1. Prove your creativity

A nice design, clever content, and interesting photos all reveal a little bit about you as a person and as a professional. Let potential employers see how creative you can be. And if you aren’t creative, don’t fret. Hiring a designer or a writer is easier than you think.

2. Provide work samples

Create a page that links to samples of your writing, photography, design, lesson plans, or whatever portfolio items are required in your industry. Of course, not all industries will require a portfolio, but whatever you have done that demonstrates your abilities should be highlighted on your personal website.

3. Public recommendations

Ask your references for a quick sound bite of a recommendation. Put these recommendations on a web page of their own or as graphical text elements throughout your site.

4. Control the Google results

Potential employers WILL Google you; there’s no question. Try to purchase your name for your domain name. If it’s not available, get as close to it as you can. When you create your site be sure to put your name in the page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags of every photo, and in the text headings of every page. These practices help with search engine optimization (SEO).

5. Don’t whine about it. . .blog about it

A blog allows you to rant about important topics or educate the masses about those topics you feel strongly about. Want to prove you really are an expert in the migratory patterns of birds? Then blog about it. Blogs benefit your personal SEO efforts, too.

6. Getting in touch has never been so easy

Create a contact page and include your phone number, email address, Twitter handle, and city/state. Add a contact form to make contact as easy as possible.

7. Resume it up

Forget the rules about one-page resumes and bask in the glory of hyperlinked text. An online resume gives you much more freedom than a paper resume (although you’ll still need one of those).

8. Sell with a smile

Pay to have a professional photograph taken, and publish it on your home page. If you have other photos you like, post them where it makes sense.

9. Create a bio with a personal touch

Your bio can go on your home page or on its own individual web page. A professional bio will summarize your resume, but it will also speak to your personality. This is the chance to talk about why you love what you do and why you want to continue doing it. Finish your bio with a short sentence or two about your personal life. For example, “Sara is a website content writer who has lived in the Denver area for more than 15 years. She enjoys visiting local restaurants every weekend and taking long walks with her beagle, Moe.”

10. Share your link and prove your credibility

Now that you have a personal website, put the URL on your business card, resume, social media profiles, and in the signature of your email. Having that website proves your are a professional with web savvy who has what it takes to get the job done.

Making your website content sound like a human wrote it will take practice. You’ll also need to follow these 12 tips. No one said injections were easy.

Tip 1 – Choose your avatar

Marketers work with “avatars” to aid in speaking to their customers. Think about who you are trying to reach with your web content. Is it a 30-something-year-old woman who lives near a city center? Get a blank piece of paper, draw her face, and give her a name. Tape the picture to your wall and now start writing TO your avatar.

Tip 2 – Outline your web content

Create the architecture of your site. In other words, decide what pages you’ll have on your website and decide on three to five main ideas for each page. Your outline can only be a set of bullet points or it can go into more detail. Do what works best for you.

Tip 3 – Read your favorites

Visit your favorite blog; read your local paper; pick up a book by your favorite author. Let yourself be influenced by the style of successful writers. Read well and read often.

Tip 4 – Just dump

Turn off the internal critic and write. Say everything you’ve said or wanted to say to that avatar of yours. Talk about what she wants; talk about what problems you’ll solve for her; and talk about why you’re different than the other companies she knows. Don’t delete any of the web content you write. Let it flow.

Tip 5 – Let it rest

Step away from the web content and no one gets hurt. Seriously, give yourself a day or more before you start to revise. In the meantime . . .

Tip 6 – Read other web content

Study competing websites. Take note of what you need to say in your website content that will set you apart. Red alert! Don’t repeat what your competitors have said. Say something different and more compelling.

Tip 7 – Revise and recycle

Open a new document and title it “recycle.” As you revise your web content don’t delete copy in haste. If you take something out, cut and paste it into your “recycle” doc. You never know where that might come in handy (e.g., blog posts, press release, brochure copy, etc.)

Tip 8 – Tell a story

Now that you’re editing, think of your web content like a story.  Is there a beginning, middle, and end on every page? Does the beginning captivate? Does the middle inform? Does the end include a call to action?

Tip 9 – If you wouldn’t say it, then don’t write it

Read your web content out loud and imagine you’re speaking to that avatar. If you squirm when reading a sentence of your website content, then it doesn’t belong.

Tip 10 – Pull from the gut

This is where you can really inject some personality. Step back and think about how can you revise pieces of your web content to make it pop. Here are a few ways to find inspiration:

• Scan Digg.com and learn to create headlines that encourage a click
• Invest in a Thesaurus and replace boring words with power words
• Study poetry and create metaphors to describe your business

Tip 11 – Get out of the boardroom

If you want boring web content, then you should definitely incorporate industry buzzwords and office-speak. But if you want web content with personality, then get out of the boardroom and say no to jargon in your web content. Delete, delete, delete.

Tip 12 – Read it again, and again, and again, and again

Read your web content and confirm that you say more about your avatar than you do about yourself. Read it again to check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Ask someone else to read your website content before you give it to your web designer. Read it one more time, just to be sure. Ask your web designer to proofread the web content before the site goes live.

