6 Copy Writing Skills for Bloggers

Every blogger blogging for marketing wants to improve his or her writing skills to make a huge impact on people reading their blogs. The skill to capture the reader is a priceless asset. The main trick is to present the idea to sell to the readers, without making them feel apprehensive or forced.

Here are 6 copywriting skills for bloggers to help them achieve their marketing goals without scaring the readers away.

1. Know Your Product: There is the need for the blogger to has enough knowledge about the product he or she is promoting. Be sure that what all that advertisements about the product say is true. Knowledge about the product will make you feel confident about supporting the product while writing. The reader needs your assurance of the products being genuine.  After reading your blog they need to feel the need for what you have written about. Unless you sound convincing and enthusiastic yourself, they won’t be convinced either.

2. Understand Your Targeted Audience: Naturally not everyone will be convinced about what you are promoting. There are a number of reasons for that. For example; the reader might not need what you are promoting, or may not have the finances for it. Age group also matters when it comes to relating with clients. The youth requires a different approach from adults and professionals. Therefore knowing your customer type helps in knowing what approach will work well. We do not want to drive away the customer, therefore try being persuasive rather than dictatorial.

3. Outline the Benefits: Provide an insight to the benefits of buying what you’re selling. The audience needs to know what they will gain from the product. It has to work for the reader, therefore when you write, talk about the benefits. If you do not tell them what they will gain from the product they will lose interest and leave. The best approach is to highlight the benefits and make sure they are clear enough. Avoid using feathery words, be as simple and clear to understand as possible. The reader should be able to see the positive impact and how it will change their lives for the better.

4. Create the Need: This is the main challenge with copywriting skills. The reader must be left with the need to act urgently. Offer a bonus gift or present for a limited time as an available opportunity to avail right now. They have to feel the need to decide immediately. You must understand that once the reader leaves your website without acting, they are lost. Therefore, you have to attract them and convince them to take the step. Offer them a thank you gift and capture their email address to be able to send them newsletters and updates in their email.

5. Be Short and To the Point: Avoid lengthy and meaningless posts. Be short, brief and informative. Always make sure the information in your blog is authentic.

6. Revise Your Work: Always cross check your writing for spelling mistakes and meaningless sentences. Do not be repetitive and present the work in an attractive and lively way to leave the reader happy to be on your site.

The Best Six Facebook WordPress Plugins

Facebook is the largest social media website and thousands of users update their accounts as often as possible. Therefore installing Facebook plugins in WordPress helps users to provide the “share posts on Facebook” option for their visitors. There are six really amazing Facebook WordPress plugins:

  1. WP-FBConnect: This plugin adds the Facebook functionality to WordPress Blogs through Facebook Connect APIs. To use this plugin you have to link your Facebook account to your WordPress and then sign into it again. This will allow you to publish comments through the Facebook newsfeed and avatars displayed in the comments field using WordPress.
  2. Add to Facebook: This plugin provides a link at the bottom of your blog posts for users to click on. Once they click on this link they can add the post they are currently on to the mini-feed on their Facebook home page. All they will need to do is sign into their Facebook account.
  3. Facebook Dashboard Widget: You have to be interactive on Facebook, and this application provides you with all the updates from friends. This widget allows users to work with both Facebook and WordPress to keep you updated about friends even if Facebook is blocked.
  4. Facebook Comments: This is a very useful plugin which imports all the comments made about your post which were shared on Facebook. These comments will be posted directly into your WordPress blogs so that you don’t miss any of the comments.
  5. Facebook Photos Plugin: Everyone likes images on posts; it makes them interesting, attractive and sometimes help people understand things better. This plugin helps you by making it easy to add photos to your blog posts. You simply have to link your plugins to your Facebook account using the WordPress blog. Once this is done, whenever you edit old or new posts in WordPress, a new icon in “Add Media Section” will appear. You will be able to see the uploaded photos in your Facebook account by clicking on the new icon visible on your screen. You will be able to insert your images as small sized, medium sized and large sized images. You can also align the images if you want.
  6. Gigya: This is a very important plugin and all its features are configurable using the WordPress Administration Panel. Once you use this plugin you can enjoy secure signup and login to your website. Additionally you will be able to update your status on different social media sites and invite your friends to the different social media sites to join your blog.

