According to this report 93% of teens and 89% of young adults are online, using their computers to research, shop and buy. How can a business offer its products and services to these potential customers when staying profitable is more important than ever? The days of walking along the sidewalk window shopping seem to be coming to an end?

The answer is simple. These customers are walking on a virtual sidewalk now (the internet), so create a virtual window for them to look through (the website), and then create sign posts along that sidewalk to guide them to that window.

How you go about doing this may seem an unsolvable mystery to some business owners, but the reality of this process has not only increased access to a broader customer base that is increasingly going ‘online’ but increased cost benefits for your business when doing so. Let me explain.

Your website is not only a virtual ‘window’ for shoppers, it’s a virtual employee. One that requires no benefits package, never gets sick and doesn’t have to take 8 hours off to go home and sleep. In this digital age, not having a website in today’s market place is like failing to put your sign up in front of your 19th century pub.

Your websites can perform a myriad of functions as well. Functions you would normally have to employ someone to do on a regular basis. It can function as a front line customer service contact, offering online solutions to common problems that take up your man powers time and energy. It can be a 24/7 sales person, imparting the same information your human salesman can, but usually in a more concise and organized way. It can even have immense benefits on your companies PR. Simply blogging regularly about issues your customers care about can establish you as an authority in that market.

In addition to being a ceaseless worker, it is also drastically cheaper. Any business owner who has hired, or has looked into hiring more employees, know firsthand the costs required, as this article from Entrepreneur.com details, hidden costs can add up quickly.

The average salary of a private sector worker is around $40,000/year. In contrast, a good website can be build to SEM specs for $20,000 or less, with most changes and site updates handled by you through a Content Management System such as WordPress.

Your website can also allow for ‘affiliate’ profits from sectors of the market related to your product or service, but in which you do not complete directly. For instance, say your company sells high end video equipment. You could become an ‘affiliate’ marketer of a company that sells stage lighting. Even though you don’t sell lighting yourself, you can still profit by sending customers to your affiliate and get a commission on any sales through links from your site.

More subtle benefits of internet marketing happen behind the scenes without you even know it in most cases. Through your blog you can speak to your customers. You can impart to them the values you employ when doing business. You engender a trusting relationship with your customers passively. Your company may also appear in places you never dreamed it would, when customers shop or research online. This build’s credibility for your company and branding for your product or service, so get your business online; the future customer is going there, with or without you.

Give blogging a try, you can do it for Free @ Skyrocket.me.

Open source has been around for awhile, but up until now, you kinda had to be a backroom computer geek working with Linux, Apache and Mysql to have really had any exposure to it. Since the appearance of Web 2.0, the interactive web as we know it today with its blogs and Content Management Systems, more an more businesses are taking advantage of open source technology.

And its becoming more accessible to the individual computer user too through blog CMS’s like WordPress. Zenoss recently conducted a survey to backup these outlandish (to those at Microsoft and Oracle) claims. The findings are encouraging for those in the opensource fields, but there is one thing holding it back:

• 98% of those surveyed indicated they used open source software of some kind, and on a scale of 1 to 10, rated their satisfaction with that software very highly, between 7 and 8.
• 71% of those surveyed considered open source software easier to deploy, this is a marked increase from prior years where only 48% in 2008, 38% in 2007 and 26% in 2006 considered open source deployment efficient.
• Financial constraints as the reason for adopting open source software doubled between 2008 and 2009.
• The number of sysadmins preferring the use of open source software of its proprietary counterparts came in at 76% of those surveyed.
• More than half of those surveyed said they used some form of cloud technology such as offsite backup solutions or project management services.
• Monitoring, Configuration Management, patching and provisioning, and security came in as the top IT management priorities and plans for future open source development.
• 46% of respondents said there was no reason not to choose open source.

But…

• The #1 reason for not going with open source was a lack of support, followed by poor documentation.

