your website. One disgruntled customer can cause huge damage. Damage control is part of online traffic building. First don’t ignore the customer and never engage in flame wars. As with any customer complaint, handle the situation carefully and try to turn the customer’s complaints into something positive. In terms of the Internet, the best strategy is to create content with the keywords that bring up the page where the customer complains or trashes your site or company, as your main keywords. Keep creating keyword rich articles until your pages push the complaint page off the first two or three pages. Most of the users only scan the first two pages of search results pages and hardly ever glance over pages beyond those two.

Use images as part of an online traffic building strategy

In the past images had very little effect on the overall ranking of a website and although ALT tags helped, the search engines didn’t give much attention to images. If however, you have images on your site today with correct ALT tags, the images can land on top of the search results page when a user types in the relevant keyword. Flickr is the missing ingredient here. By sharing photos on Flickr relevant to specific keywords and thus your business you improve overall visibility of your website. For every image shared on Flickr, indexing will follow by the search engines. This in turn will help in the online traffic building efforts as ranking will be pushed up for the image and more visibility will follow.

Create incoming links through Social Media Sites

Incoming links create a stir with the search engines. Search engines see many incoming links to a website as other site owners perceiving your site to be important. With that in mind, the search engines will rank a site higher when there are many incoming links. Social Media is an excellent tool for creating the sought after incoming links and should be used as part of online traffic building if you want your site to stand out on the Internet. The first step however, is to create valuable content on your site. If the content is interesting, valuable, humoristic or helpful and even controversial, you will get the bloggers to link to it. If the blogger’s view is valued then links to your content will also be valued. The end result is incoming links, higher ranking, more internet visitors, and better sales.

There are also forums, business blogs, writing articles at article sites linking back to your website, using affiliate marketing sites to link to your site, and numerous other methods which should form part of your overall online traffic building strategy to improve the visibility of your website on the Internet.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Creating website structure as part of the internet marketing plan

It is all too easy to get off track especially if there will be many pages in the website. Create a structure diagram of the website first. It should look like an upside down tree, much the same as used in genealogy. The first entry will be the home page known as the index. From the index you will have numerous child pages on the second level. These pages will include the:

• About us page where you tell the client about your company
• Contact us page where all the contact details will be
• Location can be included in the contact us page or can be used as a standalone page
• Services & products pages which you can directly name such as baths, spas etc.
• Sitemap which is necessary for the search engines
• Articles which will be used for content pages on an ongoing basis
• Terms and conditions page
• Privacy statement
• Online shopping and ordering page

The above are just examples of second level pages. If you for instance, have a website about horses, you will have second level pages such as horses for sale, advertising, horse products, horse stables, horse riding, and more. Think descriptive as this will help the user to navigate through the site and will also help to improve the search engine placement for particular keywords. As a general note you will not have that many second level pages as each of the second level or child pages will branch out to numerous pages that fit under the specific category.

If you for instance, have an estate agency website you will have main categories such as Residential, Farm Land, and Commercial as part of the internet marketing plan website structure phase. Underneath each you will have rentals and sales in specific areas. You can add more pages under each of the second level pages which will then be the grandchildren or third level pages. Now count the pages. Although it may all of the sudden seem a lot of pages, some will fall away, but with many pages in your website you will have more pages that can be optimized for the search engines.

Internet marketing plan – keyword selection

Create titles for each of the pages that you have added to the tree. Now use the Insights search facility at Google or a tool such as Word Tracker to locate keywords which are relevant to each title and are in demand. The secret here is to find keywords for which there are gaps not yet filled by other websites. Also make a separate list of high in demand keywords already addressed by other websites, and of course also average keywords, and a few low ranking keywords.

If you have a website about free services and have a page title such as Fax to Mail you may find that many websites already use the keyword and as such you will find it difficult to rank tops without a bit of hard work. You will optimize the Fax to Mail page for the keyword phrase “ free fax to mail”, but will then also write a few articles about fax to mail. Each of the article pages will get a separate title such as:

Free Electronic Fax
Online Faxing Service
Free Email Fax

Optimize each of the article pages for one keyword phrase.

Internet marketing plan – Adding content on a regular basis

Once all the content pages have been written and uploaded you will need to add more pages every month for each of the main categories and subcategories. Each page should be optimized for one title and keyword phrase. Add the content pages to the articles page and make sure the content pages are also reflected in the sitemap as well as being linked from the articles page. Use these pages to link to other pages on your website and to link to the contact page and landing pages where the person can purchase products or services.

The above may become rather time consuming, but if time is a problem and you are concerned about your writing skills, get in the help of Internet marketing plan specialists and writers to create ongoing content and linking so that you can focus on your core business.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Difference between the blog and articles

Articles are normally static. This means the article is uploaded and it can take a week or more before it will be indexed by the search engine. Once indexed however, it will create loads of traffic if done correctly. Now add blogging to the equation and you will have more traffic to the articles and essential sales pages of the website.

