Blog & Free Advice: Web Content
5 Tips for Creating a Strong Content Strategy
A strong content strategy never goes out of style. When you create great content you position yourself as an expert, increase your readership because people will want to read your content and share it with their friends and you have a piece of content that you can reuse on multiple platforms. To help you get started with your content strategy, here’s a roundup of recent content tips from our 1 Minute Marketing videos. 5 Tips...
Grammar Tips: 15 Copywriting Mistakes That Make You Look Silly
At Boxcar Marketing we are big fans of Grammar Girl so this infographic from Copyblogger struck a chord. These 15 grammar tips are important to keep in mind when writing emails, website copy, Facebook updates or any other online content. As the infographic notes, although online copywriting is informal, correct grammar and punctuation are important—if only to keep you from looking silly. Like this infographic? Get more copywriting tips from Copyblogger. Are there any...
Copywriting Tips for Effective Marketing
Effective copywriting is about having a good mix of SEO copywriting skills, online writing skills, and a solid understanding of your target audience and your overall marketing objectives. Good copywriting can help your content get found, convince people to buy your product or service, and convert readers into fans. In other words, good copywriting is essential to successful marketing. Here are some of our favourite tips for effective copywriting. Know your audience. Having an understanding...
What’s the Difference Between Organic and Campaign Landing Pages?
Ion Interactive held a landing page optimization webinar in August, where they highlighted the differences between organic landing pages and campaign landing pages. These differences are important to keep in mind when creating and optimization your own landing pages. Organic Landing Pages: Are pages on your site. Need to appeal and work for everyone. Should be focused on the lowest-common denominator. Should be optimized for global, organic traffic. You have little control over the message. ...
Online Video Tips and Tools
Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has been working on a number of video projects this summer, and we wanted to share our tips and tools with you. Video on the web is used for much more than entertainment. For businesses, it can be a great way to get your marketing message out — video content is the most commonly shared type of content online. Below is a list of tips and tools on using video...
How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing
HubSpot recently held a webinar on how to use video for your online marketing campaigns. Here are some of their tips. Content There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral. Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something...
How to Write Good Web Copy
Commune Media has an article on their site that offers tips on how to write copy for the web. The article offers some step-by-step advice on writing copy for the web and links to other tips and a free e-book. Some good, sound advice.
Tips on Beating Writer’s Block
or What to Write When You Are Wiped I must say that July has been a hectic month. I have been in 4 different cities. A new place each week. My favourite was Portus 2008 in Dallas where I spoke about the phenomenon of podcasting and participatory culture within the Harry Potter fandom. (Do you know about Wizard Rock? Rock music based on books ... that is another post. But if you want to divert your attention, you...
Writing Online Press Releases
Online press releases can be an effective way of reaching journalists, bloggers and industry-related media sites. With online distribution your press release may also end up on popular news aggregator sites like Google News and Yahoo News. Still unclear about why you want to write an online press release? 1. To Drive Traffic to Your Site A well-optimized press release can show up in organic search results as well as news results. And some services also...
3 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
In our new Boxcar Marketing website it was important for James and me to implement as many best practices as possible. We wanted to start with a solid design based on usability. Here are 3 mistakes we often point out to clients and how we avoided them in our design. Design Mistake #1: The About Us page is an About Me page. Why is About Me a mistake for a business About page? Although we are pretty...