Book & Product Reviews

Opportunities for quiet reading seem to have vanished the last couple of months.  But yesterday I took a couple of hours and read a book on SEO Copywriting.

• Content Rich – Writing Your Way To Wealth On The Web by Jon Wuebben

Jon states that his book is:

• The complete SEO Copywriting Guide for Search Engine Rankings and Sales Conversion

What You Get Out Of This Book

At first, it was hard to situate this book.  I already have some SEO copywriting skills.  What else could this book offer?

As I flipped through it, a few of the chapter titles are similar to what you would expect for Search Engine Optimization:

• Keyword Research
• Optimizing Your Site Content

But most of the book is about writing content for good Search Engine Optimization.  It is a copywriting book.

Jon caught my attention right from the beginning, my back straightened up. This book offers more than copywriting.

In the first couple of chapters I found:

• Some really useful strategies for content creation.

Now, I have spent a lot of time working on my own strategies for content creation.  And Jon actually taught me two very useful things:

• How to analyze your web copy
• How to prioritize which type of content you need to get what you want out of being online

This might seem easy for you.  But I have not run across these clear tactics before.  And these tactics are:

• Easy
• Relevant
• Measurable

If you are in any way involved in writing for the web, the first few chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

The cover of the book promises copywriting for sales conversion, and Jon shows you how.

These first chapters are good examples of what happens as you read the whole book.  There are little nuggets throughout the book.  Nuggets to help you get maximum value out of your online content.  Nuggets that come from experience.

At first, I thought I would skim through the chapters on subjects that are familiar to me.

But the book was well worth a full read.  It is obvious that Jon has the experience and knows what he is talking about.  He knows how to improve your web copy for better SEO for both humans and search engines.

Who Is This Book For?

Well, the book is definitely about copywriting.  SEO copywriting.  There are chapters for different types of online copywriting:

• Web copy
• Articles
• Press releases
• Viral copy for blogs, RSS, and Wikis
• Pay per click, landing pages and banner ads
• Emails and newsletters

Jon also explains the differences in copywriting between small companies and large corporations.  There are case studies.  And there is also a wealth of information on how to become a SEO Copywriter.

This book is great for anyone  involved in web content:

• Marketers, writers, and even technical web users.

What I most appreciated was how it is easy to see the strategies that go with the “how-to’s”.  It’s not often you find this mix in a book.  This makes it easier to see the whole picture of writing the content and using your content to get the results you want.

Read more Book Reviews:

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

• A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
• Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
• Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
• Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
• Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
• The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
• The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
• The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

• All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
• Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
• Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
• Sales Strategy From The Inside Out By Duane Sparks

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

• Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
• Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
• How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
• How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
• Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
• Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
• Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
• Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
• ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
• Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
• The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
• Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Here are some Product Reviews:

• Ed Rivis’ Stats Faceslap
• Success Chef’s Marketing E.S.P.
• The Management Tools I Use For Content Created To Be Re-Packaged
• The Ultimate Desktop Copy Coach By Tony Flores
  
• Web Video University And International Marketing
  

All of the book and product reviews here are totally unsolicited… spontaneous …and without affiliate links. These are books I have read recently and only the ones that I share with friends. So all of the reviews you find here are on books and products that I highly recommend.

Also, as these are books and products that I have recently read since, this is not a list of my all-time favorite books. Hopefully I will get around to reviewing my favorite culture and international business books sometime soon.

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

Content Rich By Jon Wuebben

International Copywriting

Copywriting is any type of writing that offers products or services for sale.

Writing For A Call To Action

Copywriting skills are needed whenever you have a call to action, even if this is not a sale.  Calls to action can be:

• Press this button… for any reason
• Sign up here… for anything
• Give me your support
• Call me
• Read more
• Come see me
• Ask for a free trial, report or anything else
• Buy my product

As you can see, a call to action can take many different forms.  Most of these calls to action are part of a lead generation or sales strategy.