Beyond doubt, WordPress is the best blogging platform anyone can use with Facebook.

Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

Many new blog owners don’t know what a ping is, let alone how to use this quiet little function to increase traffic to their blogs.  Put simply a “ping” is an automatic notification of new and updated content to sites that collect RSS feeds for their own subscribers.  By pinging these sites you create backlinks for your blog and you have the chance to increase your organic (that means free) traffic figures.

To utilize this function in your WP blog you need to go to “Settings” in your admin panel and click on “Writing” in the drop down menu that comes up.

writing 480x295 Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

This will bring you up a page like the one above.  You need to scroll down this page until you find…

pinglist 480x223 Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

You won’t have anything in this block when you install your new blog – you have to find a ping list to copy and paste into it.  To help you here are ten you can include by simply copying the links below and pasting them into that box: [Read more...]

How Personal Should You Get in Your Blog Posts?

One of the questions that I get asked quite often is about how personal should you get in your blog posts and honestly my only answer is “that depends on what your blog is about”. 

For example if you are writing a review on a product or service then your point of view is important.  If you are writing a site on relationship problems and how to solve them, then your own personal experience might be relevant and helpful.  If you write about politics you can be opinionated but if you are updating your workplace blog then third person anecdotes and factual information might be more appropriate.

Personally I share as much of myself as is necessary to get my point across.  If I am writing about “make money tips’ then some of the things I have done and tried would be good examples to use in a post. 

When I write book reviews I give my opinion and the reasons for it.  There are times, like in the relationship niche for example, where I have used life experience to illustrate certain points but personally I don’t think that topics like what I had for breakfast, what I watched on TV last night, or what my mates and I got up to at the beach last summer is really important – because none of my blog topics are based on television programs, food or hijinks. [Read more...]

Customizing Your Blog with WordPress – For Beginners at Blogging

WordPress is the most recommended software application for beginners. This is because it is easy to understand and use for bloggers. With this application, one can design websites, beautify them and make their blogs attractive. Additionally, it is available for free.

Never forget that to attract traffic you need to dedicate more time and work hard. Unless you provide people with readable and enjoyable content, no one will read your blogs. Blogs are the quickest means to grow your website and making money. Therefore, as bloggers you must do all you can to manage the blog and make it worth reading.

How to Use WordPress?

This ideal blogging platform is really easy to use for anyone. You don’t need to be a web designer to be able to use WordPress. There are simple steps in using WordPress for blogs. [Read more...]

What Bloggers Don’t Know About – Blog Scrapers

Everyone is blogging these days. It could be a personal website aimed at social interaction or business related sites. Of course the main objective for every blogger is to keep the traffic hooked and make it grow.

Ironically, most bloggers go to any length to achieve this objective, and mostly through wrong means.

Never copy other peoples’ web content. It is illegal.

Always write your own blogs. It is alright to rewrite an idea but never take another person’s work and use it on your website. The fact is that, the internet has too much content and when you search there is lots of similar information. This is why the search engines are becoming very sensitive when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Copied information is detected immediately. [Read more...]

Still haven’t gone local yet?

About a year ago, I wrote a post about Attacking Local on your Blog.  Looking back over the last year, how true has it become?

A year ago, most people had never heard of mega online brands like Groupon.  And forget about Gilt, Living Social, Buy with Me, etc.  Now, they’re everywhere.

Even the “old school” media like CBS is cashing in (sort of).

The trend is only going to continue.  Now is the time to get on board if you haven’t already.  There’s still plenty of time and space for amazing local content sites to stake major audience claims.

As more and more consumers head to the web for even their most hyper local needs, the SEO value of localized content continues to grow exponentially.

What are you waiting for?

WordPress Backups: What’s your disaster plan?

What is your backup plan for your WordPress site? You do have one, right?

Anyone that has experienced a personal computer crashing or a web server disaster will tell you the same thing…they wish they had been better about backing up their files.

I don’t care how often you think you will end up backing your systems up, it is never enough if you are doing it manually. Take it from someone who has gone down that road before.

I used to tell myself that I would be regular about backing up both my Mac and my websites. Hoe hard could it be? All that has to be done is setting aside a fee minutes on a regular basis to save some files to secondary storage. Not hard at all. It always seems to work for the a first few days or weeks too. [Read more...]