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Online Copywriter Vs Offline Copywriter – What’s the Difference?

Being an online copywriter is becoming a much more lucrative profession as more and more Internet business ventures pop up all over the web. Everyone has something they want to sell online, it would seem – and copywriters are the people with the skills to make things sell.

But is there really a big difference between copywriting for the web, and copywriting in the offline world? In some respects, yes. In many ways, successful online sales pages resemble successful offline sales letters. However, there are some important points to bear in mind when it comes to online copywriting that can have a big impact on the success of your copy.

The Way People Read Online

One of the biggest issues a copywriter must consider when writing for the online space is that the way people read words on a computer screen is completely different from the way they read a printed page.

Computer screens tend to cause a strain on the eyes if you read from them for too long. For that reason, people naturally start to skim and scan when they read copy on the web. Add to that the fact that web surfers in general are an impatient breed, looking for the information they need right now. When you understand these factors, you can see why online sales copy needs to lend itself to skimming and scanning.

This means having plenty of headlines through the sales copy is particularly important. Ideally, a reader should be able to scan through the page reading only the headlines, and pick up a good idea of what the whole page is about.

As for the body copy itself, short sentences tend to work best online. The language ought to be as simple as possible, so anyone can read and understand it. No one is going to get out a dictionary to understand your sales copy.

Another factor of making sales copy easy to read online is breaking up the writing into short paragraphs. It’s not uncommon to see sales page with a bunch of one-sentence paragraphs. The ellipsis (…) is also a common feature of online copywriting, because it helps draw the reader’s attention towards the next line and create a sense of anticipation and suspense.

Creating PPC Friendly Landing Pages

One of the methods typically used to drive traffic to an online sales page is PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, using a network such as Google AdWords. If you’re going to be using PPC as part of your plan to drive traffic to your product page, you need to ensure your site copy lines up well with your ad copy.

There are several reasons for this. One is that the relevance of your web page to the keywords you bid on can affect the price you pay per click. But the other is simply your conversion rate. If your ads aren’t in sync with the copy on your sales page, you’re not likely to get the conversion rates you could potentially get if your PPC campaign and your sales page copy were working in harmony.

Search Engine Optimization

Another major method of traffic generation to a sales page is search engine optimization (SEO). This involves optimizing your sales copy for particular keywords, so that your page will show up in organic search results (as opposed to paid results) at the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! And Bing.

A good online copywriter will know how to approach optimizing your sales page, is SEO is a big part of your traffic building plan.

To get a marketing experienced copywriter to handle writing or rewriting your sales page, simply visit Premium Online Writing and hire an online copywriter.

The Definition of Offline Marketing and How You Can Use It to Enhance Your Online Presence

Offline Marketing in a Nutshell

The definition of offline marketing isn’t difficult to grasp, since it’s the very same marketing strategy that was traditionally used before online marketing came into widespread use. Before online marketing monopolized the marketing landscape, becoming the primary means most businesses use to promote their products and services, traditional marketing methods were far more prominent and were, in fact, in exclusive use for gaining the attention of the buying public.

Any complete definition of offline marketing would have to include the concept of print-based media. Publications such as magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and brochures, and other types of print media, including letters, postcards, and business cards, have all been widely used to market products. Additionally, the traditional definition of offline marketing typically includes radio, TV, and recordable media such as audio and videotape. In-person encounters, including one-on-one meetings and group presentations such as lectures, seminars, and workshops, also round out the common definition of offline marketing.

Marketing Has Changed

Most of the conventional marketing campaigns we’ve been discussing, which fit the classic definition of offline marketing, carried a hefty price tag – and still do. However, today, they no longer hold the monopoly they once did. They now compete with – or even complement – new media methods. At one time, such offline campaigns were considered one of the inevitable expenses of doing business. But, with the advent of the Internet and today’s extensive line of high-powered digital devices, marketing has changed significantly.

While the overall definition of offline marketing has remained the same and its importance has certainly not diminished, its influence has shifted and its function has changed, opening the way for a whole new era of direct marketing strategies.

Today’s Marketing Requires More

Recently, the old-school definition of offline marketing as a stand-alone strategy – in comparison to the brighter promise of online marketing – has left the offline version the clear runner-up in the marketing race. And while traditional marketing methods haven’t been totally replaced by online methods, they now serve a subordinate role. Whereas, at one time they were the whole story, today they serve to complement, supplement, and/or reinforce online methods by leading prospects to a business’s website or social media fan page.

