Four Tips for Writing Persuasive Content

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Crafting good content for websites can take a lot of practice. Follow these four tips to improve your content quickly. Doing so could help improve your website’s popularity and authority.

1. Find a Creative Concept

Creativity should play a role in every piece of content. Even posts about technical subjects should include some level of creativity, whether that means finding a way to re-conceptualize common points or slipping in a few jokes. No one wants to read boring content, so do anything you can to keep readers interested.

2. Check Your Facts

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Image via Flickr by paurian

Even one inaccurate fact could make your website look untrustworthy, so double-check every sentence to make sure your content makes you look like an authority. This can get difficult when you need to write posts about subjects you don’t know much about. That difficulty makes it even more important for you to check everything.

If you know an expert, have him or her read your content to find common mistakes. You may also want to compare your writing to the information on sites like:

  • Wikipedia
  • WhoWhatWhen
  • Snopes

When in doubt, use Google to find similar content on trustworthy sites.

3. Avoid Logical Fallacies

People often use logical fallacies without realizing their mistakes. Many people will not notice. They may even agree with your content despite its flaws. Discerning readers, however, will find these fallacies troubling enough that they never return to your site. Some of the most common fallacies include:

  • Straw Man—Attacking a seemingly related argument instead of the statement at hand (example: Mr. Smith says that global warming is real, but he doesn’t have an explanation for why we got so much snow last winter.)
  • Appeal to Authority—Relying on a person’s authority to make statements seem true regardless of their merits (example: Sarah says to eat 15 tacos a day. She’s a popular fitness trainer, so she must be right.)
  • Bandwagon—Saying something is true just because a lot of people believe it (example: Nine out of 10 people believe George Washington had wooden teeth, so it must be true.)

It’s important to learn more about fallacies, so you can avoid statements that weaken your content.

4. Get Help When Proofreading

Typos, misspellings, and convoluted sentence structures can make your writing look amateurish. When careful readers see numerous mistakes, they may wonder why they should take your writing seriously. This makes proofreading an important part of content creation. Always proofread your writing at least twice. Reading it out loud will help you find confusing sentences and improve flow.

Don’t rely on your word processing software to find all of your mistakes. If possible, have another person read your content before you publish. If you don’t have someone to read your content, consider using an online service like Grammarly.

What common mistakes do you find while browsing web pages? Do these mistakes make sites seem unreliable to you? Follow the four tips mentioned above so your site doesn’t push away potential readers and customers.

Start a New Blog to Promote Your Business

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These days, it seems like everybody has a blog where they write about something. Whatever your hobby, interest or favourite sports team, you can find countless people investing time in writing about it to share with the world. Of course, writing a blog isn’t just about having a forum to discuss things you like, it is also a powerful medium for getting people’s attention. If you run a business and would like to harness the power of blogging to get more traffic, publicise what you are doing, engage with potential new customers and create shareable content that can be used in your social media marketing, it is probably easier than you think. Here, we take a look at the basics of how to start a new blog for your business.

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The Technical Stuff

While what makes a blog a success or a failure mostly comes down to the content it has on it, you do need a good basic website to put that content on. One of the first things to do is choose a web host. This will be the company you use to host the site and deal with all the server side management. You can get free hosting from sites like WordPress, but this is not really a good choice for business or commercial sites. Instead, choose a reputable host that gives you good options for managing your site, such as Umbeehosting.net or an equivalent – this will give you a professional look and take all of the hassle out of keeping your site up and running.

Content

Planning your blog makes coming up with good content much easier. If you keep a rolling list of ideas for posts, some of which should be easy things like lists you could write that would be relevant to your field, then you won’t feel as much under pressure when the time comes to write something. There are lots of apps and services to help making your blogging easier, and to help you share your content when it is live. It is a good idea to have a business Twitter account and Facebook page too, to help you do this. Other social networks like LinkedIn can also be an asset.

Your content needs to be of a very high standard, because it helps reinforce your brand. You need very good written English (or the language you are working in), and you need to have well thought out topics, and accurate facts. If you don’t have the time to do this or don’t have the writing skills, it is usually better to hire a freelance writer to create content for you. This is not that expensive, and can make all the difference because it takes the stress out of creating content and ensures everything you post is of a high enough standard to properly represent your brand.

Starting a blog can take very little time, and can have great rewards in terms of the visibility of your company. It is fast becoming something that no small business should do without!

Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Product Photos on a Shoestring Budget

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Visual cues are of utmost importance to online sales – customers can’t pick up your product and interact with it as they would in a store, so they have to get that same experience through the pictures instead. But how can a small business owner get started on a small budget?

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This guide will help you take better product photos with the equipment you have in your home right now: whether you’re shooting with a digital camera, a smartphone, or a full DSLRrig.

1. Use a White Background

Backgrounds are distracting. A single continuous piece of paper is all you need to create one of those disappearing white backgrounds the professionals use. This is a great way to help customers visualize the product in their own household, fitting in with their own lifestyle. To get the white background that truly disappears into the white background of your web store, make sure to light the background independently of the object.Increase exposure (or edit later) to ensure that your product remains nice and bright.

2. Eliminate Blur with a Tripod

Nothing looks more unprofessional than a blurry photo, especially to an interested customer that tried to open the full size to get a better idea of the details. This problem affects stores that sell large objects, like furniture or clothing, probably because nobody wants to go out and purchase a full-size tripod. But you don’t even need to use an actual tripod – you can use any table or other flat surface that allows you to set the camera at the right level. A long straight stick would even work well to give your hands some extra stability.

3. Keep Your Products Straight

Real estate listings are the worst offender when it comes to crooked photos; so many houses end up looking like they’re sinking into the soil. But when misaligned products show up in other online shops, the effect is subtle enough to go unnoticed by the seller but the cumulative effect is palpable. Use the grid setting on your camera or phone to make sure everything lines up nicely.

If your camera does not have a grid feature, you can go back through and tilt/crop the photo so it looks right. If you don’t have a great photo editor, you can ​buy and use a photography app

with this feature built-in to make life a lot easier. A good photo editor can help you correct colors and brightness levels as well.

4. Use Soft Lighting, Avoid Standard Flash

Ordinary flash from a digital camera or smartphone will wash out the photo every time. This is great if you want to market a creepy or vintage vibe, but most product photographers would do well to avoid standard flash at all. Instead, shoot under brightnatural sunlight or use a softbox light (a light with a piece ofpaper over it as a diffuser) to ensure the best results. It is even better if you can light the product from more than one angle to eliminate all the harsh shadows.

5. Offer a Variety of Angles

What you photograph matters just as much as how you photograph it. Customers want more than just a three quarter view or full front angle. They want to know what the back of the product looks like. They want to know the size of the product by comparing it to an easily scalable figure (like a person or a car).Depending on the product, they might even want to see underneath.

Try to include the product from two or three useful angles against a white background, and include one lifestyle shot to show the product in action. Every seller will have to tailor his or her technique according to the actual product at hand (seeing sweater from behind might be more important than seeing a bookshelf from behind) but “more is better” is often a good rule of thumb.

Get Started Today

Good product photography is more than just an art form – it’s a science. The professionals charge such high rates because it takes years to learn how to take great product photography, and it takes a huge investment to build up a collection of the right gear and equipment.

But they all got started somewhere: anything you can do to improve your product photos today is sure to provide a solid return on investment tomorrow. Never stop reading about digital photography, never stop practicing, and never stop thinking about new ways to show your products in a better light.