I’m not saying you should stuff your pages with keywords. Never! All I’m saying is that you should not waste valuable website space on meaningless words. Focus on words your customers can relate to and words that you just might rank for in the search engines. 

Consider this: Do you think your potential customers use the words “groundbreaking” or “innovative” when they search online? Probably not. Take a moment now and go to Google.com. Enter “groundbreaking” in the search box. Bet you didn’t plan to reading about funeral ceremonies today. See what I’m trying to say?

What You Should Do – A Fictional Book Author Case Study

Let’s say you are an author of a dog obedience book and you’ve filled your home page with all kinds of mumbo jumbo on your latest awards, your dog training expertise, etc. Here are three things I’d recommend to revise that jargon-laden home page.

1. Change the headline on your home page from “Award-Winning Author Brings You Mastering Fighto” to “Mastering Fighto Shows You How to Train the Perfect Beagle.”

2. The first paragraph on your home page references your years of experience. This is important information, but it doesn’t appeal to the reader’s problem. Tell us that you specialize in operant conditioning and have a stronghold on adaptive conditioning in your bio and not on your home page. Change your home page so that the first two paragraphs explain how your book will solve their problems. Here’s what I would write:

You no longer have to wonder why Fighto munches on the floor moldings when you leave the house. I’ll tell you in the first chapter why your beagle has separation anxiety, and I’ll tell you how to fix it.

Stop pulling on that leash when your beagle sniffs the neighbor’s grass. By the end of this book you’ll see how to engage your beagle’s intuitive senses without losing your mind.

3. Read through your web content to remove adjectives and replace them with active verbs. You should also review my list of seven generic statements and remove those from your website content, too.

Removing jargon and industry terminology leaves more room for commonly searched keywords and context, both of which will help your search engine ranking. Say goodbye to jargon and hello to better website content!

In this second post in my series of posts on how to avoid industry jargon on your website, I’m assigning you a task. Delete the following generic statements from your website content.

1. Company dedicated to quality.

2. We are the best in the industry.

3. Services tailored to your needs.

4. Innovative solutions for your business (or home, car, office, etc.).

5. We provide the tools.

6. Competitive edge over the others.

7. Our representatives offer attentive customer service. (Shouldn’t this go without saying?)

Instead of making generic statements such as these, why not back up your claims of awesomeness with direct statements, data, a legit guarantee, and testimonials.

Direct Statements

Avoid jargon at all costs! Say exactly what you mean. Think power words (active verbs and nouns).

Data

Don’t say, “Customers love us.”

Look at your sales data for information that you can use to back up your claims. Can you see that fewer than 5% of customers return your gadget? If so, say this instead, “95% customer satisfaction.”

Guarantee

Don’t say this: “We promise you’ll love us.”

Do say this: “We guarantee your satisfaction. If after 30 days you don’t like our product, call us for a full refund.”

Don’t worry about everyone taking advantage of your guarantee. You might lose out on a few sales, but if your product or service is as good as you claim, then you’ll get more sales than you lose. Customers who are on the fence about your product/service need a reason to trust you. A guarantee helps build that trust.

Testimonials

Testimonials on your website build consumer trust, too. Ask happy clients for a sentence or two of feedback. Add those nuggets to a testimonials or clients page on your website.

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Join me in the Campaign Against Industry Jargon. What other statements do you think should be deleted from website content?

In the next several posts I’ll be talking about how industry jargon and buzzwords bring down your website and your marketing efforts. First up, let’s talk about what it all means.

According to Descriptionary, a Thematic Dictionary by Marc McCutcheon, jargon is “meaningless gibberish; the special language of a class, profession, or a group.”

Examples of jargon include:

• Cutting edge
• Innovative
• Industry leading
• Sought after
• Dynamic
• Touch point
• Ground breaking
• Spearhead
• Leverage
• Thinking out of the box
• Action items
• Core competencies

Let’s try using a couple in a sentence to prove my point.

XYZ Company introduces its groundbreaking software that far surpasses the innovation of its competitors.

Let’s rewrite the sentence using “sexy.”

XYZ Company introduces its sexy software that far surpasses the sexiness of its competitors.

You can see in both of these examples that we really haven’t said anything important. Our sentence needs to inform not slather the page in gooey, meaningless words. Considering we only have six seconds to catch our reader’s attention, we better get to re-writing.

This is how I would do it:

XYX Company offers an accounting software that far surpasses the accounts receivable tracking features of competing software.

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Tune in next week to learn how industry jargon hurts your search engine optimization efforts, online and offline sales, and your sanity. Oh, and if you want to join the Campaign Against Industry Jargon, leave a comment and tell us about your most hated jargon.

Download your Guide to Social Media Planning from my writing freebies page.

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Fifth, decide who and for how much time

Maybe you are the person who spends 30 minutes every morning on social media or maybe you have several people in the office responsible for monitoring your social media accounts every day, all day. Whatever the case, keep it consistent. An abandoned Facebook fan page will have the opposite impact you are looking for.