In short, online methods are the obvious winners in terms of convenience, cost, and reach, yet they clearly benefit when a well thought-out traditional marketing plan is run simultaneously. Because some online marketing methods, such as e-mail and social media, are completely free, they are some of the most cost-effective marketing methods you’ll find! And you can learn to use these and other Internet marketing media effectively.

New Media Marketing Can Be Learned

There are many ways to ensure that your online presence is reflected in your offline marketing efforts. Many marketers are learning these processes and implementing them into their own businesses to ensure maximum profits. However, it can be quire confusing in the beginning if you don’t know what you are doing. Which is why I created a free report to get you started in the right foot.

Why wait? You owe it to yourself to stop stumbling through the maze of modern marketing methodology, inconsistently implementing one slow and ineffective trial-and-error tactic after another, when you could begin earning profits quickly, easily, and painlessly. So, do yourself a favor: Read my free report. You have nothing to lose – and everything to gain.

Mobile Marketing: Integrating Offline Marketing In Print Media

If you’re like me, then you must have heard or been a recipient of some form of mobile advertisement in one time or another. Despite its promising spiel for being the next big thing, not only in the smartphone revolution but, in the realm of marketing as well, it is not intended to independently cater to all of your marketing needs.

The objective of mobile marketing is not to interact with the consumer exclusively on their mobile phones alone, but to constantly engage with them.

Repetitive exposures to a stimulus would increase the likelihood of them being able to remember your advertisement. Research indicates that a majority of consumers have to come in contact with a brand at a minimum of eight times before they are cognitively mindful of it, and an additional two before they actually take the consideration to purchase it. This type of dynamic and regular engagement is termed participatory marketing. Any time mobile marketing is incorporated in on-and offline strategies, it may end up being participatory and become fully employed to produce a profound and enduring relationship.

The proper mobile marketing can certainly create that essential connection between your customers’ offline and online experience (e.g. online for browsing through your catalog and offline for the particular transaction). The cost of an item is the usual reason in the delay concerning research and purchase. An incorporated participatory marketing strategy creates an awareness of your brand that will most likely influence the consumer. And by increasing consumer awareness, you may be able to generate those sales to boost your quarterly net profit.

Using Print

One of the most significant and most economical mobile integration options is by using print. This is often as basic as motivating customers to view your website using a mobile phone or to send a code via SMS to sign up in a study or sweepstakes or to obtain customer details.

* Flyers

* Letterheads

* Banners

* Instructions

* Newspapers

* Business cards

* Catalogs

* Magazines

* Handouts

* Menus

* Tickets

* Manuals

Among the best approaches would be to use current print promotions in classified ads, newspapers, and magazines. With these, you can integrate a mobile initiative which is associated with the advertising campaign, directions for downloading featured mobile vouchers for consumer convenience (the customers will not have to cut one out of the paper), or marketing content material that promotes the advantages of your campaign and describes the way to get connected to current location-based ads.

Businesses may also integrate within a direct-mail campaigns. They are able to enable customers to enroll in mobile alerts whenever their monthly bill is due or when their membership status has been updated or changed. When they send merchandise to the customers, they could also let them send a text message to obtain the status of their delivery, or motivate them to subscribe for promotions or special discounts in connection with whatever they have purchased.

An additional way to integrate print in mobile marketing would be to include things like mobile directives to respond (call to action campaigns) or Quick response (QR) codes in your packaging or provisional service products, including disposable paper plates, utensils, cups, and napkins. Alternative paper resources, like envelopes, letterhead, banners, flyers, and business cards, could be employed to direct people to your own mobile website or even get them to text in a brief code to acquire a file format (Vcard), with significant contact details or to receive an open source calendar standard (Vcal), of your respective events.

Business Letter Writing – Writing a Business Letter, Offline or Online II

Whenever you are writing about an action that the company, or a department, as whole is taking, use ‘we’, and whenever it is you personally taking the action, use ‘I’. In the examples above, the first is an action on behalf of the company, and the second is an action taken by you personally. “I will talk to my colleagues” is correct in that case.