By adding a blog to the website, you can write several shorter articles called posts and link the blogs to the articles and important sales pages. This creates inter-linking which is great for ranking and will ensure that the user spends more time at your website. The blogs can be written and pre-scheduled to be uploaded on a daily basis. This means new content everyday even if you have written a whole bunch at once. Every time the page is updated you give the search engines reason to come back and crawl the site. Blogs are indexed faster than articles and although the blogs can quickly shift to page three or even twenty, the fresh content and interlinking will be worth the effort.

Other uses of blogs for marketing on the Internet

Besides building links to static pages and helping with the page rank, blogs are also the ideal tools for gathering of information about customers, trends, and competitors. Users can leave comments and that interaction will be vital. Any user that has left a comment will want to know the response of the blogger on the issue. Funny enough once conversation is sparked other users soon join and automatically help to create a buzz also with the search engines. The comments are new content which search engines love. The secret is to react to comments in an open way to spark conversation.

Tap into the 25% market

About a quarter of internet users regularly reads and follows blogs. By using blogs for marketing on the internet, you will not reach 100% of the internet users, but a quarter of the market is all that will be needed as you will already reach the rest of the market through articles and pay per click advertising. The quarter reached however, will be important as blog followers love conversation and will evidently also tell others about the blogs. Blog readers are buyers as well. Many of them are looking for reviews on products or places. They want information to help them make buying decisions whether to buy into an idea, service or product.

Brand building

Although the term brand building is used for almost any type of marketing today, blog marketing can also be top brand building tools. Create review blogs, advice blogs such as “how to” and news blogs for clients and you will develop a loyal customer or brand base by using the blogs as part of marketing on the internet.

Blogs link liberally

Blogs are great link building tools. If another blogger finds the content on your site useful, the chances for linking will be tremendous. Best of all you will not even have to ask for the link. Just create valuable content and see the links coming in. Every link will help to push up rankings and to create essential traffic.

In conclusion if you are serious about online marketing then blogs must form part of the marketing on the internet strategy. If you don’t know or don’t have the time to setup and run a blog get in help from an SEO or website marketing company that has the team to do the work for you.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Take for instance, a jumping castle rental business. The clients are mainly from one area. Let’s say they are all from Pretoria East in Gauteng. The small business owner doesn’t want to reach people in the north of Pretoria or another part of town simply for logistical reasons. The owner doesn’t want to deliver the jumping castles to places further away than 20 km. It makes sense that the website marketing must thus be specific enough to attract clients in Pretoria within a 20 km radius from the business premise.

How to obtain such a specific marketing end-result is what the small business owner wants to know. SEO companies promising to get the site listed at hundreds of search engines, getting the site to the number one spot, and to ensure mega business simply don’t understand the website marketing needs of the specific business owner. In this scenario the jumping castle business owner’s main concern is to reach clients nearby including schools, nursery schools, and churches or corporate entities wanting to rent equipment for team building or fun days.

Only when the SEO and website marketing company has assessed the particular website marketing needs such as target audience, budget, expansion goals, and overall theme as well as products and logistical problems of the small business owner, can an effective website marketing campaign be developed to address specifically the above.

One way of ensuring that the correct target market will be reached is through article writing. Articles are written around specific keywords such as Pretoria Jumping Castles, Jumping Castles Pretoria East or Garsfontein Jumping Castles etc. Research must first be done to establish which words will normally be used by users to locate such a supplier for the area. The articles are optimised to be search engine friendly, but also to be informative, helping the client to make an informed buying decision.

Website marketing for the small business owner should not be all about advertising copy and no information. Many businesses fall into the trap. Even when articles are used as website marketing tools, the focus is heavy on advertising. It doesn’t take a person long to realize that every word is advertising jargon. Never underestimate the intelligence of the audience. You will certainly offend your would be customers. As such also make sure that the SEO Company that does the marketing for you will be able to produce quality articles packed with useful information.

Another mistake often made by small business owners when they first start with website marketing is to fall for every piece of hype about internet promotion. Note that not all links are good and although it is essential to have link building strategies to ensure high ranking, it should not be the main focus. If you have valuable information on your website, in due time sites will want to link to your site. The focus should be on content relevant to your target audience.

Ranking is not all that it is made out to be. It is rather impressive to have a solid ranking with the search engines, but a website can have a relatively low rank such as 2/10 and still perform excellent for particular regions and keywords relevant to the site and target audience. High levels of traffic are only worth something if the end result is more sales and better customer relations. Getting thousands of visitors and no valuable leads or sales is thus a waste.

When starting out with website marketing as a small business with a localised market keep the above information in mind and avoid the pitfalls which have caused many a small business to fold on the web.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."