You’ve spent the time and energy to get your website looking like you want. It looks nice and you’re doing a pretty good job at keeping it populated with fresh intriguing content. So why would you want it to look and feel like every other website out there?

Personalizing your website is a great way to stand out from your competition. It is also a great way to add more depth to your branding. And if you do it right, you can create your website to have a personality unlike any other sites your competitors have.

So how can you personalize your website without going through a total overhaul?

Enhance Your Copy

Alter your copy just enough to incorporate your own personality. Be careful not to alter your message and overall point, though. If you’re funny by nature, inject some humor into your website copy. If you’re very strict and professional, let that show as well. Do whatever you can to make your website copy not seem stale, cookie cutter, or like it was lifted from a template.

Get Inspired

Are there websites for your competitors that you secretly love? It’s okay to admit it. Visit their websites and really investigate it. Find out what it is about their site that you like. Without totally ripping them off, what are they doing on their site that you aren’t? If you can find a few things, try to personalize them for your brand and see if including these new bits would help your website seem more personal.

Think of the Customers

Start taking a closer look at your existing clients and potential customers. Think of your target audience and ask yourself what sort of material they’d like to see on your website. Can you personalize it with more information about yourself or your employees? Maybe you can make it more personal with the inclusion of certain offers or specials. What can you do to personalize your website in a way that is also going to win over your audience?

Have you taken any of these steps in the past to make your website more personal? What are some other ways you have had success in helping your website stand out and cater more to your audience?

Social media has taught us that it is now easier than ever to please customers all over the world. This is, of course, a great way to get more customers and has the potential to drastically increase your profits.

Still, there is something to be said about pleasing customers that live in your area before anyone else. For small businesses, this can be crucial; having local support to test out your business legs can be a great way to get your foot in the foot of your chosen industry.

Even after you have established yourself within your community and have branched out to conquering new customers via social media, there are still plenty of ways to provide local content to customers that live in your region.

Here are a few ways to optimize your local content.

• Learn how to geo-target your offers, blog posts, and other online content. This allows you to offer specials that are available to people only in specific locations. It also saves potential customers from other areas from getting frustrated when they fund after the fact that an offer they have seen is not available in their area.

• Come up with promotions that are centered on walk-in specials. Make it clear that you still want people coming in through your doors and those that do are treated like royalty.

• Rely on localized media such as the local paper (both print and online) and any kind of online bulletin boards. Place offers in these locations and make sure the copy clearly states that the offer is only good for people in your city of geographic area.

• Work with local publications such as community magazines to organize interviews or simple ads. Again, make these ads very specifically aimed at people that live in your area.

Of course, in doing this you don’t want to lose sight of your online efforts. Find a balance between the two so that your business can cater to all of your audience rather than just a small segment. Localized content should keep your local customers happy, allowing you to keep driving towards online success as well.

The small business atmosphere is growing more competitive day by day. As a business owner, you need to find ways to make yourself stand out…to make sure your audience will be able to easily differentiate your brand from others.

There are some pretty common ways to get this done, some of which can be done with very little trouble. If you truly want to stand out from the competition, consider some of these great tips and strategies.

PERSONALIZE YOUR MESSAGE

Figure out all of the ways in which your business is different than your competitors—right down to the most trivial of differences. Maybe you were born near the beach or just love the beach life. Make your content, website and marketing approach have some sort of beach theme. Or maybe you’re a father of four—integrate your fatherly wisdom and maybe even some comical stories about your kids into your blog content…just make sure it’s relevant to the topic and not cute for the sake of being cute and different.

Make it so that whenever someone sees your marketing, website, or blog, they’ll be able to tell it is your brand instantly amid a sea of like-minded competitors.

BECOME A PROBLEM SOLVER

Do some research into the needs of your audience. Once you think you have a good understanding of their needs and demands, see if you can come up with a few specific problems the majority seem to share and work towards meeting that need specifically. Granted, this is easier in some industries than others, but regardless of the outcome it is always beneficial to understand the needs of your audience.

BECOME AN INNOVATOR

Don’t offer the same old same old. This goes with industry standards as well as your own. Don’t continue to offer the same product and expect different results. Try to update your services or products in a way that will always keep the customer happy. Find new ways to present your audience with your products or services. Make it feel new, fresh, and exciting.

These steps are about more than just thinking outside of the box. Staying ahead of your competition comes down to finding new ways to approach marketing and pleasing your audience in ways your competitors have yet to discover.

What are some ways you have been able to differentiate yourself from your closest competitors?

Any small business that is involved in social media knows just how valuable Facebook can be to getting your message out to the masses.

However, when it comes to mastering strategies on Facebook to get maximum results, things get a bit tricky. One of the most debated topics concerning Facebook marketing focuses on the best time of day to post.

