Posts Tagged ‘small business’

20 Minutes Is All You Need to Create 20 Killer Benefit Statements in Copywriting For the Web

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. And benefit statements are critical to selling your readers to try your products, services, and ideas, second only to the headline.

In comparison, the other parts of copywriting that people might find challenging, such as stories, headlines, and great price offers were easy. What drove me nuts was coming up with a benefits list; that is until I discovered how to develop more than one benefit a minute.

You may recall from Sales 101 that benefits are what sells your product or service, not features. Knowing the truth to that, I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? As an example, you “build” muscles or “create” more time. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? The process goes like this:

1.  Get a long list of alphabetized action verbs.

2.  Put the list on your desk or computer screen where you can see the entire list
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3.  Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.

”Accelerate” is the first word on my list of verbs, for example.

So, I might say to myself that my product helps people to “Accelerate your learning speed by     getting true hands-on training with every command”.

4.  Write as many benefits as you can and don’t stop! You will be able to pare down your list to only those that give the best punch later. Don’t worry about duplicates right now either. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.

5.  Now is the time that you will prioritize your list from most important to least.

This process has worked for me to write great benefits statements, as well as when coming up with article ideas for my blog, such as “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.

Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Usually, 20 benefits is more than enough to create great sales copy.

Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years.  He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors.  Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

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Start Your Business Of Right

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Just because you don’t have a good education or the job experience does not mean that you have to be stuck doing something that you do not want to do. If you have enough determination you can start your business. This will give you the right amount of flexibility. It will also allow you to do exactly what you want to do with your life.

The simplest way for you to get started is to try and make money online. A lot of people tell you do this and there is a reason for it. There aren’t that many start-up costs and all you need is something good to sell. You might not get that many orders initially but the possibilities go on forever.

You can sell whatever you want. If you can make scarves, you should sell those. Are you extremely good with making cakes? Try that. The possibilities are endless.

Most people do not want to risk their full time job for a business they aren’t sure will even take off. This is how you can turn your business into a home income opportunity. By working from home you can get rid of buying a specific place to work and you can build confidence in your business and also get a client list.

This way you can start selling things or providing services from your home at your convenience and when you begin to feel confident that your business is successful you can then decide to quit your full time job and do something you have wanted to do!

If selling things is not your style, try to make money blogging. You will be able to write pretty much anything you want to write. If you get tons of hits on your sites, it will attract advertisers. The greater the amount of hits the more money and advertisers you will get. If this is the type of job you want you should try and research what market you want to attract and other things like that. This will help you find a starting point.

Starting a business can be rather unpredictable at times. If you stay committed to it you can get a lot of things done and also enjoy the fruits of your labor. Businesses are risky but if you do it the right way you can make large profits.

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Make the Most of Your Website With Advance Planning

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Planning a website that will achieve the goals you have set for your business is probably the most difficult part of the entire Internet marketing process.  But this critical step is usually the one business people skip, or just leave it to their web designer to consider, which can be even more damaging to their overall goals. 

The process of carefully planning the outline of a new website or upgrade to an existing website will secure for you not only a vehicle to show off your business in the best light, but also one that you are able to control the process of updating content, and, most importantly, achieve your business goals.  Here are a few steps to use in the planning process:

1.  Write down on a piece of paper everything you think the visitors to your web site might want to know about your product or service.  Using the website for a school, for an example, you would probably discover that visitors would be looking for information on the staff at the school, classroom size, attendance numbers, and sports programs.  Brainstorm every possible topic someone might want to know related to the industry, product or service your website will be offering.

2.  Put yourself into the visitor’s shoes.  Visit some websites and review them as if you are in the market for the services those sites have to offer.  As a potential customer, what are the things you like and dislike about each website you visit?  Does the website inspire you to take further action?  Can you find what you are looking for fast? Are there a lot of pages to navigate through to get to what you are looking for?  Take notes on all this information with the purpose of making your own website as visitor friendly as possible.