Writing For Sales

Beginners are often confused about what is involved in copywriting.  This is because there are different types of writing for sales:

• Feature article copy – editorial writing, a little more formal, but also uses conversational writing style.
• Big ad agency copy – short and clever copy, used to build awareness and does not have a sales order device.  Success performance is not tracked and you cannot measure exact response to see how well the ad worked.
• Direct response copy – asks for an immediate action with a strong call to action.  Success of this copy can be tracked and measured.  Direct response copywiritng is personal.

Good Web Copywriting

Writing for the web is closer to direct response copywriting than any other writing style.  Whether it is for profit or not.

To understand this, you need to understand how people use the internet.  Their behavior online is linked to the action of search.

Your website needs to keep your readers:

• Attention, to get them to stop and stay on your website.
• Interest, to get them to read and look at your website.
• Desire, to spend more time on your website, and even to come back again
• and calls them to Action, to read more, to visit more of your web pages and to click through your links.

This formula, AIDA, is the first basic formula copywriters learn to write sales letters.

There are a few differences between Direct Response Copywriting and Web Copywriting.  But the principles of good Direct Response Copywriting correspond to good Web Copywriting by over 90%.

When you think about it, there is no coincidence that you can use the same copywriting principles.

• You can track and measure results for both Direct Response Copywriting and Web Copywriting.

When people refer to Web Copywriting this usually also involves SEO Copywriting.  More on the differences between these two in a later article.

It Is All About Conversation

Conversational style writing skills are what makes great copywriters.  Conversational skills that connect with target markets.  And these are the two reasons why conversational writing style works:

Empathy – You talk to your reader as a friend. You show that you understand your reader. This is empathy.

Not Selling – You provide solutions. In a conversational writing style you do not sell, you provide solutions to your readers problems.

Conversational copy is quick and easy to read.  It hits the emotional buttons that will get your readers to respond to your call to action.

This is why conversational copywriting is a proven sales technique.

Layers Of Marketing

In fact, a copywriter relies on marketing skills just as much as writing skills.

Let’s look at a typical copywriting project.

Professional copywriters usually spend their time as follows:

• 40% – detailed market research
• 20% – writing
• 40% – editing copy for sales objectives

As you can see, marketing research is a vital part of good copywriting.  This happens before the actual writing.

Marketing guidelines also come into play.  These guidelines look at the whole communication experience for the reader and also include:

• How the reader responds within a specific market
• Where your reader is when he finds your copy
• How the copy works with your reader’s specific environment
• How the copy works with the graphics

And the copywriter also refers to these guidelines when editing his copy.

And… Intimate Knowledge Of Your Readers

When you fully understand your reader, you are able to call him to action.

• You use the same vocabulary and buzz words as your reader.
• You know how to talk to your reader to get him to listen to you.
• You know exactly what his deepest fears, motivations and desires are.
• You understand how he will respond to what you say.
• You know how to respond to his objections.
• You know which emotional buttons to push to get your reader to respond immediately.

With a little tracking to measure results, copywriting skills are a valuable sales tool.  In fact, all successful marketers online have invested in good copywriting skills.  Either by taking the time to learn copywriting themselves, or by outsourcing.  And usually a mixture of both.

More on International Copywriting:

• Marketing Is An Integral Part Of Copywriting

More in the Get International Clients Business Guides

• International English
• Culture Customized Content
• Connect With Your International Markets

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

What Is Copywriting?

International Web Marketing

As a very small business owner, I do have more flexibility in certain business strategies than many bigger businesses.

Content Creates An Online Communication Base

It has now been 7 months since I started my business directory.

• Writing and publishing an article each work day for 6 months
• Creating a business system
• Recently color-coding on the website to make this system obvious to the readers

Of course, with over 200 articles there is now an obvious editorial direction for the website.