There seems to be no concrete answer. Still, experts have put a lot of time into trying to answer this question and have come up with a few recommendations.

First of all, know your audience well. Think about the structure of their day. When are they most likely to be online? If your core audience works between 8-5 every day, your posts may be best suited for later at night—but not so late that they’ll be asleep when you post.

Next, know the right stats. Here’s an important one: recent studies indicate that 80% of people 18-45 years of age check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking. Perhaps you can use your knowledge of your audience to schedule a post right around the time most of them are waking up. Given this, many small businesses have seen some great success rates when posting between 6:30 – 8:30 in the morning.

Lastly, keep in mind that the weekends can be tricky. Some people have had some success by posting on the weekends, but you need to remember what weekends are for…relaxing. Many people try not to focus too closely on business-related actions online over the weekend, but then again there is a lot of Facebook activity on Saturdays and Sundays.

Depending on your industry, posting on the weekend may or may not work. Again, there is no clear answer to when the best time to post might be.

How about you? Have you found any magic windows of time that seem to work better when it comes to posting on Facebook?  If so, please feel free to share!

SEO can be a huge headache to copywriters, especially if you don’t understand the intricacies and strategies it takes to really make it work. There’s not much that’s more frustrating than spending your valuable time working on SEO only to see no effects at all in your website traffic.

There are three common mistakes that many SEO first-timers make fairly regularly. If you can keep an eye out for these mistakes in your own SEO efforts, you’ll save a lot of time and will have effective SEO copy pulling in more traffic than ever.

Your Site Isn’t Crawl-able

Google implements what are known as “web crawlers” to index and locate certain pages. If you aren’t using great headlines, keywords and relevant content, you are making your page hard to find and, thus, not optimized to be caught by these web crawlers. This can also be blamed on poorly written page descriptions.

You can keep tabs on this by navigating your own site. Make sure you are able to reach every page within your site through Google search results. You’ll need to clock on Google’s listing of your site and select the “text only version.”

Your Keywords Are Weak

Be sure that your keywords are relevant and related to what people want to read about. If you have weak keywords, your content is going to get lost in the millions of other websites out there. You need to be very specific. For instance, if you are writing an article on the depth of the Grand Canyon, using “depth of the Grand Canyon” isn’t quite enough. You need to specify your keyphrase like “How deep is the Grand Canyon?”

A general rule of thumb is to think about the phrases or words you would use when looking for the same information. The more specific you can get, the better.

Too Much Focus on Links, Not Enough Focus on Your Website

Do not, under any circumstances, write content solely for the sake of trying to get backlinks and new followers. Of course, if content results in these things, that’s great. But your content should be interesting and compelling before everything else. Don’t focus on loading the content down with keywords just to include them…they need to fit naturally and not forced in like the wrong piece of a puzzle.

What are some other common SEO mistakes you have seen on a regular basis? And what strategies do you have to make sure your SEO is done naturally and without being blatant and forced?

Often, small business owners have to wear many hats—from marketing to accounting and all areas in between.

This also includes copywriting, and for someone that has not been working towards writing as a career, copywriting can be tricky. There are strategies and tricks of the trade that help many copywriters create successful and compelling copy.

If you find yourself handling the bulk of your business’ copywriting but aren’t comfortable with the task just yet, here are three common mistakes to try to avoid.

Separate Your “Selling” from Your Content: Informational content and sales content should be kept separate. While it is important to keep your site updated with fresh content, you don’t want to dilute the meaning of your content by loading it down with sales pitches. If you’re writing a sales page with heavy sales copy, that’s fine…just don’t mix it in with an informational article. Before you start writing an article, you should already know which category the copy is going to all into: content or sales?

Make Use of Subheadlines: A lot of novice copywriters will often leave out subheadlines from their articles. However, if you are writing an article that is longer than 200 words, subheadlines should be sued when appropriate. These are second tier headlines that help segment the page for the reader.

Most online readers scan pages quickly and use subheadlines to “map out” a page. More than that, subhead lines will also help you tremendously when it comes to outlining your copy. In terms of keeping a reader interested, subheadlines are just as important as headlines.

Keep It Simple: Remember, you are writing engaging copy that is quick and interesting for readers. You are not writing the great American novel here. A lot of what you learned in college is going to be tossed out of the window. You want short sentences, quick and to the point. Paragraphs should also be short; while there is no 100% agreed upon formula, most people try to stay between3-5 lines per paragraph when writing online.
Remember…the more you write copy, the better you will get. Look around some of your favorite sites and take notes on how their copywriting is crafted. Keep at it and you’ll be writing engaging copy every time you sit behind the keyboard!

