Some people hate Brussels sprouts, others hate stringing words together. That’s what writers are for. But everyone’s a writer, right? With all the slapdash content on the Web, it would appear to be the prevailing opinion. But even if the blank page doesn’t send you screaming into the night, you’re better off hiring a professional. Writers wrestle with words for a living. They’re good at keeping content clean and concise. They’re also good at alliteration.

Your website has the potential to do a lot more for you than look pretty in cyber space. So go be brilliant at the business you’ve created. Let a professional copywriter tell the world about it. You’ll be glad you did, and here are the top ten reasons why:

1. You’ve Made a Significant Investment

You hired a designer to give you a professional look. The programmers are poised to work their magic. SEO is bought and paid for. So, what you gonna do with those keywords? A professional copywriter can deploy them to best advantage in your brand voice. Don’t have a brand voice? A copywriter can help you find it. A copywriter can also ensure that your content is fresh, alluring, properly structured, easy-to-read, and grammatically correct from header to footer.

2. You don’t Know Where to Begin

 You know exactly what you do, and how your company blows the competition away. But getting it down on paper is like performing brain surgery, on yourself.  Copywriters have a way of drawing out the salient points. All you need do is rattle on at length about your product or service—something everyone’s good at. The copywriter will translate it into optimized content with a logical flow.

3. You’re a Prisoner of the Left Brain

Creative headlines command attention and break content into logical chunks. If you’re a left brain thinker, a copywriter can give your content some creative, if not comic, relief. 

4. You Need Marketing Spin

You majored in English for goodness sake, you can write. But chances are, no professor ever taught you how to write benefit-oriented copy, appealing to the hidden urges and desires of a given target audience. A professional copywriter can turn your hard wrought features into irresistible benefits. Pass the spin. 

5. You’re In The Weeds

Despite your way with words and uber-capacity to pile your plate, you’ve missed a deadline or two. And there are other areas in which your expertise is required. Divide and conquer. 

6. You’re Chasing Your Tail

You wade through the 17 paragraphs you’ve just banged out and realize the point you were aiming to convey is a slippery beast. Seventeen more paragraphs aren’t going to bring you any closer to nailing it. You might just be too close to this one. 

7. You’re Up Against a Deadline

Professional copywriters are used to being called in at the eleventh hour. They eat insane deadlines for breakfast. Even if you’re not champing at the bit for your copy, a professional writer is one way to guarantee that your project stays on track, humming and purring to completion.

8. Redundancy, Redundancy

If it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying twice, right? Not so much if you’re a reader with better ways to spend her time. A copywriter can ensure that you make each point once, in the most impactful way. Another word for this is editing.

9.  The Competition Hired a Copywriter

You know you read their site. A good copywriter can help you one-up them. Advantage: you. 

10. You’re a Perfectionist

That’s your name on the website: You want it done right. And you know that means hiring a professional who will agonize over every word, sentence, and paragraph. Not too long; just enough words to immerse the reader in positive vibes about you and get her ruminating on your brand. All typo-free and in the correct tense.

Marta Fenton is a professional copywriter. You can reach her through her LinkedIn profile or call her at 207.773.3703.

Original photo by Joyosity. (If you want the recipe to the amazing looking brussels sprouts above, check out the post Faux Momofuku Brussels Sprouts.

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Northern New England Poison Center gets a WordPress Makeover.

Recently flyte launched a website for the Northern New England Poison Center on WordPress.

Visitors to the site can quickly get information on poisons from A to Z or watch presentations from a growing library of recorded webinars, like this one on bath salts. There’s also a poison blog for both the public and health professionals.

The site also offers multiple ways to contact the poison center, from email to live chat. 

NNEPC also wanted to add e-commerce to their new site. While they’re not (currently) selling any antidotes, you can purchase literature, posters and magnets at cost in their NNEPC store.

NNEPC was also looking for some new branding, so they engaged flyte to create a new logo for them:

They also wanted a mobile friendly experience for their site visitors on smart phones:

While I hope you never need the services of NNEPC, you can rest assured that if you do, you can access their knowledge base through whatever channel is easiest for you.

Also, check out this interview with Dr. Karen Simone of the NNEPC on 207 to observe the 50th anniversary of the National Poison Prevention Week:

Rich Brooks
Maine Web Design

The February 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, at the hands of George Zimmerman, 28, a neighborhood watch captain who said he acted in self-defense, has riveted the nation, largely because of race. Trayvon Martin was black. George Zimmerman is white and Hispanic.

For about 10 days, the story remained obscure. Television news from nearby Orlando aired a few segments. The Orlando Sentinel published two brief articles, and the twice-weekly Sanford Herald ran 213 words. Otherwise, there was media silence. This is an account of what happened before everyone knew Trayvon Martin’s name.

The vehicle he’s talking about is a production prototype for one of the first “roadable aircraft” approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority: a flying car that’s capable of being driven legally to the local airport, unfolding its wings, and then taking off and cruising at 100 mph before landing on a runway and driving you to your final destination. That’s all while delivering 35 mpg on the highway and 20 mpg in the air.

Uncovering “long tail” search terms that drive traffic to your site with Wordle.

I recently discovered that Google Analytics has a tool where you can generate a keyword cloud to display the keyword phrases that drive traffic to your website. However, because it treats each keyword phrase uniquely rather than looking for specific words within the phrase, it doesn’t give you much more insight than just viewing your keywords as a list.