When writing in a business style, you should do so in such a way that there is no possibility of ambiguity, and that your message is clear and easy to understand. Don’t make the mistake of believing that senior personnel in your, or any other, company is educated and can understand the nuances of vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. Most can’t. Most business leaders are not English language majors. All they want is clear writing that they can understand without having to reach for a dictionary. They also want clear information, and never make excuses: provide reasons.

For example,

“Dear Mr. Customer, I am sorry that your order is late. It will be with you shortly” is not acceptable, whereas “Dear Mr. Customer, We apologize for the lateness of your recent order. It was held up due to a problem with our production unit but will be with you by the 17th of this month” is more acceptable.

Business letters should never tell lies or prevaricate. They should be short and to the point, and make an honest statement of the facts. Lies and prevarication have a habit of biting you later, so leave them alone. Put yourself in the position of the person you are writing to and write accordingly.

Business letters relevant to internet businesses are no different, only that you must not assume that just because it is the internet then you need not be so formal. Many internet entrepreneurs are very educated people who run their internet business in the same way that offline businesses are run.

The best approach you can take when writing a business letter relating to either an online or offline conventional business is to stay formal, do not use too many long words and keep to the point. State what has to be said and no more. Businessmen want the facts, not the waffle.

Offline Businesses – The Most Effective Online Marketing Uses Direct Marketing Strategies

Direct marketing in the offline world has grown to huge proportions, becoming a very professional industry in which the biggest players are immensely successful. And these same direct marketing strategies and techniques are the hallmark of the most successful Internet marketing businesses, etc. In fact, every direct marketing professional should consider Internet marketing as a career or at least a sideline for additional income streams.

Direct mail pieces in the offline business world become email blasts online – and with more and more email programs now HTML capable, can be just as glossy and heavily designed as their offline counterpart. And just as direct marketers buy targeted leads or use location-based mail drops, Internet marketing pros rent email lists, buy solo ads and buy leads.

Direct marketing techniques also include classified ads and TV infomercials – online there are a number of classified-ad sites, some international and many based on certain locals. And video sharing sites are perfect for displaying TV-style commercials, infomercials, product demonstrations, etc.

And the ‘golden lists’ or the big Direct Mail houses, those lists of targeted leads that buy from them regularly, are no different than the customer lists online. Just as direct marketers have a pre-written series of e-mails and offers that go out to their previous customers on a regular basis, so too do online marketers who use pre-written autoresponder series to follow up with each purchaser.

If you own and/or operate an offline business in direct marketing, learn all you can about the strategies, tools and techniques being used by successful Internet marketing pros and use that knowledge to increase bottom line profits considerably. While some online regulations, like the anti-spam laws, make parts a little trickier in compliance, it’s more than made up for by the low cost of email blasts, the lack of lead time required for printing, and the free video hosting the video sharing sites provide. Start by putting every commercial and infomercial in your current library online at sites like YouTube, Viddler and Daily Motion and you’re already well on your way.

And if you’re currently working in the direct marketing industry with no equity in the company that employs you, consider starting a part-time job in online marketing and building it into your own full-time Internet marketing or affiliate marketing business. You have the skills so start investigating this low-startup-costs online industry for your own future today!

Is Social Media Marketing Helping Your Offline Business – Or Killing It?

Offline businesses the world over are embracing social media marketing as an important part of marketing offline businesses online. Done right, social media and social networking can create a huge jump in foot-falls and bottom-line profits – but mishandled, social media can be the death of your offline business as well.

No longer something businesses can simply choose to ignore, sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook and the myriad of industry-specific forums and directories now represent ever-increasing market share influence. And unlike earlier methods of advertising your offline businesses, social media sites offer free ways for small businesses and home-based businesses to compete with global corporations on an almost-level playing field.

But it also represents pitfalls that most businesses haven’t had to face before too – pitfalls that can irreparably impact your business and, in extreme cases, ruin your brand, product or even the business itself. Reputation management has become a vital part of both local businesses and global corporations now that the Internet has so heavily affected the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces.

How Effective Social Media Marketing Helps Offline Businesses

Well over a billion people use social media these days – many of them using multiple platforms daily or at least weekly. This presents a quickly- and easily-accessed global market comprised of a great number of subsets representing both local markets and niche-specific markets. Never before have businesses had instant access to such large numbers of targeted prospects, nor to free ways to access those prospects.

