The way you present your e-business to the world is the key to its success. Its so important that your website looks professional and credible so that customers will trust the products or services you are selling. Ideally, your site’s content will also be interesting and unique enough that they appreciate your brand and remember to shop with you again. You need to develop two types of content to make this happen: a “Hollywood pitch” and website copy.

The Hollywood Pitch

It’s important to have a clear idea of what your business does and what it offers to its customers—both for your own thinking but also because friends, family, customers, and even potential investors are all going to ask you, “So what does your business do?”

The best way I have found to encapsulate your new business concept is to use what I call the “Hollywood pitch technique.” You identify the basic elements of your business and compare them to familiar, existing concepts or previous successes in a pseudo-mathematical equation.

In Hollywood, new movie and TV program ideas are often pitched this way because it uses already existing success stories to give listeners a quick, positive impression of what you are proposing. Boiling down your business idea to this quick summary will also help you focus on what is important and unique about your business.

For example, the hit TV show American Idol might have originally been pitched in Hollywood as “an updated Star Search with Hollywood Squares-style celebrity judges and cell phone voting.” Similarly, the Austin Powers movies might have been pitched as “1970s James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau to save the world!”

Figuring out the key concepts and buzzwords for your e-business will also help you write effective copy for your website and construct effective “meta tags” to help your search engine rankings.

Now, ask yourself: How can you summarize your new business using this Hollywood pitch approach?

Copywriting for Your E-Business

Even if you’re selling commodity products like batteries or socks, you’ll need accurate and persuasive product descriptions to convince your audience to purchase from you.

If you are offering more unique items or services, your website needs to communicate the value of your goods in a concise and compelling manner.

If you’re embarking on a more information-intensive or publishing related venture, your copy will essentially be your product, so it is even more critical to your success.

In all cases, the Internet can once again help you deliver compelling written materials cost-effectively, even if you are not a good writer (or speller) yourself. Don’t underestimate the importance of well-written copy because it is more important than you may think. You’ll need good and regularly updated copy for:

• Website pages
• Product descriptions
• E-mail newsletters
• Customer service documentation
• Advertisements
• Business correspondence

If you are a good writer, you can probably fulfill your e-business’s content creation needs yourself. There are two basic situations, however, that may warrant your getting some writing help:

• You are not a particularly good or fast writer (or at least you don’t enjoy it).
• You are too busy to do a good job at writing the copy your business needs.

As usual, the Internet can help you solve your problem. (By now you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) There are thousands of experienced writers available who would be happy to contribute to your site’s content needs on a project basis. You can find good writers looking for work by going online and posting a small ad (usually for free) to ask for help with your specific writing needs. Good places to start would be ELance & Craigslist.

Regardless of how you recruit your part-timers, ensure you are specific in your ads about the length of the written pieces you need and the style (e.g., product descriptions, advertisements, informational articles, website promotional copy, etc.), as well as your deadlines and offered compensation.

You’ll soon find that finding and hiring freelancers is a great, cost effective way to increase your productivity. This strategy also will work well for graphic artists, Web designers, photographers, customer service staff, and even salespeople.

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Telling your story is at least a secondary goal for every organization’s Web site, but lots of Web sites exist almost solely to enhance brand image. For example, if your company sells children’s cereal, the games you put on your site do not have any direct impact on sales, but they might create loyal little consumers tagging along with their parents in the grocery aisle. Many low-priced consumer goods companies have Web sites to raise awareness. Entertainment sites for current movies have a like purpose.

If you have a site designed mainly for market awareness, you might emphasize contests, quizzes, games, or other ways of generating interaction with your visitors. But some market awareness sites are changing in subtle ways. Movie sites, for example, frequently do some Web sales (for the soundtrack, for instance) or they link to organizations whom are selling tickets for your film at the cinema near you. Cereal sites are starting to sell DVDs, action figures, and other toys on top of the free interactive games.