But I have always wanted an online communication base for my own business.  Sure, I spent some time looking into the great Internet Marketing “Get Rich Quick” processes out there.  It is a good way to pick up a lot of knowledge on web marketing practices.

This is what lead me into copywriting 3 years ago.  But I chose to study copywriting because I already had good sales skills, and sales writing skills.  Of course, you need good copywriting to make money on the web, whether you are in a typical get rich quick internet business or a brick and mortar business using the web as a tool.  But recognizing good copywriting is already more than half the work done.

My situation was a little different.  I already have valuable skills.  I knew I wanted to use the internet primarily as a communication base for my own business services.  My websites are there to communicate my international business development system.

All well and good.  But how do you go about communicating your business system online to reach the right people, and to bring in the right clients?

Structure For Your Business

I found I needed matter to work with.  Content.  Lots of content. This took me 6 months of writing one article a day.

As a small business owner I had the flexibility to jump in and develop the structure on an on-going basis.

My primary focus was to write on and around my main business subject area.  My articles are not primarily determined by niche keywords and research.  Of course I tried to use appropriate keywords, and ran keyword searches from time to time.  These searches often proved to me that I knew my subject matter well.  My main focus was writing on my own clearly defined subject.

On a side note, my experience has shown this content strategy to give fantastic SEO results.  I have come up on the first page of many different search results from month 3 onwards.  Businesses from all over the world find me.

People pay money for SEO?  Why don’t they sharpen their business perspective and knuckle down to work on exploiting what is basically a communication platform?

Now that the content structure is there, the content is extremely easy to create.  This business directory has become very easy for me to feed.

Using the flexibility I had in the beginning probably gave me a better structure 6 months later than if I had planned everything offline first.

So, I now have time for the next business phase and it is now in progress.  This is the phase which links my business directory to my business.

What does that mean?

A Real Specific Business Offer And Not The Get Rich Quick Web Marketing

First of all I have a several new URL’s, or domain names, for very specific landing pages.  Now these landing pages are not the get rich quick type.  These are simply landing pages targeting each of the specific products and services I offer.

These products and services form a lead generation strategy.  This means:

• There are some landing pages for free products, some for paid products and services.
• There are also some landing pages for the same product, but written for different audiences.

This leads to a fair number of new websites, even if they are mainly mini-websites.

Ready Fire Aim

My immediate task is to set up 20 odd landing pages.  This takes time. I am doing just about everything single handed:

• Lead generation strategy
• Web marketing strategy
• Copywriting
• International SEO

Yes, it is a fair task, even just for mini-sites.

But as a small business owner I do have some flexibility.  Also as a small business owner I value batch processing.

So one of the first things I have done is to put all of the URL’s live.  I simply put all of the websites up with an article or two from my main business directory.

As a small business owner, I feel I can do this.

It is essentially a Ready Fire Aim approach.

Having all of the websites up early, means that Mr. Google will find them soon.  I will appreciate this when I actually get the website ready and want to promote it.  Tomorrow I start writing a new landing page website one after the other.

Online Flexibility Brings Success

One of the basics of international web marketing is testing and adjusting your communication. Your communication needs to be live before you get any real market feedback.

Market feedback often shows you how to improve your message.  The better your online communication is, the more sales you can expect.

Market feedback will also show you where your business potential lies.

So there will be lots of adjustments to the landing pages.  That is my second business phase.

More On International Web Marketing

• Define International Marketing
• How Too Many Contributions Spoil International Communications
• International Article Marketing
• International Email Marketing
• International SEO For Quick Results
• Marketing Segmentation
• Mindset Differences Between Offline Marketers And Online Marketers
• More Segmentation = More International Sales
• My Own Case Study – Small Business Flexibility In An Online World
• The Difference Between An eMarketer And A Geek Marketer
• Ways To Enter International Marketing
• What Is Marketing?
• What Is Your Definition Of International Web Marketing
• Your International Marketing Choice

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

My Own Case Study – Small Business Flexibility