Whether you like to admit it or not, there is something in all of us that really enjoys watching those blooper shows. Maybe it’s the misfortune of others in comical situations or just knowing what is coming when the guy on screen doesn’t that appeals to us. Whatever the reason, we find blunders funny.

This is also true in the world of copywriting…so long as it isn’t our writing that is catching the beating.

Here are some examples of humorous copywriting mistakes within recent history that are certainly worthy of a laugh, but likely got someone in deep trouble.

Air Canada’s Baggage Mistake: Air Canada made the mistake of labeling baggage with a message reading “This Baggage Has Been X-Rated at Point of Origin.”  Of course they meant X-Ray but that doesn’t make the mistake any less damaging.

One Word Missing from the Bible Gives New Translation: Granted, this isn’t recent history, but still an example of a glaring typo. In 1632, when the King James Bible was given a new edition, the printed omitted a very important word: “not.” As in, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” For a while, some of the masses were rumored to have gotten quite excited.

University of Wisconsin’s Identity Crisis: Proud graduates of University of Wisconsin were given diplomas with a glaring error in 1988…namely the name of the school. But hey, we hear that a degree from University of Wisconson s just as prestigious.

Yuck, Australia (and shame on you): A cookbook publisher was fined $18,500 for a grievous error. This is an error that clearly makes no sense, as we can’t imagine any pasta recipe that would ever call for “salt and freshly ground black people.” No matter where you are in the Outback, that’s uncalled for.

Comet’s Unbeatable Prices: Oh, the difference a decimal point can make. In 2002, Comet’s online store was having a great sale…although, probably unintentionally. For a period of time, you could get hi-fi Aiwa for £8.43. This is an especially great sale when you consider that the product was usually £84.00. The error cost Comet quite a bit of money even though the mistake was corrected rather quickly.

What are some errors you have seen in copywriting that blew your mind? Share them in the comments below.

Like any job, the more you work at it, the better you will get. Writing is no exception. Whether you’re writing novels or ad copy, practice definitely makes perfect. What’s more, when you write outside of your comfort zone, you stretch writing muscles you didn’t even know you had.

The great thing with writing is that testing yourself and keeping yourself on your toes can actually be quite a bit of fun. Here are some fun exercises you can undertake to practice. You may find yourself coming back to some of them just to have a bit of extra fun.

• The next time you’re flipping through a magazine or scrolling through a news website, choose a story at random. Read it and then create five alternate headlines for it. As any copywriter knows, headlines are among the most important bit of information to be written when it comes to articles.

• The next time you get a spam mail, open it up and read it…chances are it’s poorly written. Re-craft it and make it sparkle. (For anyone that has actually seen certain spam mails, you know that this may actually be a huge challenge).

• Use Twitter as a quiz. Putting anything in 140 characters is tricky…much less as a writer. Start out with a statement that you know for a fact will go way over 140 characters. Then find at least three ways to shorten it to 140 characters or less while getting the same message across.

• Find a short news story in your local paper and rewrite it to be funny. Or, if the piece is already lighthearted, give it some dramatic flair.

• Choose any random item from your pantry. Come up with clever slogans and taglines for whatever products you select.

• Write a book report (or even a review) on an exceptional book you have read lately.

Who says the world of copywriting can’t be fun?! Enjoy these little exercises on your quest to improve your writing!

When someone walks into your office, what sort of message are they getting? Does your office reflect your brand well or is it a mess of confusion?

We’re not talking about just being tidy. We’re talking about the ability that your office has to represent you as an individual as well as your overall brand. Comfortable chairs and nice fancy desks are nice, yes…but there’s more to it than that.

For instance, think about…

…your desk.

Your desk should be the flight deck of the office. It should never be pressed against the wall. It should be as close to the center of the room as possible. This allows for optimum space to all sides, something that some experts suggest helps stimulate creativity. Also, clutter should be kept to a minimum; keep pens and other miscellaneous office items in your drawers.

Remember…a neat and organized desk reflects a neat and organized brand.

…your brand.

Having pictures of your family on your desk and walls is perfectly fine. It gives your office a sense of warmth and charm. Still, your brand needs to be represented just as much as your family.

You want your brand represented by your personality. Is your brand known for being fun and laid back? If so, something like a dart board or a foosball table is appropriate. But if your brand is known for no nonsense and rigidity (which…why?) you may want to stick with plaques, trophies and the like. The last thing you want is an office environment that contradicts the type of brand you are trying to build.

…color.

Try to incorporate the colors of your logo or website into your office. This isn’t so much for your own enjoyment, but to enhance the environment of your brand for any visitors to your office. While we wouldn’t suggest painting your walls red if it is one of your brand’s colors, chairs and decorative art aren’t such a bad idea.

What are some other ways you have transformed your office to match the style of your brand?