That 9.5% whose main reason for not choose open source is ‘lack of support’ (and who could blame them!) is why Skyrocket Websites and Skyrocket.me is here, and a great place to begin blogging for the online community. An active support forum plus hundreds of usage and configuration articles written specifically for Skyrocket users makes your blogging easy as, well…. 9.5% of that pie you see above.

So get blogging, and let Skyrocket.me help you get started!!

Give a Skyrocket.me Blog a Try! Its Fun and Free!

An effective analogy to explain this concept comes from Nick Usborne, author of the ebook, Copywriting 2.0 Your Complete Guide to Writing Web Copy that Converts.  In it Nick explains how often copywriters approach their work with the attitude of a ‘laborer’:

Let’s say you have a skill at putting up drywall in new homes. You wait for some other guy to put the wall studs in place, then you add the sheets of drywall.

You don’t know or much care about what other people are doing elsewhere in the house. It’s not your concern what the roofers, plumbers, or electricians are doing. Your supervisor has taken a look at the house plans and shows you where you next need to put up some drywall.

All to often, online copywriters work as laborers. They don’t know what else is happening on the site. They don’t know what is planned for tomorrow. They just build a wall when and where they are told to. Or rather, they write a page. The supervisor knows more about what happening elsewhere in the house. he knows what the electrician has to do. He knows the garden landscapers are arriving next week.

As for the architect, he knows more than anyone. He has a complete picture of how the finished house is going to look. He knows how much it will sell for. He knows what kinds of people are likely to buy it. he has designed the house with a particular market in mind…

What Nick is explaining is that without a thorough understanding of the project, an understanding of who is being marketed too, their buying habits, what copy will ‘mean something’ to those buyers and an understanding of how copy integrates effectively into a web page with all its columns and banner advertisements, you won’t write copy that will convert.  Managers are in danger of operating at this level as well, in regard to how important they view webcopy.  They see it as just words on the page, instead of the integral channel of messaging it truly is.

An effective copy writer operates at the architect level.

He knows those who read his copy are going to be goal oriented and well informed on the subject he is writing, especially at the point of sale, so he knows the value of persuasion rather than manipulation as a method of making a sale.

He knows that the copy is what will actually make the sale. The copy is what makes that emotional connection to the product and its benefits. The copy is what helps the buyer rationalize his emotional desire for the products benefits with proof, this product really does what it claims to do.

Add to this already complex set of variables, the necessity for a copywriter to optimize his copy for a search engine through thorough keyword research, effective copywriters research their buyers, how they think, what is important to them and communicates to them in their language.

It is true, that one of the skills an SEO copywriter must have is the ability to write copy that will sell products, but a more important skill many times overlooked by companies (to their determent) is the ability to create pages that help visitors and users find the information they are looking for.  A subject also introduced in the articles Do You Answer Their Question? & What To Say, over How To Say It.

This ability to gently guide a user along a pathway to their goal, with as few clicks and confusion as possible, with a pot of gold that takes the form of a real answer to their question has value that cannot be understated.

Think about how you feel when you arrive at a site looking for an answer to a question.  The first page mentions something that you think might pertain to your question, provides some text that further piques your interest and a link to find out more.  Upon clicking the link, you read a little further and find what you were looking for.

Along the way you subconsciously note how easy it was to find that answer and how well the sites design and content facilitated the completion of your goal.  You also note that you were not pressured to click some link you really had no interest in because it offered some great product or had an overt sales pitch.

You will feel really good about that website and by extension, about the people who created it.  Would you return to that site if you had another question of a similar nature?  If that company had a product that was in some way associated with your interests, would you be more inclined to trust that company and their product?

Now imagine the opposite.  You arrive at a site that has a subhead that might pertain to the answer you are looking for, but before you can click on the link or read any of the text, a pop up window blocks your view with some product that may or may not be related.  You get rid of the annoying pop up and read the text which sounds like it might be an answer to your question so you click through.

The next page has its editorial copy squeezed between multiple sales banners with BUY NOW!! flashing in garish colors.  The text answers your question, but not before hitting you would sales copy for a product related to the issue.