3.  Investigate to find out the keywords your visitors will most likely search for to find your website. You don’t need to invest in expensive search tools, Google has a free keyword tool that is adequate for this purpose.  By typing in a general phrase such as “exercise video”, other keywords will come up that are related.  Your visitors already have questions about these things.  By arming yourself with this information, you will be able to plan your website to answer their questions right away. 

4.  Make sure to plan your website to grow.  Don’t be lured into a website format that won’t let you expand easily to add new content pages or products.  A good website is a constant work in process. 

5.  Finally, make sure your website is easy to control, so you don’t have to rely on your website designer to make even the smallest changes.   Today’s dynamic Internet marketing environment demands new and fresh content added to your website often, and the old fashioned sites that rely on a web developer to make changes just won’t work anymore.  Your new website should be on a platform that lets you add content quickly and easily.

Usually, a new website is one of your business’ largest expenses.  It is critical to take the time to plan a new website that is compatible with your business goals. 

Marty Dickinson is the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for over 10 years. His specialty is Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

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Start Your Business Of Right

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Life is full of unimaginable possibilities. Many assume because they don’t have the right education or the right experience, they have to get a horrible job. This is not at all the case. Most people can find amazing jobs that help them and the overall economy by starting their own businesses. Businesses provide the amount of flexibility people need and you can sell or manage something that you love.

The simplest way for you to get started is to try and make money online. A lot of people tell you do this and there is a reason for it. There aren’t that many start-up costs and all you need is something good to sell. You might not get that many orders initially but the possibilities go on forever.

There are many things you could sell. Maybe you have a knack for making scarves or other crafts. If you advertise well enough your business could take off rather quickly. It can always start as a part time business and then eventually you can make it bigger.

Most people would have a hard time leaving their full time employment for something they haven’t even made money from. This is the best reason for you to start your business as a home income opportunity.

This way you can start selling things or providing services from your home at your convenience and when you begin to feel confident that your business is successful you can then decide to quit your full time job and do something you have wanted to do!

If selling things is not your style, try to make money blogging. You will be able to write pretty much anything you want to write. If you get tons of hits on your sites, it will attract advertisers. The greater the amount of hits the more money and advertisers you will get. If this is the type of job you want you should try and research what market you want to attract and other things like that. This will help you find a starting point.

Starting a business can be rather unpredictable at times. If you stay committed to it you can get a lot of things done and also enjoy the fruits of your labor. Businesses are risky but if you do it the right way you can make large profits.

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Using WordPress For Your Little Business

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Wordpress marketing is one of the most well liked blogging tools available on the internet today. What a large amount of folks don’t realize though is that it’s also a powerful Content Management System that is able to be used for more than just blogging. When you use wordpress you have the capability to either have a blog or a website which ever you choose. Easy IM Profits shows this well. 

Wordpress was initially designed as a blogging tool but you now don’t have to use it just for blogging anymore. With just a few updates here and there you may also use it for your website and you can either with a blog or no blog at all. Just the indisputable fact that Wordpress was once initially designed for a blogging platform gives Wordpress some pressing advantages . It is designed for straightforward publishing and changing your content whenever it is required. There also are other advantages that are superb for home entrepreneurs as well .

1. First of all Wordpress is SEO optimized. There are a few adjustments that you will need to make but overall there are a few SEO benefits that Wordpress provides to your for free . This saves you considerable amount of time and effort that’s usually required when you’re creating your website to be SEO optimized.

2. Another great advantage of Wordpress for growing businesses owners is that the content is easily updated and you will not even have to know any HTML to get it done either. You can simply create new pages or edit your existing pages employing a easy rich text editor. This is another good way for you to economize when you’re first creating your website.

3. There are thousands of people in the Net world that create extensions of the Wordpress program. Just think how many free themes and ratings, among lots of other choices, are open to you for nothing. You may not have to pay the large price you would typically have to for a web designer because these extensions will enable you to do it for yourself.