When deciding on time allowances, consider the realistic impact you could have on each social network. If your objective is to provide customer service to customers who hang out on Facebook and StumbleUpon, spend more time where you have more influence. With Facebook you can provide links, ask questions, and respond to feedback easily whereas with StumbleUpon the impact is not as direct. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on StumbleUpon, it just means you should limit your time there.

Sixth, create an editorial calendar

It’s time to decide what kind of information you should publish in order to reach your objective. If it’s customer service you’re after, then you should answer frequently asked questions, provide links to resource articles, and invite customers to take surveys on performance, for example.

Your editorial calendar doesn’t need to cover every little detail, but it does need to outline the type of content you will publish over the next 30 days. Keep in mind that 75% of the material you bookmark and post should be non-promotional, questions and answers, and general interaction between followers while 25% of material can be promotional.

Seventh, create your social media accounts and keep them personable

It’s tempting to open a social media account and use your corporate speak to fill in all those fields “about you.” Social media is not the place to overload on marketing speak. Instead, keep it conversational and add your name and pictures/videos where it’s appropriate.

Eighth, listen and respond

Successful social media interaction doesn’t result from 100% automation. To have success, you need to listen to what your customers say and respond! Use Google Alerts and other listening tools to hear what people say about your business.

Ninth, build your connections

It’s very easy to start connecting with people in your industry or celebrities or local news, and that’s okay to do, but it doesn’t help reach your objective of providing customer service. Focus on your customers—the rest is just butter.

Tenth, revisit your social plan and empty the next bucket

After a month has gone by, assess your work. Are you making progress toward reaching that objective? If not, try changing up your editorial calendar and the frequency/timing of your participation.

If you have made progress toward reaching that first objective, then look at your next bucket and repeat the process. Of course, much of the ground work is already done, so it’s just a matter of modifying details to empty the subsequent buckets.

Do you have a social media marketing plan?

First, decide on your goal. Think about your mission statement. What is the one thing your business hopes to accomplish? Take that idea and pull it into social media. For instance, I want to help small businesses create killer web content. Using social media, I connect with small business owners to offer marketing ideas and my services.

Second, determine your objectives. This is the moment where you determine the concrete results you hope to achieve. For example

•    Boost in website traffic
•    Search engine optimization
•    Higher sales
•    More media mentions
•    Build credibility in your industry (e.g., number of followers on Twitter, number of guest blog posts accepted, number of referrals, etc.)
•    Provide another avenue for customer service
•    Keep in touch with customers and potential customers
•    Simply have access to news and information

It’s not enough to make a blanket statement such as, “I want more website traffic.” A better objective reads, “I want 10% more website traffic.” Attach a number to an objective whenever you can.

Third, prioritize the objectives. Now that you have a list of objectives you want to accomplish, put them in order of importance. You should not try to be all things all at once. Instead, create a plan that includes a series of strategy phases.

The first strategy phase, or bucket as I like to call it, will help you reach your immediate objective, e.g., provide avenue for customer service. Anything that won’t help you reach your customers should be added to a subsequent strategy phase a/k/a bucket.

Fourth, identify where your customers hang out. If you don’t know where your customers hang out within social media, ask them, pay to have market research completed, or research online. Here are a couple tools to review:

1. Social Media Demographics via Flowtown
2. Go to Quantcast and enter the URL for every social media site you think relevant

Once you know where your customers spend 80% of their time within social media, establish your presence on those sites. For the sake of this series of posts, let’s say your customers choose Facebook primarily and StumbleUpon secondarily.

In the next post, I’ll talk about additional social media planning steps.

You can’t find the expiration date on your web content, because it’s not there. However, there are a few ways to look at web content and decide on when it should be updated. But that’s probably not what you want to hear. You want to hear a concrete answer on web content expiry. I get that.

So before I get into the long “it depends” conversation, let me give you the short answer. Small businesses should revise there web content at least once a year.

That’s just the minimum effort. Now for the long answer.

Update Your Site Regularly and Keep the Search Engines Happy

A stale site could lose its search engine ranking.  It’s for this reason that blogs prove helpful for keeping a website in a search engine’s favor. If you don’t have the resources to blog, then make it a priority to add new content to your site every three to four months.

Do You Cringe When You Read Your Web Content?

Let’s say you wrote the content for your business a couple months before you took the first client. Now that you have a few months under your belt it’s likely your business has morphed into something different than you originally planned. Take time every two months to review a page of content. Does it represent your business correctly?

Review Your Bounce Rate

In a recent blog post I talked about how Google Analytics can help improve your web content and explained how a poor “bounce rate” (how quickly a visitor leaves your site) indicates a need to revise your web content. If your visitors don’t stay on your site long enough to learn what you do, then chances are your website content bores them. Hence, you need to revise those pages right away.

The Phone Doesn’t Ring

If your website does not motivate potential customers to call you, then rewrite your web content. Websites do function as online business cards, but they should also function as sales tools. If the phone isn’t ringing, continue to revise your web content until it does.

Stay Current

Up-to-date copyright dates on the bottom of each web page, links to recent media mentions, and case studies written in the past year each prove to your visitors that your business is an active one. Staying current helps to build trust with the consumer.

Tell me. Is your website content expired?