While product page design has improved in the past few years, an often neglected area is sales copy.

A common mistake is to simply place the manufacturer’s product descriptions on pages. While this approach is easier, a more personal touch and unique tone of voice can help your product pages stand out and really sell the benefits of products.

I’m going to explain why good sales copy is so important, and look at some examples where retailers are getting this spot on…

Five great examples of product page copywriting by Graham Charlton

These past few months—in my summer and early autumn creative writing classes—I’ve not focused so much on the mindfulness aspect of my teachings. Perhaps this had to do with the energetic pace of summer, which only recently faded here in the South East of England. Just last week autumn seemed finally to arrive and with it the cozy, heartwarming smells of wood and coal smoke rising from the chimneys of local cottages. The end of our unseasonably warm Indian summer ushered in that back-to-school feeling of my childhood days growing up on the South Shore of Massachusetts.

And so it was just last week that I made explicit the intended theme of the six-week course which got underway in mid-September. That theme’s perhaps best conveyed by the course title, Write Your Way into Autumn. I had everyone spend about ten minutes in class writing a list of autumnal-inspired words, phrases and snippets of language. We then read aloud the words we each gathered. – 10 Steps to Writing Mindfully for Your Blog by Sean Madden

 

Image via CrunchBase

Mention YouTube and most people will picture cats playing piano. But among a certain type of small businessperson, the name conjures another image: Dollar signs.

Such entrepreneurs can often sound like brainwashed cult members — in a good way. For instance, Scott Imbrie, owner of Original Skateboards, a brand that has been built largely on its YouTube presence, says the platform is better for marketers than even Facebook. “YouTube is actually the biggest social media site,” he says. “It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter.”

Another YouTube proselytizer is Jeffrey Harmon, chief marketing officer for Orabrush, a Provo, Utah oral care brand that recently parlayed a series of successful YouTube videos into a national distribution deal at Walmart. Original Skateboards, which joined YouTube in 2005 and Orabrush, which dropped its first YouTube video in 2009, were clearly ahead of the curve, but YouTube is still a great place to launch or grow a brand. – 6 Best Practices For Small Business YouTube Marketing by Todd Wasserman

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of November 5, 2011… [Read more...]

Let me preface this short post with the catalyst behind it – this article by Sarah Shearman for Marketing.co.uk: “Content key to marketing in social media says P&G exec.” Let me throw a few bits and pieces of the article your way, and we’ll get started.

Content is the best currency in social media, according to Usama Al-Qassab, e-commerce marketing and digital innovation team leader at Procter & Gamble.

Speaking at a panel debate at the Social Media World Forum today (29 March) on the role of social media in traditional marketing strategy, Al-Qassab said: “There is a lot of talk about social commerce, but the average person is not yet there yet. On sites such as Facebook, the majority of people do not go there to purchase and still prefer their traditional online retailers. In order to monetise social media, it should not be seen in isolation and needs to be integrated into the wider marketing mix. But unless you have content, there is no point. The content you deliver and the investment behind that is key, much bigger than straight media dollars.” – Social Business vs. Social Marketing: Understanding the fight over “content” by Olivier Blanchard

 

 

 

 

In the real estate world, there is a saying: “The three considerations that most impact value are location, location, and location.” In the world of social media, they are purpose, purpose, and purpose.

Nothing impacts the success of a social media effort more than the choice of its purpose. Because purpose becomes the cause around which people will rally and be inspired to act, it is also the source of social media’s business value.

What is a good purpose for social media? Would you recognize one if you saw it? And if you could identify a good purpose, would you be able to mobilize a community around it and derive business value from it? – Social Media Success Is About Purpose (Not Technology) by  Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald

As SEOs we often live in a bubble, sometimes it’s a social media bubble where we only tweet amongst our peers, sometimes it’s a literal bubble that we don’t explore outside our comfort zone, but that bubble can easily keep us from seeing things that to consultants in other fields is painfully obvious. At the end of the day, an SEO consultant isn’t any more special than a CPA or a Financial Planner, we’re all consultants and ultimately our job is to give our clients what they want.

The question then is, what do our clients want?

- The Business of SEO: Perception vs. Reality by Matthew C. Egan