I was looking for a tool that would help me quickly uncover trends and themes within the keywords my prospects were using by amalgamating multiple long tail searches…those very specific terms that goal-driven searches may look for. 

So I took a list of the 500 keyword phrases that drove the most traffic to flyte.biz in the past month, exported them, and popped them into Wordle, a free tool that generates tag clouds like the one above.

Pretty cool, huh?

Two caveats: 

• Wordle only looks at individual words, not phrases, so even “how to” is treated as two unique words. 
• The way I ran the report doesn’t factor in how many times a specific search was performed , rather only by how many times a word appeared in total within the list. I.e., “facebook cover photo” might have driven 50 unique visitors to our site in the past month, but “facebook,” “cover,” and “photo” only get one vote each for that specific search. The terms “business” and “facebook” appear larger in the tag cloud because so many unique searches included those terms. I could have run a scenario where “facebook cover photo” was repeated 50 times before I entered the terms into Wordle to get a better idea of how popular a certain phrase was, but I was looking for trends, not exact numbers.

While this is far from scientific, it does help me get a sense of the biggest challenges our ideal customers suffer from. 

What does your tag cloud tell you?

Rich Brooks
Head in the Clouds 

You can have beautiful, long, sexy hair like the celebs with hair extensions! Whether you’re looking to add volume and/or color to your hair, or if you’re looking to conceal thin/thinning areas, hair extensions are a great product to use.

For the best results, it’s of utmost importance to seek a professional stylist. We’ve all seen bad extensions before, and believe me, bad extensions are always worse than no extensions at all!

Be sure to always discuss the type of extension(s) offered by your stylist. There are clip-ons, bonded, and sewn-in variations, each with their own benefits and drawbacks.

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Can you make money from your blog?

Dear Rich,

I have a full time job, but I’m very passionate about staying healthy, eating right, and exercising, all on a limited budget.

I want to start a blog so I can share my story, provide tips and advice, and help others. 

I also want to make some money doing it!

Can I have a blog without a website? If so, how can I monetize my blog?

– Monetizing in Machais

Dear Monetizing,

You can definitely have a blog without a traditional website. However, these days the line between blog and website is so blurry as to be inconsequential. Your blog will probably have several static pages, such as an About page and a Contact page at a minimum. 

One way you can make money from your blog is by selling ads. Unless you get a huge following you’ll probably never be able to quit your day job this way, but it will offer you passive streams of income. You could start with Google Adsense, which is probably the easiest way to get going. There are also plenty of blog-specific ad networks out there, including BlogAds.

If you want to increase the money you make off of each ad you’ll have to sell them yourself, which can be more time consuming for both the sales process and managing the ads yourself.

Advertisers will be interested in how many people they can reach through your blog, so you’ll need to build your numbers up. 

You may want to check out 25 Ways to Promote and Market Your Blog to get more traffic.

If you’re wondering what to charge, find similar blogs that take advertising and ask for their advertising rates. (Note: this does require some subterfuge. Try not to mention you’re soon to be a direct competitor. And who knows? If they’re undercharging, maybe you should advertise your blog on theirs!)

Another way you can make money off your blog is through affiliate programs. There are probably plenty of books on Amazon that you’ve read and could recommend through your blog, taking a little bit of each sale through the Amazon affiliate program. Likewise, there may be inexpensive athletic equipment you could recommend. These affiliate links could be within blog posts themselves (although by law you need to mention that it’s an affiliate link) or posing as ads in the side columns.

You should also check out sites like Commission Junction and ClickBank. Through these affiliate marketplaces you can find products with affiliate programs that are in line with your values and the message of your blog.

A third way to make money off your blog is by creating, promoting and selling your own e-product. Maybe you could put together a book of inexpensive recipes or workouts that don’t require expensive equipment or a gym membership. Maybe you could create an e-book called 101 Ways to Get Exercise Out of Every Day Activities or a video program that shows how to exercise using items found around the house.

Using services like e-junkie or 1ShoppingCart you can then sell these virtual goods to the audience you’ve attracted.

Do you have any other ways in which you’ve made money from your blog? Let us know!

Rich Brooks
Blog Monetization 

The midflight breakdown of a JetBlue pilot has sparked concerns about psychological screening for flight crews.

Capt. Clayton Osbon’s erratic behavior prompted Flight 191 from New York to Las Vegas to make an unscheduled landing in Amarillo, Texas, on Tuesday after crew and passengers intervened and subdued the 49-year-old pilot.

Osbon “yelled jumbled comments about Jesus, September 11th, Iraq, Iran,and terrorists,” according to a federal criminal complaint filed against Osbon. One passenger quoted Osbon as saying, “Pray f—— now for Jesus Christ,” the complaint said.

“It just seemed like something triggered him to go off the wall. He would be calm one minute and then just all of a sudden turn,” said passenger Jason Levin.

Mirroring a national boom, introductory archery classes have been packed as the buzz for “The Hunger Games” and its bow-toting heroine, Katniss Everdeen, has grown. This weekend, as “Hunger Games” fans spent $155 million at theaters, classes at the range were filled, mostly with girls and women hoping to channel their inner Katniss, said instructor Eva Yam.

“The last couple of weeks have been crazy, especially this last weekend,” said Yam, who read “The Hunger Games” trilogy last year, hoping to keep up on story references from her new students.

“(The crowds) were definitely all ‘Hunger Games’-related. We had a group of 20-something women who came in for a birthday party, who were going to the movie afterward. One of them had a T-shirt that said ‘Team Katniss.’”

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Excellent hair resource.

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