4. If you happen to run into a problem or wish to add on custom features, it is really easy for you to find support as there are thousands of Wordpress developers available on the net. All that you need to do is type in Wordpress support in your favorite search site and you’ll be dazzled at the results that you are going to get.

5. The finale benefit for home entrepreneurs is that Wordpress is simple to install. There are numerous corporations that also offer assistance with your quick install to get your site up and running in no time.

As you can see there are several different reasons why Wordpress would benefit your SOHO.

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How To Get My Lost Blogs?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

If someone’s personal blog disappears and is somehow lost, it may not seem like a tragedy. But historically speaking, it well might be. Data management professionals are well aware that as technologies evolve through four generations, data that was created with the methods of the first generation pretty much becomes unreadable. What does this say about the future of digital records such as blogs or even photos hosted on websites?

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?

Historians can still study cuneiform tablets and reconstruct the history of Babylon, or read Egyptian tomb records and learn what happened in that country 4000 years ago. And because of personally written journals and accounts, America’s founding history is well known. But today’s history may be lost as technology changes. Alter the blogging software of a few sites just enough over the next 20 years, and the news, analysis and personal reflections of millions of people will be gone. A blog may correspond to the papers of older historical figures, but the technology makes it less easy to preserve.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

As record-keeping continues switch to digital formats and away from paper that might still have been readable a century or two from now, the question of lost records grows in importance. The expense alone of continually upgrading records to new, technological formats is very high, so as people rush headlong into those technologies, they simply resign themselves to losing older data. With the disappearance of the weblogs of ordinary people, as well as those making history, and even people’s simple deletion of their own email, data is vanishing that might leave huge gaps in the future understanding of current world events.

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Fun To Blog About Celebrities!

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Among the many thousands of new blogs constantly being created, the celebrity blog appears to be the most popular and successful type. While blogs written by celebrities themselves have gained in strength in recent years, most of these sites purporting to be news blogs about the stars are written either by fans, or by people who have a lucrative business searching out the secrets of the stars.

It’s likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades. The public has always had a high interest in juicy tidbits about the rich and famous.

However, it’s one thing to have “high interest” and quite another to engage in the almost manic gossip that prevails today, probably due at least in part to the rise of these supposed blogs about the stars. The longstanding tabloids and celebrity magazines of the past might now envy the reach of these blogs, whose writers often manage to achieve access to famous people that the older gossip outlets could only dream of getting. And even the fans themselves use their cameras to post public photos that are not always flattering to the stars they follow.

Sports figures, of course, are not immune either, with sports blogs following the gossip trend, running items about players’ love lives or speculation about drugs or illegal activity. And politicians are now major targets as well, having achieved a greater level of celebrity than ever before. However squeaky clean they might portray themselves, if they’ve got a skeleton in their closet, or even just an old finger bone, then someone is going to find them out and make a blog post about it.

It’s no surprise, then, that stars also began their own weblogs, maybe to counteract the rising cacophony of unrelenting gossip. The phenomenon of blogging has been a boon to both sides of the relationship, in fact, since famous people can also get their preferred message out to millions of people. While you have gossip blogs like www.perezhilton.com or www.tmz.com on one side, on the other you have famous bloggers like Bruce Willis, Barbra Streisand, the very popular and prolific comedian Margaret Cho, soccer star David Beckham, famous chef Jamie Oliver, home style diva Martha Stewart, writer Neil Gaiman, and on and on. The blogosphere is crowded with celebrities of every description.

This may not be a good thing. Celebrity blogs might already have turned civil society into something much less civil, a nation of gossipers unjustifiably prying into the private lives of their fellow citizens, however infamous they are. Even formerly responsible news organizations now include gossip about celebrities in their papers and newscasts. Bloggers who pry into the lives of the stars may now be the “journalists” of the world, to the detriment of well-researched and reliable news.

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