Imagine how you feel now, after having to navigate all those distractions to find your answer.  Are you going to reward this site with your purchase?  I wouldn’t either.

Writing copy that truly informs and helps visitors is the opportune moment to establish trust and rapport with your visitor or prospect.  An opportunity to have them nod in agreement with you, or nod appreciatively as you guide them to their goal.

You have established yourself as not only an authority on the issue, but you have become a friend in doing so.  You respected their right to choose to continue on and check out your product, instead of throwing it in their face.

Pages on your site that are purely informational, can lead to increased conversion if done correctly.

Probably the single most important skill we as SEO copywriters acquire, is the ability to figure out What To Say, rather than focusing on How To Say It.

I touched on this point briefly in the article: SEO Tips – Do You Answer Their Question? as I examined how users of the internet use it to communicate their ideas and opinions using reviews and blogs, and social networking outlets like Facebook.

Most times copywriters with no SEO training put to much emphasis on how to say something.  They want to be clever, hoping their wit will sell, when in actuality all it does is serve their own ego.  While this may work to some extent in politics, in copy it serves little purpose if a thorough study of what to say has not been performed.  Fortunately, the internet is a storehouse of information on figuring out what to say for those who have been trained to look in the right places by those who know.

Once you figure out what to say about your product, service or subject it is usually a pretty quick process in figuring out how to say it, as through your research you will have already exposed yourself to how potential visitors to your page communicate as well as any optimized keyphrases searchers are using.  You will have seen what words carry importance and validity to them, what websites they trust and what they hold as a higher value as compared to something else.

Find a copywriter who knows how to research your prospective visitors/buyers, who has been trained by those already successful in the business and copy that converts will flow from the fingers.

SEO Professionals know, when readers fire up a web browser, you can be sure of one thing, they are getting online for a purpose.  They have a question, or a goal they want to achieve and they want to meet it quickly.  SEO content writers do this by asking themselves specific questions about their sites.

You too can ask yourself these important questions when you examine your website.  Does my site facilitate my visitors finding what they want quickly?  Do I even know what they are most likely looking for?  Have I thought about any questions they may be trying to answer by visiting my site?

If you answer no, or have not taken the time to answer any of these questions in the first place, you are losing visitors.  In terms of sales, its money out of your pocket.

The world wide web was never created for you to promote a product and sell it.  The web was created for the sharing information, views and opinions.  If you think I am making that up, just take a look at the sites that are more popular today.  Granted, Amazon.com gets a lot of traffic; but what is it compared to the number of hits Youtube.com or Facebook.com get daily?

The Web as a market place is an afterthought, brought about by its convenience of making a purchase without leaving your home.  What this means to an SEO copywriter or SEO professional is this; in order to create effective copy, you must understand what drives the web.  The web is driven by its users and to write good copy or make your site relevant in Search Engine Marketing terms, you have to learn how they communicate with one another.  You have to find out what is important to them and ‘how they talk about that subject’.  Your site and its copy has to be user-centric.

When a visitor comes to your site, what do you believe will appeal to him more in his quest to reach that goal mentioned at the beginning of this article?

Corporate talking points that has been used for print advertisement centered on how great the company is, how long its been in business or how much its stock has increased in value all wrapped within a style guide created by the company to control its marketing, or a website that’s content and feel is centered on the subject matter he is interested (you can ensure this by choosing the proper keywords and phrases to include in that particular pages copy and title)?  Providing him with information on that subject in a language he uses everyday to communicate with others via social and content driven websites?

Unless he truly is interested in how long your company has been in business, instead of that widget you are marketing, he will leave your site within 5 seconds, and most likely, never return.

Find out what question is in your visitors head when he lands on your page, answer it quickly and with authority and proof, and he will become your friend.  And then you can sell to them.  Mess up, exaggerate a claim or use hyperbole in the wrong situation and it becomes very public, very quickly.