heartharmony.com.au

I have been working on a new website for one of my products and late on Sunday night clicked the button to go live so I could have a few colleagues test all the links on their respective browsers, before final prettying up on the site and then sending traffic to it.

The site is currently very ugly as my web designer is still trying to decipher my cryptic notes. How we work is  I do the very rough draft for the foundation of the site and she makes it pretty.

The site has a few typos and grammatical errors (proof-reading is the last step on our list of things to do).

It also hasn’t been optimised for the web in terms of keywords in the metatags or images etc – that is still on my list of things to do once we get the design finalised.

The good news is the site and links all seems to work … and even without any promotion, SEO, adwords, social posting or the like – and only one very tiny obscure link to the hidden pages in one of my sites (just to test the flow through), it generated more sign-ups in 24 hours than the previous 6 months of the product on our main site.

The search engines found and indexed the main page and started to send organic traffic to it in less than 24 hours (remind me again about the web designers who say you need to wait up to 6 months before the search engines find you).

This experience has reinforced for me the power of:

• testing and measuring campaigns,
• getting the niche right,
• having a brilliant offer, and
• fantastic copywriting with the right keywords throughout the copy (even if there are typos).

It has also reinforced to me that ugly sites sell – you don’t have to have a beautiful site to get results if you have the other things in place.

So – what is the site address? Well …  I can’t tell you (yet). I want to make it a bit prettier (yes the girly part of me wants it to be a bit more attractive before I share it with you all).  But you can be sure I will be tracking the stats to see if my prettying up of the site has increased/decreased conversions.

Stay tuned over the coming days when I will announce the site with all appropriate fanfare.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Long time readers know that my parents are starting to get on in years and bits are starting to fall apart. In his younger days my dad was a mad keen biker, and loved his Indian motor bike and his Harley motor bikes with a passion. Some of my earliest memories were being propped up in a sidecar and the wind in my face as we rumbled around Sydney.

Now in his late 70s, dad still walks about 5km per day, but lately he has been checking out mobility scooters “just in case” he gets old.

He was quite impressed with one he saw the other day. According to him it had great acceleration and fantastic speed.  But as he has also said for a few years, he is not really interested in getting a mobility scooter until Harley Davidson produces one.

I thought that was a brilliant idea for the fading company, as there are many bikers starting to go grey, not to mention all the other younger bikers who had fallen off their machines and now can no longer get around (Harley’s are notoriously heavy). Can you imagine a whole posse of grey haired grannies rumbling around the shopping centre?

So, a while back I sent a letter to Harley Davidson, giving them the idea.  Deathly silence … not even a form acknowledgment letter that said “thank you for your suggestion it is under consideration”. If anyone else wants to go with the idea – be our guest.

How many other businesses are handed cool ideas on a plate – and ignore them? What happens to your customer feedback forms or customer suggestions? Do you act on them? What can you do to improve your process? You could take a leaf out of Richard Branson’s book and personally talk to them.

So …  Harley Davidson – we are still waiting. I reckon you have a few years yet before dad will need your prototype mobility scooter.  Until then you may just want to check out your customer feedback process.  I look forward to hearing the patented rumble in a mobility scooter in years to come.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance copywriters

This morning I woke to a chorus of congratulations from friends, colleagues and clients. I had just made the cover of the Working Women’s Magazine – a fantastic national publication by the WNA.

http://www.womensnetwork.com.au/page.cfm?pageCode=magazine

Long time readers of my newsletter know that WNA is a great Women’s Networking group, with branches across Australia.  The magazine has a circulation of over 20,000.

I suspect the cover was partially due to my brilliant photographer’s work www.fullframe.com.au - but whatever the reason I am very grateful.

If you would like a copy of the Autumn edition of the magazine, drop me an email and I will organise one for you. (BTW – the magazine is a great place to advertise if you want to reach professional women in Australia).

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writers

We have spoken before about the power of viral marketing – where someone has a great idea and films it, uploads it to video sites and then through the power of referral people share the video. If the video is great – lots of people end up watching and talking about the video.

This is one of the latest ones – where Samsung sponsored some people to make a video. It shows what can be done with sheep, some LED lights and a good idea.

Over 650,000 people have watched this video so far – imagine if that was your website and your business. What could an extra 650,000 people bring you in the way of traffic and profits?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – SEO copywriters

Last week my colleague Donna-Marie Coggins and I attended a 4 day conference and heard a range of brilliant speakers talk about the latest and greatest in internet marketing.

Of course all of the speakers had a package for sale (hey they have to make more money some how!) What was interesting was watching each of them build their credibility with the audience through testimonials.