If your site exists mainly for awareness, do not overlook opportunities for Web sales of other products, but make sure that your site fulfills the awareness needs first. Cereal sites that spend too much time amusing children with games might upset a mom who wants to learn more about the cereal’s nutritional content.

Regardless of what your awareness site is trying to do, your search strategy focuses mostly on navigational searches. Cap’n Crunch cereal mostly gets searches (from kids or moms) for “capncrunch” or even “captain crunch,” but not for the specific games or action figures on the site (unless they have an ad campaign for them). Searchers will be typing in the name of the cereal, the name of the movie, or other brand names.

Market awareness sites are also more likely to be “trendy” than sites with other purposes, because they are great places to generate buzz about a product (movies are again a good example).

If you have a brand awareness site that you want to promote for your company, i wouldn’t rely on organic search engine rankings just yet. Organic SEO can take a while to get moving (you must design and optimize your pages and wait for search spiders to find them), therefore whilst your site matures and is waiting to get indexed by the search engines, id recommend paid placement techniques to start the marketing ball rolling.

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Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.

Anytime you’re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:

• Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.

• Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.

• Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool; many businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In most cases, though, bloggers aren’t just going to stumble onto your web site. It’s far better for you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t control what a blogger might say, so it’s possible that the review you get won’t be favorable. Its possible to get reviews from small to mid-sized blogs without too much of a problem, but when it comes to getting reviews from the most popular blogger in your niche, it may cost you a few hundred $$$. For example, John Chow charges a whopping $500 for a review, which he doesn’t even write himself.

• Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press releases. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts, including benefits, sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press release marketing to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included.

• Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. You provide a link to people who want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and when someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal you have arranged), the affiliate — the person who placed your link on their site — gets paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05 per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates, and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs. The trick with affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links.

• PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links — you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.

• Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and create the illusion of popularity, you’re going to do more damage than it’s probably worth to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldn’t do it. There are plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work a little harder for the higher quality links.

Inbound links are such an important part of any online marketing strategies that some organizations find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It’s not a bad thing to want to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information is from your web-analytics application. A great and free analytics program available is Google Analytics. Check it out.

So there are my top link snagging tips which i actively employ for most of my online businesses. Which tactics do you use for your website, and have i missed out any good link-snagging techniques? Have your say by leaving me a comment.

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A brand is the means by which your company or organization is identified. This can be in the form of its name, such as IBM, or its memorable logo, or a slogan, such as “It’s the real thing’’, which most readers will know is Coca-Cola.

Depending upon the way your site—or the site you’re working on for someone else is set up in terms of trademark and other legal aspects, it may fall to you to ensure that the sites designer implements and makes sure the company’s brand is well-defined and maintained throughout the site. Being consistent with branding is key in defining and maintaining a brand identity.

For trademarked names, logos, and slogans, in the United States, it is up to the holder of the mark to ensure its strength and safety. This is one reason some companies, such as Disney, are notoriously litigious when it comes to anyone trying to mess with their brand materials.

If it’s up to you to help the client define the brand for his or her Web site, here are some time-honored tips to help:

• Consider a brand name that has existing and related meaning to your goods or services. A well-known example of this is Nike, a brand known worldwide. Nike is the Greek Goddess of Victory, a perfect choice for athletic goods.

• Build your visuals based on the symbology of your brand. Images should reinforce the message behind the brand, not dilute it in any way.

• Write slogans that are catchy and relevant.

• Integrate your strategies into the long-term Web site plan.

• Test early. If the brand name, images, or slogans do not test well early in the design process, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and gain more insight as to why.

• Be sure to place your branding consistently throughout your site. The company logo should appear on every page, as should any slogans. Imagery related to the brand should be used consistently, too.

One last tip. Many designers create a larger logo for the home page, and use a smaller logo on subsequent pages. Linking logos on subsequent pages to the home pages is also very common; many people expect the websites logo to link back to the home page, so its pretty much a recommended practice.

Do you have any tips or experiences when it comes to ensuring a brand is used consistently and ensuring a brand is implemented effectively onto the web?  Tell us your views by leaving a comment below.

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