This scenario offers a number of advantages to businesses using social media effectively: announcing new product rollouts, ease of customer service, brand management, reputation management, customer involvement and interaction, notifications of sales and other events, building goodwill and announcing charitable affiliations, real-time competitor marketing analysis, community-building within your target market and positioning your business to be found by those looking for your products or services. This last point is especially important when promoting local businesses online, as more and more consumers are using the Internet to find local services and stores, especially when on mobile devices.

How Ineffective Social Media Marketing Hurts Offline Businesses

The biggest potential disaster for offline businesses vis-a-vis social media marketing is not having a presence on at least the big sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc – even more specialized sites like YouTube and Pinterest. Your competition will be keeping their name and brands front-and-center in your target market’s minds, while you’ll be out of sight and out of mind.

Second most harmful is not paying attention to your online reputation. Not responding to customer enquiries or complaints, not dealing with negative concerns regarding your company, brands or even your industry in general can erode your customers’ and prospects’ trust – and trust is a huge factor in today’s commerce and business worlds.

Publicly discussing contentious issues on your business pages will also alienate portions of your audience. Leave topics like religion and politics for the dinner parties and focus your online activities around your company, brands, industry and related organizations important to your audience. Mentioning that you made a donation to a local charity can be beneficial, but discussing the conditions in your community that led to the need for that charity is best left to the local newspaper and television editors and columnists.

Social media marketing is just one aspect of promoting local businesses online, albeit a very important one. Get familiar with both the huge popular sites and those specific to your niche or your local area and start building your presence and reputation on each of those. If you feel you lack the necessary skills or the time to handle your online presence effectively then hire social media marketing specialists to handle it for you – and if you’re a local business, be sure they have recent relevant experience in marketing local businesses online as well.

Online Versus Offline Marketing: Which One Is Better?

It’s amazing how the world has evolved during the last 20 years.

More than just the shifts of power across countries… more than just the life changing events like hurricanes, earth quakes and terrorist attacks… the advancement of technology has completely changed the way that we view the world.

YouTube has virtually replaced television. Blogs tend to break important news faster than the actual news stations. And people are meeting their friends and significant others through social networks like Facebook and eHarmony.

And probably the most significant change has been the way that businesses market themselves.

If you go to YouTube and search for “Dollar Shave Club” you’ll find a minute-long video that a guy made in his warehouse that ended up getting over 15 million views… for FREE. The purpose of the video is to get people to go to his website and subscribe to a monthly program where they send you a high quality razor every month for a dollar.

Now, imagine for a second… if just 10% of those views convert into sales for him, he just generated sales of over $1.5 million per month… for FREE.

If you wanted to get 15 million views from a TV commercial, you would have to pay thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands… AT LEAST.

In another simple example… if you wanted to deliver a 15 page sales letter to 1000 people, and you were going to do it through direct mail, you would have to cough up at least $5,000 to send those letters out. And unless you hired a professional copywriter to write your letter for you, for all you know, you could have very well wasted your $5,000.

Now, if you put that same sales letter on a website and drove pay per click traffic to it, you would most likely pay anywhere from $250 – $1,000 (dependent on the industry you’re in). And the beautiful thing is, you can track everything. You get to see how many people saw your ad, and what percentage clicked on the ad.

You can also compare ads to see which one gets more clicks and you get these numbers in real time. If you wanted to compare two different ads through direct mail, you would have to wait weeks before you got any response and your tests would be relatively hard to track.

There are countless more scenarios in which it is advantageous to deliver your message through online mediums versus offline, however, this doesn’t mean that offline marketing doesn’t work anymore.

The most successful business people that I know use both online AND offline marketing tactics. They intermingle the two mediums to deliver their message.

And probably THE MOST POWERFUL resource that comes with online marketing is the creation of the auto-responder. In its most basic form, an auto-responder is just that… an automated responding mechanism that follows up with your prospects automatically.

As a basic feature of the auto-responder, you can send newsletters to your prospect list. If you had a list of 1000 people, you could email them on a daily basis at no extra cost to you. However, if you wanted to send a newsletter to 1000 people via direct mail, you would be paying AT LEAST $1,000 per day!

It’s THE most revolutionary invention in the world of marketing and business.

In future articles, I will go into the finer details of each of the concepts that we talked about and will give you instructions on how to use them effectively.