Most showed slides of their earnings and their fancy cars (yawn). Many had slides of written testimonials of people who had been successful. Some had written testimonials and photos of the people who had followed their programs to success. But there were two who really stood out.

One had people in the audience come forward and live on stage give their testimonial about the product and then backed it with film of exactly what the person had achieved. Pretty powerful to a group of 700 people.

My favourite speaker had a couple of films from a few people. Nothing exciting except that these people were famous people such as Mark Victor Hansen. These famous people raved about the speaker and the difference he had made in their lives. His program sold out in a few minutes as a result.

So what can you learn from this? Credibility is vital in business and testimonials are a great way to show what you can do.

There’s a sliding scale of testimonials. All testimonials are good – so start with written ones. Ramp them up with the addition of a photo. Ramp them up further by recording either the voice or film of the person.

You get extra bonus points for live testimonials (people can ask them in breaks their experience). However the cult of the famous person is alive and well – so celebrity testimonials from “famous” people really carry weight.

How did they get the testimonials in the first place? They asked for them and rewarded people for their words.

We watched at the end of the conference when speakers gave away extra bonuses for people who filmed testimonials on the content of the seminar.

How could you borrow these ideas and apply them to your business?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance SEO copywriters

One of my favourite videos from last week’s conference. Anyone who has ever been an office meerkat can get this one!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance web writer

These past few days have been a whirlwind. I have been at the World Internet Summit with the ubiquitous long days and nights with many different speakers. In the midst of this my eldest daughter needed to interview me for a biography she had to write for her English project.

One of the questions from her was “The internet has just turned 20 years old – what were you doing 20 years ago?”

It was fascinating taking a long dip in the memory pool with her to realise how far both I and the internet had come. My daughters have always known of computers and the net and can’t imagine life without it. Whereas me … well let’s just say my love affair with computers started before the birth of the net.

About 5 years prior to the birth of the net I graduated from Uni where I can still remember hand-coding Fortran computer program cards to run simple programs and the net wasn’t even considered. Our libraries still had paper card files and personal computers did not exist in the mainstream (yes … I am THAT old).

20 years ago we were using floppy disks the size of LP records at the Queensland Industrial Commission where I was the Research Officer.

In those days the computer screens were black and white and systems crashed with amazing regularity. Data regularly corrupted and files disappeared never to be be seen again. It was a dicey subject saving files – it was always done with fingers crossed.

Computer terminals needed to be shared between employees, with most people still using typewriters for regular correspondence. I was one of the few with a personal terminal and I remember the pride and love I felt for that temperamental piece of machinery. For me it showed me that I had “arrived”.

At that time I was involved in creating the first Australian National Industrial Relations Thesaurus – a thesaurus of industrial relations keywords to be used across all states and the Federal Commission. I then taught the Qld Registry and Commissioners to keyword their Industrial Decisions so they would be able to be found on the database designed for the net. It is funny how keywording is still a major part of my life today.

Before our project with NIRT I used to research the cases for the Commissioners by manually looking up bound copies of all decisions and by phoning my interstate colleagues. Now people looking for industrial case law can just hit a few buttons and all decisions instantly appear.

I can’t imagine my life now without the net. I has made information easily accessible and the world so much smaller. Yes, it has many growing problems similar to having a rambunctious teenager in the house – but would I turn back the clock? Not on your nelly!

I love the web and the internet. Yes, I have been with the net since the early days. Yes, I still love what I do and yes I still write for the net.

It is in my blood – although I am not so sure I liked the label of “Internet Pioneer” given to me by my daughter. I felt like I should be wearing gingham and in an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

That said, she is right – there are not many people who have 20 years experience on the net.

I wonder what the net will be like in 20 years from now?

What do you think will be some of the changes you will see in the net in 20 years time? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Ingrid

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Web copywriter

OK … I admit it. I am not an admin guru. I have moments of amazing lapses of systems and processes and make some brilliantly spectacular stuff ups.

My best ones seem to all revolve around my itchy email trigger finger – so in the interests of sharing my human side here are a few of my better ones from the past few weeks so you can have a laugh/cringe with me (and take away some of my lessons).

Check your email addresses really carefully before hitting send. My email contacts list is massive, so it was bound to happen – but I now have clients and support team members with remarkably similar names.

In the past fortnight an email destined for my accountant ended up with a client of the same first name and same first last surname letter. As luck would have it this client is also an accountant (but on the other side of Australia). Once we worked out what had happened we could have a laugh about it and catch up with each other’s businesses … but it did give me a few OMG cringe-worthy moments.

My Virtual Assistant has the first name and similar initials to another of my favourite clients – so my VA ended up with the material and handouts I completed for my client on a Menopause seminar she is presenting this weekend. My VA thought I was subtly trying to tell her something about needing HRT!

Save documents before attaching them. This should be a no brainer – you should save the document you are working on before you attach them in an email.

But when you are a freelance writer you just can’t help making one more edit, one more edit, one more edit – gee gotta send it now to make the deadline. Doh!

One of the documents I had recently been working on hadn’t been saved with all of the edits prior to sending – which meant the document was full of typos, spelling errors and gaps. Of course the version in my file was fine as it auto-saved on closing the document. My client didn’t pick up on the issue – but I did when I had a funny hunch that I followed to work out what had happened. It was the ultimate example of “before” editing and “after” editing and why we edit our work.

I suspect the common theme through all of these is to make sure brain is in gear before hitting the send button.  We get so used to quickly responding to situations and events via email that I know that sometimes I get email trigger happy to get through my 100+ emails a day.

I have already set my email to only send and receive when I click the button rather than auto-send because I know I have this malady … I just now need to build in a further “Are you really sure” button!

What do you do to manage your email trigger finger?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Freelance copywriters are by nature creative – it is part of the job description. Some people believe creativity is like turning on a tap – you get ready and then all of a sudden it just flows out of you.

But all creative types such as artists, writers, musicians – true creatives know that creativity flows in a similar way to a small creek trickling through the forest.

At times there is a massive flood of ideas and the torrent of creativity simply poors through the creative mind. At other times the creek goes into drought and all that is left are small tepid pools that no longer trickle. If the drought persists, the pools dry up and all that is left is a barren desert.

Annette is a highly talented artist in gems – who makes stunning wearable art/jewelry pieces. For a long time she was stuck in a creative drought. Piles of half completed pieces next to her – nothing grabbing her attention for longer than a few moments.

Then the dreadful bushfires came through near her community. In Australia many of the wonderful native trees we have require fire to open the seed pods – to enable new seedlings to bud. Out of tragedy comes new growth.

Annette discovered that she needed to pull apart all of her half done pieces – to de-contruct and start again with fresh eyes. She then discovered her creativity had returned in a flood – and Annette discovered she was feverishly creating new pieces, barely stopping for sleep.

It is funny that the new piece Annette chose to showcase this week was one made from silver and lava. Lava is rock that has been tested under both pressure and fire – and the combination was striking and beautiful.

It is the same with all creatives. In our creative drought times it can take a life changing event to restore our creativity and to create new growth. It is as if we need to be challenged to emotionally reconnect with life and joy.

This is the same for every business. There will be times when you are full of enthusiasm and times when you go through the motions. What will it take for you to rediscover your passion and purpose? What needs to happen for you to once again find your inner spark?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance copywriters

Good SEO copywriting is designed to attract visitors to your website as a result of choosing relevant keywords and phrases and embedding them in just the right places throughout the copy

The challenge comes when SEO writers go out of their way to use the keywords as many times as possible – which can result in copy that is hard to read.

This means that while you might get the people to your site – once they get there they have no real idea what you are selling or what you are trying to actually say.

Your webcopy just looks like strings of keywords loosely woven together with the odd joining word thrown in for show (much like the plots of porn films, or so I am told).

All the SEO experts say that you need a keyword density of 3-4% to get great results in the search engines.  What this means is that out of 100 words 4 of them should be the main keyword. If you are targeting a range of keywords – then they also need another 4 words out of that hundred and so on.

In my experience this is great for the search engines, but very rarely flows for the reader. For example I had a new potential writer create an article for me with the term “Brisbane SEO copywriter” as part of their work sample (and yes I paid them for it).

The results were SEO perfect – but hilariously unreadable. “Brisbane SEO copywriter” appeared in every sentence, even ones that had absolutely nothing to do with Brisbane SEO copywriters! Needless to say the candidate didn’t get the job with me.

Following too slavishly the 3-4 out of every 100 rule may be great in theory, but in reality it can make your work unreadable and make you lose clients. It stops their concentration and derails them into thinking of anything else except what you are trying to sell them.

Good SEO writing needs to be a balance of fantastic sales words and SEO. They are not mutually exclusive!

Focus on the sales as the highest priority for your web writing as that is where the money is made for your business – then add in the SEO touches to give it that extra oomph. If you are not making sales – then no amount of SEO can save your business.

So how many keywords are too much? When someone starts to comment on how often a word has appeared (or bursts out laughing at the twisted combinations), then you have gone too far. If they read your copy without any stops or hold-ups – you have got the percentage just right (no matter what the SEO gurus say).

So – get someone to read over your web copy and avoid stuffing keywords into every nook and cranny.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane SEO copywriter